There are exceptions to each of these trends, so the medium alone is not sufficient to determine the context of a manuscript. Papyrus was a more formal and expensive medium, often used for important documents that needed preservation. Writing boards could be erased and reused like chalkboards and were well-suited for school exercises or administrative tasks such as inventory and accounting.
Ostraca were cheap, readily available and disposable, a convenient medium for practice exercises and other documents that did not need to be preserved for the long term. Common media used for literary, religious and administrative texts includes limestone or ceramic pottery fragments known as ostraca, stuccoed wooden writing boards and papyrus. The most obvious example of material evidence is the medium upon which a text was written. These physical traces supplement textual evidence by revealing the presence of the ancient scribe and the context in which he created the manuscript. Evidence such as the writing medium, the handwriting or how often the scribe refilled his pen with ink is often the only trace of the real person who wrote or copied a particular manuscript. Material and paratextual evidence help us learn more from ancient Egyptian texts than just what the words say, They enable us to consider who copied the text, in what context it was copied and by which methods the copy was made. A growing effort by proponents of the critical school of material philology seeks to broaden philologists’ focus beyond textual content to include the material features of ancient Egyptian manuscripts as well. Many researchers never see the manuscripts that contain these texts, instead reading from copies or hieroglyphic transcriptions. We transcribe from hieratic to hieroglyphs, translate them into English and other languages, and then interpret what the words say or examine their grammatical features. Since hieroglyphs were deciphered in the early 19th century, Egyptian philologists have focused on the language and content of ancient Egyptian texts.
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