What Did Ancient People Write On When Paper Was Expensive? Broken Pots

Papyrus and parchment were manufactured goods and cost real money, which made them unsuitable for a shopping list, a school exercise, a receipt or a rough note. Broken pottery was available everywhere in unlimited quantity at no cost, since every household broke vessels constantly, and a curved sherd takes ink readily. In Egypt, flakes of the local limestone served the same purpose and took ink and paint even better. The result is that the cheap everyday writing of these societies survives on material that nobody valued, while the expensive formal writing survives far less well.

The range is exactly what one would expect of scrap paper:

• •Receipts, tax payments and delivery notes
• •Letters, including brief personal ones
• •School exercises, with corrections by the teacher
• •Drafts of documents later copied onto papyrus
• •Sketches, doodles and caricatures
• •Workmen's records of attendance, absence and complaints

The richest concentration comes from Deir el-Medina, the settlement of the workmen who cut and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, occupied for several centuries. Thousands of inscribed sherds and limestone flakes survive from it, recording work rotas, absences with the reasons given, disputes between neighbours, loans, marriages, illnesses, complaints about rations and, in one much-discussed case, a strike over late payment. That material gives a picture of an ordinary community in the thirteenth century before the common era with a level of everyday detail available for almost nowhere else in the ancient world.

The material presents its own problems and reading it is slow work. The writing is usually cursive and hasty rather than formal, since these were rough notes, so the hands are far harder to read than a carefully written manuscript. Ink fades and the surface abrades, and a sherd may carry traces of earlier writing. Fragments break further, so a single text may be spread across pieces excavated in different seasons and held in different collections, and joining them is a recognised speciality. Imaging under different wavelengths recovers ink that is invisible to the eye, which has added substantially to what can be read from material excavated a century ago.

The Greek word for a potsherd gave its name to a specific political procedure in Athens, in which citizens could vote to expel a prominent individual from the city for ten years without any charge being brought. Each voter scratched a name onto a sherd and the sherds were counted, and the person named on the most was required to leave, keeping their property and their citizenship. Large numbers of the actual sherds used have been excavated, including a cache bearing one name in only a few hands, which indicates that somebody was preparing them in advance for distribution, and is the earliest surviving physical evidence of organised electoral manipulation.

Broken pottery and limestone flakes cost nothing and take ink, so they carried the receipts, notes, school exercises and complaints that nobody would waste papyrus on, and because they are indestructible that ordinary writing survives where formal writing did not. Deir el-Medina produced thousands recording a workmen's village in detail. Athenian expulsion votes were scratched on sherds, and pre-prepared ones survive.