Catalogue des ostraca hieratiques non litteraires de Deir el-Medineh, vol. 9: nos. 831-1000.

• Author: Demaree, Robert J.
• Position: Book review

Catalogue des ostraca hieratiques non litteraires de Deir el-Medineh, vol. 9: nos. 831-1000. By PIERRE GRANDET. Documents de Fouilles de l'IFAO, vol. 41. Cairo: INSTITUT FRANCAIS D'ARCHEOLOGIE ORIENTALE, 2003. Pp. xix + 448, illus. (paper).

This volume represents the second welcome result of the author's laudable initiative to resume the publication of the non-literary ostraca found during the French excavations at the site of Deir el-Medina, continuing the series of fascicles published by J. Cerny and S. Sauneron between 1935 and 1970. In an exemplary format, 170 administrative documents are made accessible not only to the Deir el-Medina "experts," but also to the world of Egyptology in general. Of these, only some forty texts had already been more or less known through the (mostly unpublished) transcriptions in the famous notebooks of J. Cerny.

Following the practice adopted in his earlier volume 8 (1999), the author has once against listed the texts according to their genre. In the introduction (pp. 1-10), the most important aspects of information drawn from the different genres ("documents institutionnels," "documents prives," "lettres," "questions aux oracles," "varia") are summarized.

The main body of this impressive volume consists of the complete edition of each of the incorporated documents, including full description, translation, commentary, photographs, facsimiles, and transcriptions (pp. 11-156 and 197-448). Specialist and non-specialist alike should be grateful for the author's decision to present full translations and commentaries; they add substantially to our understanding of these often difficult texts and their contribution to our knowledge of the workmen's community of Deir el-Medina in general. Some texts are of real historical interest, e.g., ODM 886, recording the execution of the chancellor Bay ordered by Pharaoh in year 5 of King Siptah, and ODM 890, which records further events during the famous strikes in year 29 of Ramesses III. Other documents provide a variety of information on both work-related and private activities of the workmen, their families, and their assistance personnel: presence and absence lists, deliveries of rations and other victuals, heritage divisions, barter agreements, payments, oracle questions, small notes, and letters.

The section of translations of all documents is followed by a series of indexes (pp. 157-94), of which notably the vocabulary is more than useful. The lists of names and the concordance lists of find places, dates, and inventory or excavators' numbers are appreciated, but less indispensable nowadays since all of these data are easily retrievable via the Deir el-Medina Database (in fact, the sheer bewildering mass of this kind of data was one of the reasons to initiate this research tool).

The photographs, facsimiles, and transcriptions of the documents are mostly of impeccable quality, even if in some cases a few corrections or different readings may be proposed. Especially the painstaking work of preparing all facsimiles can hardly be overestimated. Yet, it is this reviewer's firm belief that a facsimile can (and should) never replace a good photograph of the object. After all, any facsimile, however well drawn, always represents the subjective rendering of the original and therefore...