A potsherd or, more rarely, a flake of stone, bearing an inscription in ink or paint. In Greece they were employed for voting; in Egypt for memoranda, business accounts, writing exercises, jottings, artist's sketches, and listmaking. They commonly consisted of personal jottings, letters, sketches, or scribal exercises, but also often inscribed with literary texts. They could also be fragments from inscribed jars (e.g. a wine jar inscribed with the details of a vintage). Ostraca are known from all periods, but 19th- and 20th-Dynasty examples are commonest (up to 20,000 have been found) in Egypt. Most of the Egyptian examples are in hieratic or demotic, but there are also cursive hieroglyphic texts and numerous pictures, including drafts of hieroglyphic inscriptions. The term is derived from the classical Greek voting practice of ostrakismos (ostracism), a 5th-century BC political move in which each citizen could write upon a potsherd the name of someone whom he wished to see banished. If sufficient votes were cast against one person (the number seems to have been 6,000), the person named would be banished for ten years. The usage of inscribed sherds seems to have spread to Egypt with the Greek conquest. Ostraca from the New Kingdom are especially numerous. Deir el-Medina's ostraca is a great source of evidence for the life of its workmen's village and community.