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The administrators and draughtsmen were literate, and for a convenient writing-material they often used limestone chips (present in abundance in the desert, and from the tomb-cutting work). These men belong not to a working class, but a highly specialised group of royal craftsmen working on the most important project of the reign. The chippings on which they wrote and drew are known in Egyptology as 'ostraca'. Together with the relatively numerous papyri from the site, these ostraca represent the largest group of day-to-day written records surviving from Ancient Egypt. The ostraca are dispersed around the world; they are often rapidly and cursively written, and so difficult to decipher. Fortunately the outstanding Czech scholar Jaroslav Cerny transcribed a high proportion, and the ostraca are accessible through his notebooks (archived in the Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).
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