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Writing board

Place of production Egypt
Date 2000–1870 BC; 19th century AD (?)
Object type written document
Medium, technique Wood, gessoed, painted
Dimensions

7,5 × 11,3 × 0,5 cm

Inventory number 51.2197
Collection Egyptian Art
On view Museum of Fine Arts, Basement Floor, Ancient Egypt, Daily life

Besides rolls and sheets of papyrus, thin wooden boards, covered smoothly with white gypsum, are also evidenced as a writing medium in ancient Egypt. Since gesso-coated tablets could be easily erased and thus used repeatedly, they provided a perfect surface for texts of ephemeral importance, such as notes and school exercises. Scribes recording the amounts of goods on a writing tablet held in their hands are frequently portrayed in tomb scenes, but wooden models of granaries and workshops, deposited as funerary equipment in elite burials from the First Intermediate Period to the early Middle Kingdom, quite often include a figure of a scribe, seated or crouching, with a tiny writing board placed on his lap. Similarly, this particular writing board had been originally attached to a wooden scribe statuette, formerly in the collection of Sigmund Freud (EGY_51.2200), but later on it was detached from the figure and enrolled into the museum register as a separate item. It is worth noting that whereas the associated scribe statuette is a fake, the writing tablet itself is a genuine ancient Egyptian artefact, showing clear traces of modern additions and alterations. It was sawn out of a larger, inscribed writing board of early Middle Kingdom date, cut to size and affixed to the fake statuette by the forger, who also painted nonsense sign imitations onto the tablet’s reverse. However, the obverse bears six columns of an authentic hieratic inscription (i.e., cursive handwriting used primarily for practical purposes); based on properties like minor grammatical mistakes and hesitancy in correct spelling, it can be considered the work of an apprentice scribe practising sections of the offering formulae. The history of forgery knows several cases when genuine ancient artefacts, or pieces of them, have been also used up in the process of manufacture in order to make the finished product look convincingly authentic.

This record is subject to revision due to ongoing research.

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