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Pompeii’s walls preserve declarations of love, insults, sketches, portraits, and other marks left by people who lived there nearly 2,000 years ago. They offer recognizably human glimpses of everyday life—but they do not prove that ancient Romans were simply “just like us,” or tell us what every resident thought.
What did people write and draw on Pompeii’s walls?
An interdisciplinary project called Bruits de couloir (“Corridor whispers”), involving Sorbonne Université and Université du Québec à Montréal, examined several hundred inscriptions and documented 79 previously unseen examples on two corridor walls. The project reports examples including declarations of love, insults, sketches of gladiator fights, portraits, animals, and boats. The 79 refers to findings in that project’s study area—not to all the newly discovered graffiti in Pompeii. Sorbonne Université describes the project and its findings.
The subjects are striking partly because they are so varied: a personal message or quick drawing can sit alongside evidence of public life. But a surviving wall mark is only one small trace. It does not, by itself, tell us how common a particular sentiment or activity was, who made it, or whether the writer’s experience was typical.
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What counts as graffiti in Pompeii?
“Graffiti” can refer broadly to writing and images on walls, but the term also has a more specific scholarly use. The Ancient Graffiti Project uses it for handwritten inscriptions scratched into plaster and publishes critical editions, including work that updates the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Painted public notices belong to Pompeii’s wall-writing record too, but they are a distinct kind of evidence. The Archaeological Park’s guide to the excavations, for example, discusses electoral programs and advertisements for games.
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That distinction matters when interpreting a particular wall. A scratched personal message, an image, and a painted public announcement may all tell us something about life in the city, but they were made differently and may have served different purposes. The medium and setting are part of the evidence, not incidental details.
How can graffiti help reconstruct everyday life?
Wall writing can preserve fragments of individual experience that formal inscriptions and official records may not capture. Pompeii Online notes that informal messages can complement written records and household objects when researchers try to reconstruct people’s lives. UNESCO likewise describes Pompeii’s written remains as evidence within a socially complex Roman community and a broader picture of everyday life in the first century AD: UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre overview.
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That evidence is valuable because it is varied and tied to particular places. It is also fragmentary. What survives depends on what was written, where it was placed, what endured, and what has been found and recorded. Vivid examples of love, conflict, or humor can make the past feel close, but they cannot establish how often people felt or behaved a certain way, nor represent the city’s entire population.
How do researchers read and translate a wall inscription?
Reading an inscription involves more than recognizing Latin words. Researchers must locate and document marks, assess what can be read, and consider the archaeological and linguistic context. The Bruits de couloir team brought together epigraphy, archaeology, philology, and digital humanities; its work included identifying and describing marks, translating them, and recording them in a database.
For a specific Latin text, a translation is most useful when it can be traced to a scholarly edition or catalogue. The Ancient Graffiti Project provides critical editions, which let readers see that interpretations rest on documented readings rather than on a memorable line repeated without context. If a mark is damaged or ambiguous, the reading may be uncertain; an image or short phrase should not be treated as definitive without that context.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Were ancient Romans really “just like us”?
The walls support a more careful conclusion: some human concerns are familiar across time. People left messages, insults, pictures, and public notices in a city whose streets and buildings still preserve traces of daily life. Those parallels can help make the past feel tangible, but they do not erase differences in social conditions, values, or circumstances. Pompeian graffiti gives us glimpses of particular people and moments, not a complete portrait of what all ancient Romans were like.
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