![]() ![]() Taylor and Baird have edited a book that sprang from that conference called Ancient Graffiti in Context, which will be published in September. One, at England’s University of Leicester organized by scholars Claire Taylor and Jennifer Baird in 2008, drew so many participants that there wasn’t space for all of them. In the past four years, there have been four international conferences devoted to ancient and historic graffiti. Today, graffiti is valued for the nuance it adds to our understanding of historical periods. “ Everyone was doing it,” she says.Ĭontemporary scholars have been drawn to the study of graffiti, interested to hear the voices of the non-elite and marginal groups that earlier scholars spurned and then surprised to learn that the practice of graffiti was widespread among all groups across the ancient world. ![]() The prevailing attitude was expressed by August Mau in 1899, who wrote, “The people with whom we should most eagerly desire to come into contact, the cultivated men and women of the ancient city, were not accustomed to scratch their names upon stucco or to confide their reflections and experiences to the surface of a wall.” But Benefiel’s observations show the opposite. The 19th century effort to document ancient graffiti notwithstanding, scholars have historically ignored the phenomenon. In other places, the graffiti include drawings: a boat, a peacock, a leaping deer.īenefiel prefers to wander the ancient city and examine the remaining graffiti in context. In a stairwell, people took turns quoting popular poems and adding their own clever twists. Some were greetings from friends, carefully incised around the edges of frescoes in the home’s finest room. #B IN GRAFFITI WINDOWS#Inside elite dwellings like that of Maius Castricius-a four-story home with panoramic windows overlooking the Bay of Naples that was excavated in the 1960s-she’s examined 85 graffito. In the ancient Roman world, graffiti was a respected form of writing-often interactive – not the kind of defacement we now see on rocky cliffs and bathroom stalls. “Many of these walls were brightly painted and highly decorated, and the graffiti let the underlying white plaster show through.” “The graffiti would have been much more visible then than they are now,” she says. Much of what remains is on protected interior walls, where servants, visitors and others took sharp instruments to the stucco and left their mark. This effort is a boon to scholars like Benefiel, since more than 90 percent of Pompeii’s recorded graffiti have since been erased by exposure to the elements.Įven though she studies this vast collection of inscriptions, Benefiel prefers to wander the ancient city and examine the remaining graffiti in context. In the late 1800s, scholars began making careful copies of Latin inscriptions throughout the ancient Roman world, including Pompeii, and cataloging them. The city’s well-preserved first level has given archaeologists, historians and classicists an unparalleled view of the ancient world, brought to a halt in the middle of an ordinary day.įrom the very beginning, archaeologists noticed copious amounts of graffiti on the outsides of buildings. Since the 18th century, archaeologists have excavated about two-thirds, including some 109 acres of public buildings, stores and homes. Vesuvius dumped ashes and lapilli on Pompeii for 36 hours, sealing the entire city up to an average height of 20 feet. Regardless, she’s always eager to return. “Sometimes the guards forget to let me out of the buildings at the end of the day!” “There are a few hazards to this work,” laughs Benefiel, a 35-year old classicist from Washington and Lee University who has spent part of the past six summers in Pompeii. 79 and buried their city in a light pumice stone called lapilli. She soon found what she was looking for: a string of names and a cluster of numbers, part of the vibrant graffiti chitchat carried on by the citizens of Pompeii before Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. Nonetheless, she moved closer to the walls and searched for aberrations in the stucco. And – much higher on the ick meter-her flashlight revealed a desiccated corpse that looked as if it was struggling to rise from the floor. Rebecca Benefiel stepped into the tiny dark room on the first floor of the House of Maius Castricius. ![]()
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