Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)

ZOLTÁN HORVÁTH: A unique servant statue in the Egyptian Collection

THE PROPERTIES OF THE WRITING TABLET Only a few writing boards have been preserved from the Old and Middle Kingdoms that were actually utilised as portable writing surfaces in the literacy of everyday life.

64 Some of these plaster-covered, oblong wooden tablets match the dimensions of contemporary standard papyrus sheets making up a roll,

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" but significant variations in size within this small corpus suggest that this was more of a coincidence than a rule.

66 Model writing boards held by squatting scribes in wooden models of daily life also range in size, though they were eventually intended to imitate the shape and proportions of real writing tablets on a smaller scale.

67 Like their larger counterparts, model writing boards were usually carved from a single piece of wood, roughly 0.5-0.8 cm thick,

68 typically whitewashed or covered with a layer of white plaster, upon which a short hieratic inscription has occasionally been added. Dobrovits aptly recognised that the Budapest writing tablet had been cut off from a larger board bearing a hieratic inscription:

69 as opposed to the other three edges, the lower, longer one is missing the plaster coat, and is cut through the lowermost words or signs. It was doubtless the point of division, and what appears now to be a small tablet was once the upper part of a larger writing board. More could be deciphered concerning the latter if we pay attention to the other small wooden tablet in the Freud Museum, London (FM No. 3279) that shows practically the same measurements and traces of manufacture as its counterpart in Budapest: height (cm) width (cm) thickness (cm) distinctive features Budapest, inv. no. 51.2197 7.0-7.5 11.3-11 00.3-0.5 slightly trapezoid shape; modern signs painted on the verso London, FM No. 3279 6.4-6.8 10.8 0.5 slightly trapezoid shape; modern signs on the verso; the foreside has blackened Seeing the uniformity in size, shape and in the condition of the gesso, I propose that both of these wooden tablets pertained to the same large writing board mentioned above, which accordingly might have had a minimum size 13.5-14 cm in height and some 11 cm in width. The latter derives from the fact that both shorter edges of the