Reading Ancient Rome's Best Graffiti

In this video, we read through many examples of graffiti that the Ancient Romans left in the city of Pompeii and on the Pyramids.

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The following music performed by Kevin Macleod Available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Heavy Heart

Sources and Further Reading

Picture Attributions

[Araneu]

"We have urinated in our beds... There was no chamber pot." is not only an ancient graffito, it's an ancient Yelp review.

[Painfulldarksoul]

Someone said "The internet is like old Egypt. People write on walls and worship cats.". ... Apparently, they were incredibly right.

[aronjanssonnordberg]

Ancient Greeks being disappointed when visiting the ruins of Egypt because they couldn't understand the hieroglyphs was pretty funny.

[MyPhobo]

I like the "I made bread" one. They aren't complaining, or boasting, they're just baking.

[AnyoneCanSee]

"friends forever were here...Gaius and Aulus". Little did they know that 2000+ years later their declaration would still be there.

[ChrisChansunbornchild]

You will NEVER have millennia long friendship like Gaius and Aulus
Why even live

[alyasuramza]

"I made bread" truly the greatest achievement of mankind

[AngelOfDC]

*_“I am in tears, while carrying you to your last resting place as much as I rejoiced when bringing you home with my own hands 15 years ago.”_*

[rubenskiii]

I remember standing in the Hagia Sofia and being completely in awe, litteraly mouth open and impressed to the max. Then i turned around and my eye fell on a peculiar small glass box and a sign. When i realized some guy named Halvdan was exactly where i was about a 1000 years ago and decided to just carve his name in the marble i couldn't help myself. I started laughing out loud. It was then that i realized so strongly that history is nothing more than us, but from long ago. We've always been the same deep down.

[panqueque]

6:30
Bro went to Egypt and asked "Where are the subtitles?"

[ajlucky]

Imagine writing your names and declaring your friendship on a stone and it still being read today. Gaius and Aulus, you guys are real ones 👏

[EloiFL]

The drop in the literacy rate during the Middle Ages was not a tragedy because the loss in historical accounts or scientific knowledge. It was a tragedy because of all the shitposting lost to time.

[joedellinger]

On a bathroom wall at Stanford University in the 1980’s:

To flush toilet, push down hard on handel

in another hand beneath that:

If I do, will it push bach?

and in yet another hand:

No, it plays water music

[csjrogerson]

I tried to wrote "Romans go home" Got caught by a Centurion and given a lesson in Latin grammar. Made me paint the entire square by dawn. Ah, the good old days.

[iainballas]

As a hotel clerk, the one about the beds and lacking chamber pot is still true. Two years ago I found a note in a room I was helping clean, where the guest explained that their toilet wasn't working, and so they'd used the rug.

[Neckromorph]

I absolutely love that the classic "X was here" tag was used even 2, 000 years ago

[lordInquisitor]

I always love these kinds of insights into the past. It really humanized history.

[martineldritch]

"And the sign said, "The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence" - Paulus Simonicus

[rezopolis]

"Epaphra! You are bald!"
holy sh1t, even at that time they used to annoy bald people lol

[glassworktrophic]

This, unironically, makes me feel more connected to the people of the ancient world than any artifact or historical document ever could. It brings a tear to my eye how goofy and relatable so much of it is.