Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Archaeologists discovered the largest trove of ostraca—inscriptions on broken pottery sherds—ever found, with over 43,000 pieces present at one ancient Egyptian site.
• The ostraca date from the third century B.C.E. to the 11th century C.E. and offer a picture of everyday life throughout these eras.
• Akin to ancient sticky notes, these ostraca included tax lists, delivery receipts, and drawings.

The typical written record of everyday life takes the form of the short notes, lists, doodles, and other ephemera. And that’s been true since long before you could simply grab a pen from a nearby junk drawer to jot something down. In fact, a recent discovery highlights how just far back this habit goes. Archaeologists uncovered the largest known trove of ancient Egyptian “sticky notes”—broken pieces of inscribed pottery known as ostraca. The collection, which includes more than 43,000 examples, was found at the Upper Egypt site of Athribis.

What started as an excavation of the Temple of Ptolemy XII (the father of Cleopatra) soon turned into a lesson in ancient daily living. The ostraca bear short, run-of-the-mill notes—the kind of throwaway writing that rarely survives the centuries.

“The ostraca show us an astonishing variety of everyday situations,” Christian Leitz, professor at the Cultures of the Ancient Near East at the University of Tübingen, said in a statement. “We find tax lists and deliveries, along with short notes about everyday activities, exercises by schoolchildren, religious texts, and priestly certificates attesting the quality of sacrificial animals. This mixture is what makes the find so valuable.”

The joint effort between the University of Tübingen and the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities focused on Athribis. The site was constructed in the fourth century B.C.E. about 125 miles north of Luxor and six miles west of the Nile and was the cult center of the lion goddess Repit.

With the oldest ostraca hailing from the third century B.C.E. and the newest from the 11th century C.E., the trove represents a huge swath of Egyptian history. The bulk of the find (including the oldest examples) feature the Egyptian cursive script known as Demotic, but there’s evidence of the area’s Greek influence as well, and plenty of Greek inscriptions were mixed into the collection. The archaeological team also located geometric designs and rare texts in Hieratic, hieroglyphic, Coptic, and Arabic.

The oldest example, written in Demotic, is a simple tax receipt. Pictorial ostraca feature people, gods, and animals like scorpions, shrews, and swallows. One ostracon served as a receipt for the first-ever delivery from a southern vineyard. “This everyday content gives us a direct insight into the lives of the people of Athribis and makes the ostraca an important source for a comprehensive social history of the region,” Leitz said.

According to a Smithsonian report, roughly a third of all ancient Egyptian documents are written on pottery or stone ostraca, and now, experts believe that scribes sometimes intentionally used pottery even when papyrus was available. Easily accessible and affordable, pottery would have served as an ideal slate for casual notes.

As the archaeological work progressed, the Athribis ostraca kept turning up in massive numbers. An excavation in an area west of the Temple of Ptolemy XII revealed a large-scale deposit of ceramics that included plenty of ostraca. From there, the excavation moved further west, and about 40,000 additional ostraca were discovered in another area—up to 100 sherds were found daily. Much of the site hasn’t yet been excavated, and feet of sand still cover temples and lost settlements.

“We expect to find many more ostraca,” Leitz said. “The high and ever-growing number of objects is encouraging, but it also presents us with challenges.” Leitz hopes to digitize the vast assortment, but doing so is labor-intensive, and the technology needed to turn the 3D pieces into a digitized library is demanding. “In principle, it would be possible to accelerate the digitization and cataloging of the ostraca by using AI systems,” he said, “but the effort required to train and maintain such a system, though appealing, would be high.”

Even so, the ostraca collection represents a revealing look at the day-to-day life of ancient Egyptians.