Welcome to the Graffiti Gazetteer

About the Gazetteer

The Graffiti Inscription Gazetteer is a digital archive dedicated to cataloguing and preserving the stories of graffiti inscriptions across Egypt. Explore locations, the stories behind the inscriptions, and the writers, visitors, and artists who created them. The Graffiti Gazetteer project builds a unique resource collecting data on the multilingual corpus of graffiti in Egypt. In a full version, it aims to include historical secondary inscriptions starting with ancient material but with potential to include visitors’ texts produced up until the 20th century.

Its first aim is the ancient graffiti. Secondary epigraphy, or graffiti, are probably the most widespread media of the ancient world. Texts and figures added to varied surfaces and places could be produced by nearly everyone. Even though graffiti articulated individual and community concerns and religious and political views, they are underrated. This is a paradox, because studying graffiti enriches historical knowledge and challenges established narratives about past cultures.

Why a digital resource for graffiti in Egypt and in the Nile Valley? - Short texts and images, some outwardly resembling modern ‘tags’ and others more like ‘street art’, appeared in the funerary environment, or on temple architecture, as well as in other anthropogenic locations like mines and quarries. These seemingly unprepossessing artefacts are in fact eloquent traces of past societies and cultures, allowing fragmentary insights into both elite and non-elite lives and the roles that monuments continued to play long after their original construction. The graffiti study has benefited from using concepts developed in anthropology, cultural history, literacy studies and cognitive archaeology, offering a rich interpretation.

Empowering research by digital data accessibility has changed the research of graffiti, as it has been demonstrated by presentation of graffiti from single sites. Graffiti are a widespread, productive source, but require both a quantitative and qualitative study that situates each inscription in their environment, yet allows to view aggregated corpora in buildings, and across sites or regions, and across historical periods. Egypt offers a fascinating corpus of texts and images that provides insights including–and extending beyond–local or regional histories.

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