OSTRACA ŏs’ trə kə. The term “ostraca” is the pl. of the Gr. noun ὄστρακον, which means “fragment of an earthen vessel,” “potsherd” (e.g., LXX Ps. 21:16 [22:15]). In ancient Greece it referred to the potsherds used in voting on the banishment of a public official (whence the Eng. words “ostracism,” “ostracize”). More generally, the term refers to pieces of broken pottery on which people wrote, esp. in ancient Pal., where many have been found in archeological excavations. The abundance of potsherds made them a cheap and readily available form of writing material. Chiefly they were employed for documents requiring only small space, such as letters, brief memoranda, receipts, short lists and notes. Although unsuitable for longer documents, such as Biblical books, ostraca may have been used for recording brief prophetic oracles and proverbs which later were incorporated into books. Because the material is virtually imperishable, some of the oldest written documents in Pal. are ostraca and inscrs. Recently greater care has been exercised in some excavations, e.g., ’Arad and Heshbon, in handling Iron Age potsherds in order not to wash or scrub off possible writing on the sherds.

Two major collections of ostraca relating to OT history are the Samaria ostraca and the Lachish letters. Over seventy ostraca were found in a storehouse in one of the palaces of Samaria. These were receipts for oil and wine paid as taxes to the king. These are dated in the early 8th cent. (reign of Jeroboam II) and throw a great deal of light on the history of Israel in this period. In 1935 and 1938 twenty-one Heb. ostraca were found in the excavations of ancient Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir). Most of these are letters written by a commanding officer at Lachish shortly before the capture of the city by the Babylonians in 589-588 b.c. These ostraca definitely identify the mound as Lachish and illuminate these final years of the State of Judah.