In Search of Ancient GraffitiWith a smaller daily readership but longer archiving.
Written by Arieh O'Sullivan
Published Wednesday, August 31, 2011
A Paleo-Facebook, writings on the wall tell of ordinary people from distant past
HIRBET BURJIN, Israel -- It’s hot. A haze of heat hangs flat over a copse of hundred-year-old oaks and dry scrubland of the Judean foothills where people may have lived for millennium, but not a soul is around today.
“Don’t worry. The air conditioner is on inside,” jokes Boaz Zissu, a rugged, tall archaeologist with a swagger that makes it easy to conjure up his past as the former commander of the unit for protection of antiquities in Israel.
Shortly later, after clambering through the thicket and fig trees, crawling down steps carved into the earth, we are sitting in the cool, darkened halls of a cave staring at its white limestone walls and trying to decipher the mysterious scratches.
“It says ‘Christo.’ It’s the name of Jesus but in vocative, like ‘O Jesus,’” says Zissu, pointing out the ancient Greek letters chi and epsilon carved about chest height.
Ancient graffiti, etched into the walls of burial caves, tombs and quarries, is a postcard from the past and gives us a look into the minds of our ascendants. In a way, graffiti is like the Facebook of earlier eras.
“Graffiti are a way of expressing yourself,” says Zissu, today a senior lecturer at Bar Ilan University. “In a period when Internet and blogs didn’t exist and somebody wanted to express himself and to say something they were doing, they did it with a nail on a wall of a cave.”
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The article is difficult to excerpt from here, but it deals with graffiti left by Byzantine monks in Greek and by Second-Temple era Jews in Hebrew.
That project to produce a comprehensive collection of ancient inscriptions from the land of Israel is noted here. And another recent article on graffiti in ancient Israel is noted here.