Graffiti and Their Supports: Informal Texts in Context

As research on ancient graffiti presses forward, their complexity and diversity continues to impress. Among the graffiti preserved at Pompeii, the appearance of literary texts has not gone unnoticed (Gigante 1979, Milnor 2009), but research opportunities remain. This paper presents two case studies of Pompeian graffiti that preserve epigrams containing combinations and modifications of verses from Propertius and Ovid.

This paper examines a particular class of religious graffiti from Pompeii and suggests the role these graffiti played in the creation of sacred space within ostensibly mundane public places. Focusing on graffiti that explicitly invoke Venus, the most visible deity at Pompeii, I demonstrate how these informal writings challenge certain notions of the relationship between ex voto texts and sacred space. There are a number of graffiti from public spaces at Pompeii that explicitly invoke Venus.

A small fragment of an amphora with a list scratched on its exterior was discovered in the 2008 excavations of the Athenian Agora. This paper presents a text of this list and outlines its relationships to the object on which it was inscribed, the building in which it was deposited, and similar lists from the same site. These relationships question the distinctions between public and private, official and casual.

Building on studies by James Whitley (1997, 1998, 2001), Paula Perlman (1992), and Alan Johnston (2006), this paper calls attention to graffiti on pottery from Azoria, a site in East Crete with a significant Late Archaic phase. Owner’s inscriptions, dedications, labels, control marks, etc. allow us to appreciate emerging literacy from the 8^th to the early 5^th c. B. C.

The aim of this paper is to present the results of a recent field study of the archaeological context of the rock inscriptions from ancient Thera. Dating back to the 7th and 6th century B.C., they are amongst the earliest testimonies of alphabetic writing in Greece (Jeffery 1991). Personal names, invocations to the gods and records of erotic achievements were carved in the ancient town -and are still clearly visible to the modern visitor- on the rocks around the temple of Apolo Karneios, the Agora of the Gods and the gymnasium, offering a vivid image of civic life in archaic Thera.