The site of Deir el-Medina is famous among Archaeologists and Egyptologists not only because of its remarkably well-preserved remains of the necropolis workmen’s settlement and tombs, but also because of the vast amount of textual sources produced by their community, especially during the Ramesside Period. Numerous hieroglyphic texts feature on tomb walls, stelae and other local monuments, and thousands of hieratic texts survive on papyri and ostraca. But in addition to hieroglyphic and hieratic writing, which were largely the domain of professional scribes and draughtsmen, there existed a different notation system featuring the personal identity marks of the workmen and their families.

Unlike writing proper, this notation could be used by a wide range of persons in the settlement, and at the places of work in the Valley of the Kings. The identity marks would most often be used to mark the property of workmen and their families: pottery vessels and their content, textiles, furniture, tools etc. Such property marking is well-attested cross-culturally, and throughout human history.

But the Deir el-Medina community took this system one step further, and also used their marks to compose administrative texts on ostraca (inscribed fragments of pottery and limestone) and graffiti in the Theban mountains. Both types of inscriptions could be made up of marks only, but on ostraca, marks were often combined with other easily readable signs like numbers, or pictograms for commodities supplied to the workmen. In this way, persons who did not fully master the art of writing could create ‘texts’; the marks became components of a semi-literate code, which survives on hundreds of ostraca and in hundreds of graffiti.

Research at Leiden University by Ben Haring, Kyra van der Moezel and Daniel Soliman, concentrating on ostraca inscribed with marks, made this ‘pseudo-script’ accessible to Egyptologists for the first time. Although ostraca of this type are found in many Egyptian collections worldwide, the richest corpus is kept in the Ifao archive and the archaeological storerooms at Deir el-Medina. The edition of that corpus is therefore of great importance, and is to take place in the form of an Ifao catalogue compiled by the aforementioned Egyptologists in the near future.