Epigraphy and palaeography

The twentieth entry is l’ostrakon, and it is the one word on this page that an English reader already owns without knowing it. In Greek ostrakon was a potsherd, a broken piece of fired clay, and broken pottery was the cheapest writing surface there was: a receipt, a school exercise, a tax note went onto a shard, because papyrus had to be bought and a smashed jar cost nothing. That is why so many of them survive, and why l’ostrakon has a place in a list about inscriptions at all. In Athens the same shards were put to one further use. Once a year a citizen could scratch on one the name of the man he wanted sent away, and if enough names agreed the man left the city for ten years. The procedure was named after the object, ostrakismos, and English kept only the abstract half of it: « ostracism » now happens in an office or a playground and has nothing to do with clay. Italian holds the two halves apart. L’ostracismo is the shutting out; l’ostrakon is the thing an archaeologist lifts out of the ground, still carrying somebody’s handwriting.