The last 25 years have seen a dramatic expansion in the production and popular reception of graffiti. In the context of this twenty-first century (re)discovery, Scribbling Through History provides a vital reminder of graffiti's deeper history as an enduring human activity. The volume originates from a conference held in Oxford in 2013, aimed at bringing together ‘specialists working on graffiti in as many different cultures as possible’ (p. 4) so that commonalities and differences of definition, method and theory might be constructively discussed and scrutinised. In large part the resulting compilation fulfils this impetus, despite a perceptible geographic and disciplinary focus on inscriptions of the Ancient or Classical World. There is a compelling diversity of social, religious and political contexts and motivating factors explored across the book's 12 case studies.
The editors open the volume by outlining the complexities of graffiti, both as a subject of enquiry and as a burgeoning field of interdisciplinary study. They identify instructive aspects of previous research which frame the direction of the present title, without attempting to set or resolve questions of categorization. Thankfully, their expansive tone liberates the contributing authors from becoming absorbed in what graffiti is and they are instead able to demonstrate what graffiti does and how it works. Although the book generally eschews prescriptive definitions, from the outset graffiti is foregrounded as an action or situated event and, more or less implicitly, as a practice of writing. This position ensures graffiti is firmly instated within epigraphic and classical studies, but to some extent overshadows the treatment of graffiti as artefact.
Following the introduction, chapters are grouped thematically into sections, according to the physical context or material surface within which inscriptions operate. As such, there is Section 1 Graffiti in the Landscape; Section 2 Graffiti and the Wall; and Section 3 Graffiti and the Written Page. Ostensibly, this structure reflects an attunement to the relationships forged between the writer/maker and the site or socio-cultural setting of inscription activity. Hence graffiti is variously construed as a statement and an action: a process of identity formation and negotiation; a performance of place-making, devotion or commemoration, an act of pilgrimage, protest, resistance and belonging. Many of the chapters explore how graffiti reactivates surface and space, forming a dialogical and dynamic interface in which past and present intersect and entangle through the reading/writing and seeing/drawing experience.
Section 1 incorporates case studies in which graffiti is inscribed into open sites and specific geological landscapes, thereby addressing the capacity of mark-making to transform, augment and mediate spheres of the natural and cultural environment. Chloé Ragazzoli begins the series with an analysis of the content and spatial distribution of graffiti from a tomb at Deir el-Bahari, Ancient Egypt. She describes how a diverse suite of votive inscriptions, names, satire and erotica correspond to a distinct social milieu of scribes who used graffiti to enact their participation in a professional community. In chapter 2, Alain Delattre details specific instances of graffiti activity to trace the presence of individual Christian clerics and pilgrims living and travelling through the Theban Mountain during the sixth–eighth centuries. Noting how particular individuals returned and renewed their ‘signature’, Delattre signals the potential of graffiti as a ritualized exercise of place-making, as well as a source of biography for the researcher in the present. In chapter 3, Ömür Harmanşah compares the rock monuments and graffiti of Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Anatolia. While he proposes that they constitute distinct inscription ontologies, he explains how they each contribute to the making and unmaking of territory and self and sacred geographies. In the chapter that follows, Michael Macdonald provides a fascinating investigation of the relationship between writing and literacy in ancient Arabia, describing the individual and clustered graffiti of two desert communities: Safaitic scripts made by nomads living in an oral or ‘non-literate society’ (within which word-of-mouth and memory are the dominant mode of communication); and the texts produced by settled Nabateans, for whom reading and writing was essential to the functioning of their ‘literate society’. Closing this section, Christiane Gruber presents a contemporary case study from Istanbul's Gezi Park, tracing the semantic origins of specific slogans and images and strategies of ‘rhetorical conflict’. She reveals how Gezi graffiti, through its ‘shared locus’ and generative unfolding, became a unifying force that enabled protest while maintaining social inclusiveness.
Section 2 is concerned with the production of graffiti as it occurs on built structures and in man-made environs, including ancient cities. It begins with Rebecca Benefiel's assessment of the public greetings, quotations, popular sayings and gladiatorial representations preserved from first-century Pompeii. Benefiel's study highlights the striking sociality and localized nature of the custom, as a site of public exchange which is largely positive and neither contests nor resists authority. Moving on from the public streets of Roman Pompeii to the private rooms of a Tikal palace, Elizabeth Olton's chapter examines how a prominent theme of Mayan iconography—the Ruler and Protector—was rearticulated as satirical and subversive graffiti. In contrast to Benefiel's example from Pompeii, Olton suggests that graffiti was an alternative and dissenting commentary on official narratives made by and for members of an elite Mayan audience. In chapter 8, Hana Navratilova discusses a vast corpus of graffiti produced in the necropolis of the ancient capital of Memphis, Egypt. Focusing on the graffiti applied by visitors to existing funerary monuments, Navaratilova points to the relational aspect of inscription as a palimpsest or ‘epigraphic ensemble’ through which the graffiti author becomes materially enmeshed, and thereby affiliated, with deities, royal figures and sacred space itself. In another account from a mortuary context, Karen Stern considers pictographic and text-based graffiti from the ancient subterranean cemetery of Beit She'arim in the Levant. Stern indicates how ‘context-sensitive acts of carving’ are potentially multivalent—a form of spatial engagement, a mode of address, a dedication and an act of commemoration.
It is in Section 3 that the volume takes a radical leap, shifting from the more familiar surfaces of rock and brick to the page, the book and the screen. This consolidates the book's overall emphasis on graffiti as a form and practice of writing, while also fostering innovative perspectives in graffiti research. The first chapter is well placed to bridge the transition from wall to paper as Glen Dudbridge traces a similar shift evidenced in the literary heritage of medieval China. Dudbridge describes how plastered buildings, used for the display of Chinese government proclamations, came to be used for the dissemination of poetic verse and other unofficial communications. Over time, many of these ephemeral inscriptions were transcribed into notebooks and personal collections by travellers as they recorded their own encounters of reading and writing on walls. In chapter 11, Janine Rogers presents a sophisticated reading of graffiti as it intersects with medieval and early modern book culture by examining the different kinds of inscription activity that occur in the marginalia of manuscripts: from the signatures and names of individuals and pictorial representations of the human form to puns and paw prints.
In the final contribution, Marc Jahjah offers what is perhaps the most novel and provocative formulation of graffiti in the current collection—by aligning it with the emergence of digital reading platforms, and specifically an annotative functionality which enables readers to highlight, make notes and comment on digital texts. Such user-generated material subsequently becomes a resource from which companies like Amazon may produce editorial content. For this reader, graffiti in a digital context is more easily reconciled with code-hacking and the disruptions of Anonymous rather than the commercially enabled and monetized inscriptions that Jahjah describes. This is, however, precisely what makes the chapter, and overall trajectory of the book as it nears its conclusion, such an intriguing and refreshing challenge. It also raises an important question: if graffiti may be rendered as any additive enunciation or notation, what might be said about other modes of elaboration and accumulation? This query highlights where the book's inherent strength of emphasis on writing spaces and epigraphic traditions, may present itself as something of a shortcoming, as any indication or reference to other, arguably more ‘material’, expressions and conceptualizations of graffiti and place-making (e.g. stone-stacking) are notably absent. This may also explain why there is limited attention to the gestural and sensorial aspects of graffiti and mark-making behaviours and other non-textual and graphic communications or interventions in the public sphere.
One of the few criticisms I have of this volume is that there is an overall lack of regard for the many other archaeologies of graffiti undertaken outside classical studies. Moreover, given that an objective of the workshop was to shift ‘individual bodies of evidence out of their relative disciplinary isolation’ (p. 4) and to produce ‘a book on graffiti throughout history’, a deeper engagement with graffiti scholarship from across the humanities and social sciences spectrum would seem warranted. In many ways, these issues speak in a positive sense to the research possibilities and exciting momentum that the book engenders and a strong desire on my part simply to continue reading. Hence, despite the evident omissions, there is much to recommend this collection as a thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring set of case studies. Each chapter offers its own unique insights on graffiti, which may find application to archaeologists and a wide array of scholars concerned with thinking about and through graffiti, in all of its manifestations, from the deep past through to the contemporary lived experience.
