Graffiti Through the ages From Roman Pompeii to modern day, a secret history has always been written on the walls Written by Ben Gazur
Greek letters and symbols scrawled into a rock in the Eastern desert of Egypt
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umans have always sought to leave their mark since the dawn of civilisation, but when history has been recorded, the voices of the masses have usually been left out. It seems many more ordinary events were not thought important enough to write down. Luckily, graffiti has helped fill that gap by offering us an unfiltered view of the period in which it was created, and we can find familiar themes in our lives like boastful comments, lewd jokes and caricatures. Graffiti cannot be easily defined, but for our purposes it is any illicitly made marking. Cave art, however powerful, can’t really be thought of as graffiti in spite of the tempting similarities. An ancient handprint doesn’t look forbidden and we don’t have enough information to say for certain if it was. For the same reason, petroglyphs, ancient marks incised in rock, are not true graffiti.
“Ancient foreign visitors left their marks, too”
Vandalise like an Egyptian Most people’s reaction to the words ‘ancient graffiti’ is to ask, “Oh, like hieroglyphs?” While the Ancient Egyptians were seemingly addicted to decorating their monumental buildings with entire walls of text, these were sanctioned by the pharaohs and so were closer to state propaganda than street art. However, hidden between the official marks, we can find more modest ones that can truly be called graffiti. These might be as simple as a crude representation of an animal or as complex as a lovingly rendered image of a god. Unlike the acclamatory inscriptions of the pharaoh, which display his name proudly, we will never know the identity of most of these early graffiti artists. When cameras penetrated the hidden shafts and chambers of the Great Pyramid, they found
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hieroglyphs and symbols set out in red paint, left behind by work gangs as they constructed the pharaoh’s monument — and they have revealed much about those unknown toilers. The crews charged with building the pyramids liked to sign their work, perhaps revealing a rivalry between groups. The ‘Friends of Khufu’ might compete with the ‘Drunks of Menkaure’, or the ‘Purples’ with ‘The Craftsman Gang’. These markings supports the growing evidence that the Great Pyramid was built by willing, proud labourers, rather than slaves. It seems that as soon as you teach someone to write, they will want to scribble somewhere they shouldn’t. In 1240 BCE, the treasury scribe Hadnakhte took a trip to the sacred temple
of Djoser at Saqqara and decided to mark the occasion with a graffito. He described how he “came for a pleasant stroll… with his brother Panakhte, the scribe of the vizier.” Another scribe who visited left a slightly ironic complaint about those who had come before. “I feel sick when I see the work of their hands… Their work is awful.” Ancient foreign visitors left their marks, too. In the tomb of Ramesses IV in the Valley of the Kings, 1,000 ancient inscriptions in Greek and Latin have been found. Some just record the names of the visitors, while others read like modern trip reviews — “I visited and I did not like anything except the sarcophagus!” or “I cannot read the hieroglyphs!”