Seven fish on a piece of stone

Can you count all seven fish? Their black shapes cover a small, irregular piece of limestone, barely eleven centimetres across. Follow their outlines for a moment. A few painted marks are enough to make the animals recognisable, even on a rough fragment of stone. A piece like this is called an ostracon: a fragment used as a surface for writing or drawing. This one comes from Deir el-Medina, an ancient Egyptian settlement, and dates to the thirteenth to eleventh centuries before our era. Archaeologists found it in 1929. We do not know exactly why someone painted these fish. Calling it a fishing record or a drawing exercise would give us a neat story, but the fragment leaves that question open. What you can see is the attention given to animal shapes on an ordinary surface. In a room devoted to raising animals, hunting and fishing, that small act of looking feels especially fitting. Return to the fish and notice how much of each body the painter could suggest with so little.