In Egypt, anything with a smooth surface could be used as a writing surface. Generally discarded material, ostraca were cheap, readily available and therefore frequently used for writings of an ephemeral nature such as messages, receipts, students exercises and notes: pottery shards, limestone flakes thin fragments of other stone types, etc., but limestone sherds, being flaky and of a lighter color, were most common. Ostraca were typically small, covered with just a few words or a small picture drawn in ink.
The importance of ostraca for Egyptology is immense. The combination of their physical nature and the Egyptian climate have preserved texts which in other cultures were lost, texts of a mundane nature, which are often better witnesses of everyday life than literary treatises preserved in libraries (WikipediA Encyclopedia).
Let's bring together photo's of ostraca that are exhibited in museums all over the world!
