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Ancient graffiti could be a painted campaign notice, a scratched love line, a workday record, a religious membership list or a visitor’s name on a monument. These seven examples show why informal writing and drawing are valuable evidence: they capture everyday communication that formal histories often leave out.
Here, “remarkable” means unusually revealing, vivid or wide-ranging—not simply famous because of how it was discovered. The examples span walls, an amphora and a monumental temple setting. Some were meant for a crowd; others seem to have served a household, workplace or religious community.
1. Pompeii’s political and gladiatorial walls
Place and period: Pompeii, before the city was buried in the eruption of AD 79. Surface and forms: painted notices and scratched writing on walls. Language: Latin appears among the city’s inscriptions. Pompeian walls preserve campaign appeals, advertisements, greetings, names, love declarations, jokes, insults, drawings and comments about gladiators.
Political messages addressed potential voters and their neighbours; notices promoted people or events; gladiatorial comments spoke to an audience invested in public spectacles. The mix matters as much as any one line: a wall could carry official-looking persuasion beside personal speech and quick reactions to entertainment. The painted and scratched marks also remind us that “graffiti” describes more than one technique.
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Because the eruption preserved much of the city’s built environment, its informal writing survives in exceptional density. Asking what people wrote on the walls of Pompeii therefore opens onto several kinds of public life at once: how residents campaigned, advertised, socialized and followed the arena.
2. Herculaneum’s compact love message
Place: Herculaneum. Surface and date: a wall graffito; the cited record does not establish a more precise date or the writing technique. Text: Hic amor sapiet, translated by the Ancient Graffiti Project as “Here love will be wise.”
Four Latin words can make a wall feel startlingly personal. The sentence is memorable partly because it leaves room for interpretation: the English rendering is a translation, not a uniquely certain explanation of what “wise” love meant to the writer. Among Herculaneum graffiti, it shows how a brief inscription can preserve an intimate thought without telling us who wrote it or for whom.
3. Herculaneum’s bread-making calendar
Place: Herculaneum. Surface and date: a graffito; a more precise date and surface detail are not stated in the cited record. Text: XI K(alendas) pane factum / III Nonas pane factum. The Ancient Graffiti Project translates it: “Eleven days before the Kalends, bread was made. Three days before the Nones, bread was made.”
This is not a literary flourish but a practical note tied to the Roman calendar. It records bread-making on two dates, turning a wall inscription into evidence about routine work and scheduling. It cannot tell us by itself who made the bread, where it was produced or whether the note tracked a household or a business. It does show that wall writing could help record ordinary tasks as well as express opinions or feelings.
4. Dura-Europos’s multilingual everyday archive
Place and setting: Dura-Europos, a city on the Roman frontier. Surface and period: graffiti on walls; the cited overview does not assign the full collection one date. Languages: the city’s multilingual setting is part of the evidence, though no single language describes the whole group. The surviving marks range from scratched camels to elaborate urban landscapes, as well as lists, receipts, calendars, horoscopes and names.
This variety makes graffiti at Dura-Europos an archive of more than spontaneous jokes or insults. Lists and receipts point toward administration and exchange; calendars and horoscopes toward ways of organizing and interpreting time; drawings toward people’s visual interests and surroundings. Together, the marks offer glimpses of movement and daily life in a frontier city whose residents used more than one language.
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Place and period: the Mithraeum, or shrine of Mithras, at Dura-Europos; its dedication is dated about AD 168–169. Surface: graffiti in the shrine. Content and language: the recorded marks include initiates’ names alongside their Mithraic grades; the gallery account does not specify a language for every name.
These short entries connect writing with religious membership and hierarchy. A list of names and grades could identify people within a community, rather than address the broader street audience associated with many Pompeian notices. The contrast is useful: both settings preserve informal writing, but the social group and likely readership differed. The surviving record does not establish exactly who made each entry or how widely it was meant to be read.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.6. Vindolanda’s graffito on an amphora
Place: Vindolanda, a Roman military site in Britain. Surface and date: an amphora, a large storage vessel; the cited inscription record does not give a date for this particular graffito. Text: the database records a graffito cut into the vessel, but the cited summary does not supply its wording.
The object is the point: graffiti did not have to be written on a wall. A mark on an amphora puts informal writing on a container that could be handled, stored or moved, though this record alone does not establish how the marked vessel was used or who inscribed it. Vindolanda’s wider written record includes inscriptions on buildings, altars and tombstones, as well as stamps. Its approximately 1,700 writing tablets, most dating around AD 100 according to the British Museum, provide additional context for written life at the site; they are not all graffiti.
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7. Visitor inscriptions at Abu Simbel
Place: the temples and monumental statues at Abu Simbel in Egypt. Surface and date: inscriptions carved on the ancient monuments by later visitors; the accessible evidence does not establish one secure date for all the marks. Languages and content: a reference summary describes a five-line Ionic Greek inscription on a colossal statue that mentions Psamtik I and Amasis II, alongside Phoenician inscriptions. Griffith Institute archival material also records names carved at the temples.
These marks turn a sacred landscape into a kind of travel record: visitors left names or texts on monuments whose original makers belonged to a much earlier setting. The named pharaohs are part of the inscription’s reported content, not proof here of the exact date when it was carved. The Greek and Phoenician evidence also cautions against treating the visitors as a single group. Compared with a campaign message on a Pompeian street, these inscriptions connect personal presence with an older monumental place.
What these examples reveal about ancient graffiti
Together, the seven examples resist a narrow definition of graffiti as rude one-liners scratched into urban walls. They include paint and incision, personal messages and work records, religious lists and travel marks. Their differences help historians ask who could write, who was likely to read a mark, what surfaces people used, and how informal communication worked across city streets, frontier communities and monumental sites.
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