Graffiti aren’t only a modern phenomenon. New imaging and digitizing efforts are revealing thousands of inscriptions scratched into the walls of ancient sites, restoring the voices of ordinary people — enslaved women, bored soldiers, shopkeepers and others — who left quick marks where they lived and worked.
Pompeii, buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and preserved beneath ash, is the richest source for this research. Early excavations, beginning in the 18th century, emphasized frescoes, mosaics and wealthy homes. More recently scholars have turned to the ephemeral scrawls that fill taverns, corridors, stairwells and household plaster, arguing that these informal texts shed direct light on daily experience across the whole city, not just elite spaces.
Historian Rebecca Benefiel founded the Ancient Graffiti Project to digitize inscriptions from Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum. She and others note a surge of interest over the past 15–20 years, aided by social media and online platforms that make graffiti accessible to both researchers and the public.
The word graffiti comes from the Greek graphein, “to write” or “to draw.” Unlike commissioned inscriptions, graffiti are spontaneous and local — names, jokes, poems, prayers, drawings and insults left by people who rarely appear in formal records. That immediacy is what makes them so valuable to historians.
In the 19th century an influential archaeologist, August Mau, dismissed many of these marks as trivial — the ancient equivalent of tourists carving their names. That view stalled serious study for decades. Today scholars show that graffiti are pervasive throughout Pompeii and appear in every kind of space, representing a wide range of authors and purposes.
Some inscriptions give intimate glimpses into lives otherwise invisible. One prayer by an enslaved woman named Methe reads: “Methe loves Chrestus, may Pompeian Venus be propitious in her heart to each of them and may they both live of one heart.” Other scrawls quote or play with Latin literature: lines from Virgil appear, sometimes altered playfully as if they were popular songs or memes of the time.
New imaging technologies are expanding what can be read. Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) uses changing light angles to reveal shallow scratches invisible to the eye. A team led by Marie-Adeline Le Guennec (University of Quebec) with Eloise Letellier-Taillefer and Louis Autin (Sorbonne) applied RTI to a Pompeian corridor that led to a theater, recording hundreds of graffiti and identifying about 80 previously unknown inscriptions on a surface once thought fully cataloged.
Thematically, newly documented marks include carefully drawn boats, numerous gladiator sketches, portraits, animals, names, numbers and multilingual scripts from the eastern Mediterranean — evidence of visitors or soldiers from afar. Gladiator drawings clustered near a theater suggest casual popular interest rather than formal programmatic decoration. Unlike modern graffiti, many of these marks remained on walls for centuries, apparently tolerated or ignored.
As imaging, transcription and digitization continue, researchers expect to recover many more individual voices. Each scratched line expands our view of Pompeii beyond elite art and architecture to the full, messy social life of the city’s inhabitants.
Edited by Elizabeth Grenier