Why ancient Roman graffiti is so important to archaeologists | Hacker News Reader

Why ancient Roman graffiti is so important to archaeologists

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73 pointsakakievich27 comments

At the risk of nitpicking: "Meanwhile, every female Roman voice has been lost to time."

I bring this up less to bang on some diversity card, and more that it seems very far from true? (Yes, they were a vast minority, but 'lost to time' seems quite overwrought) In terms of poetry we have Sulpicia (both of them) and then lots of miscellaneous daily writings e.g. the diary of Vibia Perpetua; and of course Lucretia and Fulvia if we're talking public figures...

And the additional quote of female homosexuality being universally abhorred also seems to be misaligned with what I was taught, but my memories of this are both fuzzier and from my days in university, so I'd be more than willing to be proven wrong. (The obvious argument in my favor is the amount the of attention garnered by the supposed lesbian (both in location and sexual practice) Sappho) My take on it was that there was as much of a distribution in terms of outlook on sexual practices as there is today, albeit very differently weighted.

That all being said, roman graffiti is _amazing_ as a view into "normal people", the article leaving out the fact that gives me a good (but immature) chuckle, that a large amount of graffiti included simply crude drawings of penises.

  > that a large amount of graffiti included simply crude drawings of penises.

While reading your comment, I literally could not stop myself from thinking of this. teehee

The advertising on redorbit.com (desktop site) is utterly preposterous- in terms of the quantity, quality, and repetition, and the relentless popups. I usually get annoyed when HN comments devolve into people discussing the page or the site rather than the contents of the story, but this is just absurd.

I would normally assume that a site that looks like this has to be a domain squatter's autogenerated site, or some sort of honeypot for distributing malware.

Or maybe I'm not getting the same experience everyone else is? If this is what it looks like to everyone, that's grounds for HN blacklisting redorbit.com links. I hope this is a screwup and not what the site owners are going for.

What I'm seeing in this link: every image and every paragraph is followed by the same Teleflora banner ad that scrolls open when you scroll past that image or paragraph. At some point an animated Revlon ad also appears which expands to fill the entire page. The sidebar and bottom of just about every page is consumed by ginormous BS "Trending now!" links to "25 celebrities you didn't know posed topless!" and "The weight loss trick that they don't want you to know!" articles on other equally disreputable sites. The page for this article looks like satire, it's so ridiculous and seedy and invasive. I wanted to read the article, I really did.

Do you refuse to use adblockers based on some moral principle?

No. But any site that is willing to go to that length to compromise their content (for people who don't use ad blockers) clearly doesn't value their content or the people who read it. That's the message it sends.

Here, try this instead. Some hilarious stuff. No adds, i'm pretty sure it's circa 1995:

http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%2...

"Gaius Pumidius Dipilus was here on October 3rd 78 BC"

That's apocryphal, right? How did he know it was "BC"?

It gets weirder when you consider that Christ was most likely born between 7 and 2 BC.

Mobile Android Firefox with uBlock Origin it's not bad, other than that the font's too small (10" tablet). With Firefox's Reader Mode (which I engage for virtually all text content, and very much wish were the default), it's fine.

Not dismissing your experience at all (I'm quite sensitive to annoying sites). Just noting that it's possible to improve on it markedly.

I have Ghostery installed, so I don't notice any ads.

Most HN users are probably uBlock and Adblock users.

Beyond being annoying in the extreme, this surely must run afoul of the advertising source's rules. I couldn't even finish reading the page because the ads kept popping up and distracting me!

Another great bit of ancient graffiti are runes carved by some Vikings sheltering inside the ~4800 year old tomb of Maeshowe on Orkney:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeshowe

"He is a viking...come here under the barrow"

http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/maeshowe/maeshrunes.htm

Along the coast of Norway, outside Tromsø, I found these ancient stone drawings:

http://i.imgur.com/2ago5A9.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/YaIIXdP.jpg

Including the one of a six-legged cow (with three horns). I have no idea why the Norwegians wanted to draw a six-legged cow, but I assume it must have some significance. If anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them.

I would have interpreted the third horn as ears.

Two hypothesis on the six legs:

* an oddity, this things sometimes happen and might have been interpreted as good or bad omens, worth recording. The positioning (mid-flank rather than at the bottom, like the others) seems consistent with similar cases I have seen. Random internet result: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/25/6-legged-lamb_n_123...

* maybe those are not extra legs of the top animal, but horns of the bottom animal (who also has 4 short legs), maybe recording when some ram or species of deer charged into a much larger cow? Though the horns would be out of proportion, and I'd expect them to be curved.

Perhaps it's some kind of ancestor of Sleipnir; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleipnir.

They are spears pointing to the vulnerable places to killing the uro? nape and two zones of the belly. Other pictures of the same series could be interpreted also as traps, and with a little of imagination, even pools of blood under both uros.

>"These places weren’t necessarily vast repositories of lost literature, but the eruption froze them nearly perfectly in time, preserving them for nearly 2,000 years—and preserving thousands of pieces of graffiti along with them."

Actually, Pompeii and Herculaneum are precisely one of the largest and most precious repositories of lost ancient literature.

http://ancphil.lsa.umich.edu/-/downloads/papyri/JankoRecentD...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/the-invisible-l...

Umm what? "[Pompeii and Herculaneum] weren’t necessarily vast repositories of lost literature"

Not sure about Pompeii, but Herculaneum had the villa of Piso with tons of scrolls from Philodemus, who totally fleshed out the ideas of Epicurus, upon whose atomism all of modern science is based.

> Epicurus, upon whose atomism all of modern science is based.

It is difficult to comprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.

Modern science makes no reference to Epicurean atomism, other than in the historical choice of the word "atom" to refer to something that Epicurus wasn't talking about.

Okay. Then I'd be interested to know about atomism after Lucretius and before the renaissance. Who was the first modern "inventor" of it?

My comment was meant to express alarm that anyone could say there was no lost library buried by Vesuvius.

Here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_of_the_Papyri#Epicureani...

It also contains the ideas of Priapus, upon whose ideas all modern trollery is based.

I love this type of stuff, because it is an insight into the way that normal people (ie. not royalty) lived.

Absolutely unreadable on mobile; the site just keeps scrolling itself back to the top.

What OS? iOS and Crystal make it just fine. It's a pity add block isn't a default position for everyone.

Android.

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