This volume publishes the demotic ostraca discovered by the Egypt
Exploration Society in the Sacred Animal Necropolis at North Saqqara
more than thirty years ago. This site, with its complex of galleries and
temple buildings, has brought new insights into Egyptian art and
architecture, as well as important information about the economy and
organisation of what has turned out to be a cosmopolitan area. The
majority of the four hundred or more ostraca published in this volume
are written on potsherds, but there are also limestone and gypsum
plaster fragments and writing-boards. Collectively, they preserve two
different types of text: firstly jar-labels or dockets originally
written upon a complete vessel in order to describe its contents or to
give directions for its delivery, and secondly compositions written upon
a sherd that had already been broken from its parent vessel, or a flake
of limestone or some similar material. The texts include literary and
magical compositions and a range of texts which argue for the existence
of a scribal school of some kind. There is also a short oracular
question, various dedications to the gods of the Necropolis, an appeal
to the Mother of the Apis, lists of payments and divine images, and a
document of self-sale or self-hire which is probably the earliest such
document so far recognised. Some of the texts date from the Achaemenid
period but the majority are undoubtedly Ptolemaic with some
preponderance to the first half of the dynasty.
