Graffiti on the walls of Pompeii

This article was posted on the Science News website reporting on the AIA Conference in Anaheim this past week.


Graffiti on the walls in Pompeii
News from the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif.
By Bruce Bower
January 30th, 2010; Vol.177 #3 (p. 14)


ANAHEIM, Calif. — Well-off homeowners living in the Roman city of Pompeii more than 2,000 years ago could read the writing on their own walls, and apparently didn’t mind the spontaneous scrawling. Citizens of Pompeii scratched out graffiti on the walls of private residences to share creative greetings, welcomes and salutations to friends, Rebecca Benefiel of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., reported on January 8.

Many elite Pompeii dwellings bear dozens of graffiti messages on their walls, Benefiel notes. She studied 41 examples of written graffiti spread across two stories of one such house. Most graffiti appeared on walls in well-traveled areas, such as an entrance area and near stairways. Different people wrote messages back-and-forth to one another on the walls, sometimes in the form of poetry, Benefiel says. Graffiti writers intended to have their product read by an audience, she suggests.

Graffiti in the Pompeii house are generally small and unobtrusive. “Defacement did not motivate those who wrote on these walls,” Benefiel says. She also identified 12 instances of graffiti images in the ancient house. These drawings portrayed boats, animals, a palm frond and a man. A few areas contained graffiti consisting of a series of Roman numerals that were possibly used in number games, in Benefiel’s view.

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