Graffiti

Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.

Where we are: We’re in Dinan, France, where I was so focused on getting a walk in before the rain started this morning that I totally forgot to upload today’s newsletter—making this the first time since I started doing this in 2019 that I’ve been late. I knew I should’ve done it yesterday. Learn from me, kids—don’t procrastinate!

Graffiti

I have a weird obsession (I mean, I have many weird obsessions, but this one is particularly niche): old graffiti.

I don’t mean the grungy-looking faded tags from seven years ago that make your local warehouse district look vaguely creepy on cloudy weekends. I mean old graffiti.

I think the first truly old graffiti that grabbed my attention was in Palermo, Sicily—prisoners during the Spanish Inquistion painted extraordinary art and testimony onto cell walls. It’s one thing to walk through an ancient-but-empty prison and try to imagine what it must have been like, especially one that old. But seeing the words and images left by people who lived through the horror of the Inquistion—there was something incredibly evocative about seeing that tiny glimpse of humanity on those ancient stone walls.

We’ve seen bits and snips of older graffiti, too, in various Roman ruins. Pompeii, because of the extraordinary way the whole city was frozen in time, is known for its graffiti.

In Saudi Arabia, we hiked into the most stunning red rocks to see inscriptions carved by ancient traders passing through the area. They didn’t look exactly like graffiti as I know it—more like complex spreadsheets or shopping lists. Did they count as graffiti? I’m not sure, because they were all written in impenetrable ancient languages like Minaic and Nabatean (definitely not on the average linguistic curriculum, not even in graduate school). Maybe that’s how records were kept back in the day—carving your contract in stone certainly has an air of permanence to it. I think of graffiti as having more of a Caesar was here vibe, rather than a municipal archives vibe.

And then there’s the really super-old stuff—images carved or painted on stone in the days before written records. In Namibia, we followed a guide into a desert canyon to peer at black and white and red stick figures on a rock. They were both fascinating and … anticlimactic. The whole scene was too removed from any kind of familiar context to really speak to my imagination. The simple painted figures looked like the kind of kindergarten art I hung on the refrigerator when our kids were small (we are not an artsy crowd). Plus, I was slightly nervous about what kind of wild animals might burst out from between the rocks and devour or poison us. Can you say puff adder?

I think, having given it a lot of thought (and having annoyed a whole host of tour guides who were trying to explain Very Important Concepts like Ionic versus Doric capitals while I was off in a corner taking photos of old-school dick pics) that what I like best is graffiti that adds a layer of history to history.

Fast forward to ancient Egypt (lol see what I did there? Yes, sometimes I write these essays just to amuse myself). The graffiti that is plastered on many (most?) of the remnants of ancient Egypt is absolutely fascinating to me. People from all over the world take bucket-list trips to marvel at the wonders of the Pharaonic tombs and temples. While they’re ogling the columns and heiroglyphs, I’m over in a corner looking at John Doe’s signature from a hundred years ago. Or more accurately, L. Buvry’s signature from 1852 (he signed himself from Berlin, in case you’re wondering).

Here’s the thing about Egypt: we humans are fascinated by the remnants of antiquity, and those remnants are most plentiful, most well-preserved, in the dry heat of the Egyptian desert. There’s something incredibly compelling about stepping into the remnants of a lost civilization, especially one as sophisticated and just beautiful as ancient Egypt. I think it was that fascination that birthed the modern tourism industry, starting with Thomas Cook’s invention of the package tour in 1869.

The appeal hasn’t changed much, but it’s clear the touristing has. The European men (and they were almost exclusively men) who wandered Egypt two hundred years ago had unfettered access to unexcavated antiquities, broken and neglected like Shelley’s Ozymandias in “the lone and level sands…”.

Can you imagine? Being a pampered son of the Industrial Revolution, searching for adventure beyond the geographic boundaries of the ‘normal’ Grand Tour? Of course you’d leave your mark. Of course you’d shout your dominance from the rooftops, or in this case, carve it into the columns.

When those inquisitive, acquisitive adventurers wandered the banks of the Nile two centuries ago, the ancient temples and tombs and monuments were mostly buried in the sands that had shifted around and over them for thousands of years. My buddy L. Buvry, like most of his counterparts, carved his signature into the upper portion of a column in the Temple of Karnak. Nowadays the temple has been thoroughly dug out of the sand, cleaned up, studied, and preserved. I stood on solid flooring and craned my neck to see his signature, high above my head.

In another portion of the temple, I again craned my neck to see the smudged remains of holy paintings, the marks of early Christians who converted the ancient spaces into places of worship. Those layers of history are visible in Turkey as well—the slow rise and fall, growth and decline of one civilization, one religion, after another. The early Christians probably thought they were consecrating a space, but they were also leaving a record for us to read.

My 19th-century graffiti-ist, L. Buvry, also wrote himself into the historical record. I wonder how long it took him to etch his signature into the ancient stone? I wonder what he was thinking?

Graffiti kind of gives new meaning to the old adage if these walls could talk. Well, you know what? Sometimes they can.

Take care,

Lisa

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