Graffiti—the ‘Selfies’ of the Ancient Near East?

By: Karen B. Stern

Few phenomena embody the current zeitgeist like the ‘selfie.’ Glances through Facebook or Instagram reveal selfies in abundance. Cameras on today’s smart phones, combined with the platform of social media, transform auto-photography into an art form by allowing people to publically project carefully selected images of themselves—posing in front of famed monuments, clustered with friends at public events, or at home, surrounded by friends and family. The selfie, which today serves as a common medium of self-expression, self-documentation, and self-promotion, manifests the wonders of the postmodern age, in which technological access permits individuals to publicize their photos and achievements.

But ancient and medieval people were also deeply concerned with their self-documentation, self-representation and self-promotion. They, too, registered their presence at tourist destinations, participation in life events, and positions amidst friends and peers. In place of iPhones and Facebook, they took styluses, nails, and paint to copy words and images to stone and plaster to broadcast their sentiments and images to the world. Their ‘selfies’ were graffiti.

Some might be surprised that ancient graffiti exist, or that they might be relevant as antecedents of modern popular culture. Less elegant than professionally executed inscriptions or wall paintings, graffiti, which may include writing and pictures, traditionally attract little attention. But graffiti are common throughout the ancient Near East—in Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, Asia Minor, the Levant, Mesopotamia and Arabia. People carved them in diverse places of tourism and worship, inside public theatres and hippodromes, burial caves, and along desert byways. These rough-hewn graffiti retain otherwise unknown information about their authors’ desires to publicly commemorate their experiences and sentiments.

History of the term

Traditions of graffiti writing emerge from earliest antiquity. The word graffitiborrows from the Italian verb for ‘to scratch,’ and serves as an umbrella term to classify texts and pictures, carved or painted onto surfaces. Definitions vary: some scholars describe graffiti as ‘unofficial’ or ‘informal’ markings on surfaces originally designated for different purposes, which, in turn, differ (in appearance and in authorship) from thosecommissioned for monumental display.

Graffiti in antiquity are equally diverse. Some are lewd and irreverent, such a Latin graffito from Ostia, which, in less than polite terms, threatens sexual violence on unauthorized inscribers of the surrounding wall. Others found in Pompeii often invoke the Roman gods on the walls of latrines (“…if you look down upon this curse, may you have Jupiter for an enemy”). Such better-known instances appear to confirm common assumptions about the inappropriateness and irreverence of graffiti—ancient or modern. But many ancient graffiti differ strikingly in form, location, and content from these so-called “latrinalia.”

Ostia graffiti “

Every comer scrawls the walls with his graffiti,

The only one who’s written none is me.

Bugger all these scrawlers! My entreaty

Is to call them epitoechographs [writers on the wall] like me.”

Graffiti, tourism, and pilgrimage

By the second millennium B.C.E. in ancient Egypt, tourists of elevated social rank used graffiti to document their visits to esteemed places of pilgrimage. One scribe of the king’s treasury named Hadnakhte, for example, wrote on the already-ancient Djoser Temple beside the pyramids of Saqqara, that he and his brother Panakhte, “came for a pleasant stroll in the West of Memphis.”

Much later during Ptolemaic and Roman rule in Egypt, comparable tourist graffiti burgeoned. Examples include Greek graffiti from a sanctuary dedicated to the wilderness god Pan, located in the eastern Egyptian desert along the travel route from Berenice to the Red Sea. Visitors recorded their personal names on the temple walls and surrounding cliffs (“Zenon came up here too”). Others boasted of their far-flung origins in Crete, Macedonia, and Judea, recorded tribulations that preceded their arrival (“…having suffered greatly from redoubled hardships….”), or their number of visits to the sanctuary (e.g., “Menneas and Theodoros of Sillyon, to deuteron). These acts of carving graffiti were not disrespectful, but simultaneously enabled visitors to register their presence, flaunt their resilience, and display their writing abilities.

Graffiti as worship

Acts of carving graffiti onto sanctuary walls might shock modern sensibilities.

But graffiti pervade sacred spaces throughout the ancient Levant—particularly in regions of modern Syria, Iraq, Israel, and Jordan. The remarkably preserved town of Roman Dura Europos retains hundreds of such examples. A military assault by Sassanian Persians reduced Dura to a ghost town by 255/257 C.E. But during the life of the city, graffiti-writers applied their work everywhere, including spaces designated for religious purposes. Greek graffiti from temples dedicated to local deities record worshippers’ personal names and their individual requests for resident gods’ remembrance (“mnesthê”).

Perhaps most surprising, however, are the precise locations of such carvings: many cluster most densely inside and around cultic niches and places of sacrifice, where worshippers considered gods to be most accessible. These graffiti did not defile surrounding spaces, but rather, proudly advertised authors’ names and supplications in spaces visible to deities and to other devotees. Even graffiti from Dura’s Christian building appear inside its baptistery.

Graffiti from the local synagogue contain additional features that might resonate particularly with modern selfie-artists.  While most graffiti from the synagogue record writers’ names in Aramaic (the graffito “I am Ḥiyya” appears multiple times), or their remembrance requests (“May Amathbel be remembered…and his brother…”), others incorporate an additional element: figurative portraits.

For instance, one graffito found beside the synagogue, which reads: “Ahiah son of…of the sons of Levi. May he be remembered for good before the Lord of Heaven… Amen. This is a memorial for the good” is accompanied by the drawing of a human torso with articulated facial features.The symmetrical position of the picture and its proximity to the accompanying text suggest strong links between them. And this pattern recurs: another textual graffito from the synagogue similarly accompanies the image of a male bust. The inclusion of portraits beside name graffiti may reflect worshippers’ redoubled efforts to solicit attention and remembrance.

Pietistic graffiti, such as these, are not limited to antiquity. Pilgrimage sites throughout Syria and the Holy Land, including Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem also contain hundreds of graffiti applied by pilgrims from early through late modernity. Written in Greek, Armenian, Georgian, and Arabic, these graffiti follow patterns similar to those of ancient analogues. They include religious symbols and pictures, names of writers and their families, and requests for their blessings and remembrance.

Graffiti for the Dead

Ancient graffiti are also found in mortuary contexts, both inside and around burial spaces. Their contents vary, but some particularly solicit the attention of an audience. One graffito from a tomb complex in Abila (Wadi Qualibah) in Jordan, from the Roman or Byzantine period, exemplifies such an effort. The Greek sentiment entreats the visitor to “remember the writer [and] the reader…and….!” Upraised hands of a human figure, carved in relief beside the text, may demonstrate complementary gestures of prayer or mourning. A Greek graffito from a tomb in the Judaean hills in Israel, carved into a corridor between a tomb vestibule and a burial chamber, similarly requests: “remember the writer and the reader and me!”

Due to their anonymity, such mortuary graffiti remain particularly enigmatic (who were their writers? their readers? and who is intended by designations, such as ‘me’?). Nonetheless, while people today might classify graffiti in burial caves as disrespectful, these appear to be the opposite—they revere the space, anticipate other visitors, and solicit remembrance and goodwill for and from the dead.

Among hundreds of other graffiti found throughout modern Israel, an additional example exhibits complementary impulses. Found inside a catacomb of the late ancient Jewish necropolis of Beit Shearim, this simple Aramaic graffito records the presence of “her brother.” This text cannot be an epitaph, because it is carved meters away from the closest tomb.It serves, rather, as a different kind of memorial—of a brother’s visit to his beloved sister’s grave. Such documentation might seem strange in the modern world, but demonstrates yet another function of unofficial writing as a means of commemorating both the writer’s visit and his affection for the deceased.

Conclusion

In the modern world, acts of carving names or self-portraits inside places of worship or burial would be classified, unequivocally, as vandalism. But in the ancient world, authors and artists considered their graffiti to be desirable in these places. Closer evaluation thus reveals why modern audiences should take notice of ancient graffiti: they broadcast their writers’ presence in coveted locations, serve as a means to solicit an audience’s attention, and publicize their subjects’ emotions, including devotion, affection, and sorrow. In other words, they document human impulses that equally inform the activities of today’s selfie-obsessed. Their writers, much as those who post selfies on Facebook, want to impress and be viewed favorably by others.

Karen B. Stern is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

For Further Reading:

Baird, J. and Claire Taylor, 2010. Ancient Graffiti in Context. London and New York, Routledge.

Barbet, Alix. 1994. Les peintures des nécropoles romaines d’Abila et du nord de la Jordanie. P. Geuthner, Paris.

Bernand, A. 1972. Le Paneion d’El-Kanaïs: Les inscriptions grecques. Leiden: Brill.

Chaniotis, Angelos. 2010. “Graffiti in Aphrodisias: Images—Texts—Contexts,” in eds. Baird and Taylor, Ancient Graffiti in Context, London and New York, Routledge, 191-208.

Mairs, Rachel, 2010. “Egyptian ‘Inscriptions’ and Greek’ ‘Graffiti’ at EL Kanais in the Egyptian Eastern Desert” in eds. Baird and Taylor, Ancient Graffiti in Context, London and New York, Routledge, 53-164.

Stern, Karen. 2012. “Tagging Sacred Space in the Dura Europos Synagogue,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 25 fasc. 1: 171-194.