The Ashmolean has one of the largest collections of ostraca in the world and the selection on show here (many are displayed in drawers in the gallery) give a fascinating glimpse into the lives of the inhabitants of this community.Ĭontrasting with these small chips of history is the Sinuhe Ostracon, displayed in the centre of the gallery.
Thousands of documents excavated from the site, mainly in the form of limestone ostraca (chips of stone on which the villagers drew and wrote as a cheap and readily available medium), reveal a huge amount about the daily life of this village, from the cost of hiring a donkey to the outcome of court cases. A main theme of this gallery is the lives of the community of workmen – masons, craftsmen and artists – who lived in the village now known as Deir-el-Medina and worked in the royal tombs.
1540–1075 BC) the tomb of the pharaoh took the form of a series of corridors and chambers cut into the cliffs on the western side of the Nile at Thebes in the Valley of the Kings. This gallery covers the period after Akhenaten’s demise up to the Greek and Roman conquests of Egypt.ĭuring the New Kingdom (c.
