Abstract
The sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, destroyed in the volcanic eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 CE, provide remarkable insight into the presence of writing in the ancient city. The plaster that covered the walls of these cities, inside and out, has yielded not only the majority of wall-paintings from the ancient world but also thousands of written messages-both official, publicly posted, painted announcements (dipinti), and unofficial, individually handwritten messages that were scrntchcd into wall-plaster (graffiti).T he painted inscriptions (dipinti), consisting of myriad political campaign posters and advertisements for gladiatorial games, contain standardized information, fertile and abundant material for understanding the rising prominence of elite families, annual elections, and local government more generally. The richness of this material is made clear by a recent series of monographs devoted to the study of these painted inscriptions. The handwritten inscriptions (graffiti) likewise provide abundant, fascinating material for exploration, hut they represent the opposite of standardized information. Bather, they are as variegated as the people who wrote them-heterogeneous in content, format, handwriting, and expression. Certain groups of graffiti have received excellent treatment, in particular erotic graffiti and poetic graffiti, but multiple factors hinder attempts to study ancient graffiti collectively and therefore to understand the phenomenon as a whole. The Ancient Gmlliti Project, henceforth AG P, has been designed precisely to break down harriers to the study of ancient graffiti and to facilitate new avenues of research in this field through the use of digital tools.
Document Type
Restricted Access: Campus Only
Publication Date
2019
Publisher Statement
Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Recommended Citation
Benefiel, Rebecca, Holly Sypniewski, and Erika Zimmernann Damer. 2019. “Wall Inscriptions in the Ancient City: The Ancient Graffiti Project.” In From Document to History: Epigraphic Insights into the Greco-Roman World., eds. C. Noreña and Nikolaos Papazarkadas. Leiden: Brill, 179-196. Co-authored with R. R. Benefiel and H. M. Sypniewski.
