If you thought “I was here” graffiti were only a modern bathroom-stall phenomenon, think again. New methods are revealing scratches and inscriptions across ancient sites, offering direct testimony from ordinary people of the past — from enslaved individuals to bored soldiers who carved their names into walls.
The focus of much of this research is Pompeii, the city buried by Vesuvius in AD 79 and preserved under meters of ash. For centuries excavations emphasized colorful frescoes, mosaics and the homes of elites. More recently, scholars have turned to the spontaneous markings left by everyday residents, and interest in ancient graffiti has surged over the past 15–20 years.
Historian Rebecca Benefiel, who started The Ancient Graffiti Project to digitize graffiti from Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum, says these inscriptions spread across the city and appear in all kinds of spaces. Graffiti — from the Greek graphein, “to write” — are not formal inscriptions but casual, in-situ writings and drawings that give a direct window into daily life. Early enthusiasm for graffiti flagged after 19th-century archaeologist August Mau dismissed them as trivial tourist-like scratches, but the modern reassessment shows they provide important social and cultural evidence.
Some of the most moving finds are from people who rarely appear in historical records. An enslaved woman named Methe scratched a prayer to Venus: “Methe loves Chrestus, may Pompeian Venus be propitious in her heart to each of them and may they both live of one heart.” Such personal appeals allow voices otherwise absent from the record to be heard.
Graffiti also reproduce literary lines and playful parodies. Quotations from Virgil’s Aeneid show that Latin poetry formed part of everyday mental life, like a background soundtrack people could quote and riff on. One writer substituted the epic’s famous opening — “I sing of arms and a man” — with a humorous variant: “I sing of dry cleaners and a hoot owl, not arms of a man.”
Advances in technology are unlocking even more. Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), which uses varied lighting to reveal faint surface scratches, has exposed inscriptions invisible to the naked eye. Researchers led by Marie-Adeline Le Guennec (University of Quebec) and colleagues at the Sorbonne recorded hundreds of graffiti in a corridor that once led to a theater, adding 80 previously unknown inscriptions on a surface thought to be well documented. Some graffiti have remained in place for over a century, a contrast with many modern graffiti that are often removed.
Themes recur across the scratched walls: detailed boats, numerous gladiator images, portraits, animals, numbers, and names. The frequency of gladiator drawings suggests that people often doodled familiar figures rather than responding directly to nearby theatrical performances. Names from the eastern Mediterranean indicate visitors or soldiers from far-flung regions leaving their marks — a very old version of “I was here.”
Researchers say each etching is a distinct, immediate voice that helps broaden our picture of Pompeii beyond its elites. As imaging and documentation methods improve and projects digitize and share finds, these ordinary inscriptions will continue to enrich our understanding of daily life in antiquity. Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier