Hunting for ancient graffiti

ARIEH O’SULLIVAN THE MEDIA LINE

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 have lived for millennia, but not a soul is around today.

“Don’t worry. The air conditioner is on inside,” joked Boaz Zissu, a rugged, tall archeologist, 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. A short time later, after clambering through the thicket and fig trees, crawling down steps carved into the earth, we were 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 [the] vocative, like ‘O Jesus,’” he said, 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 a much earlier era.

“Graffiti are a way of expressing yourself,” explained 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.”

In the modern world, graffiti is often seen as vandalism. For others, it’s a sort of pop culture on the boundaries of modern art, never mind that it defaces someone else’s property. But it’s nothing new. Graffiti has been around since ancient times, ever since ordinary people could write, really. It’s a generally overlooked nuisance for most archeologists but, for some, it’s another telling glimpse into the past.

Returning to the cave for the first time in nearly 13 years, Zissu took a moment to get his bearings. The cool cave was once a home to Byzantine hermits and they left their marks on the walls, which, remarkably, have remained untouched for 1,500 years.

“I hope to find more inscriptions that I overlooked then,” said Zissu as we scoured the cave niches. At the far end, we came to a carved cross with the Greek letters delta, alpha nu, iota, eta and lambda. Daniel, followed by the name John. It is surrounded by the images of two lions, evoking the biblical story of Daniel in the lions’ den. “We have plenty of depictions of Daniel in the lions’ den because it’s a story of salvation,” Zissu remarked.

In modern days, spray paint and marker pens are the most common instruments of the graffiti artist. In ancient days, a nail or stick often did the job.

“The major difference between modern graffiti and ancient graffiti is that many ancient graffiti were written really to last,” explained Prof. Jonathan J. Price, chair of the classics department at Tel Aviv University.

“It wasn’t ‘Kilroy Was Here.’ It wasn’t some scatological remark on a bathroom stall, but it was often someone’s epitaph written by hand on a wall either by paint or with a nail or messages sort of to the future.”

According to Price, the study of ancient graffiti has been somewhat neglected, but efforts are underway now by an international team of scholars to publish all the inscriptions found in Israel dating from Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE to Muhammad in the seventh century CE. The corpus will contain some 13,000 texts in more than 10 languages.

Two thousand years ago, these hills were the metropolis of the Jewish nation. Jewish villagers and farmers inhabited virtually every hilltop. The Romans sent most into exile. Over the next centuries, the Byzantines, Crusaders, Arabs and, ultimately, Jews inhabited the area once again. All have left their mark.

The quest for more ancient graffiti took us to Hirbet Burjin, an ancient settlement that sits atop a network of underground tunnels the Jews used in order to hide from Roman soldiers during the Second Revolt in 135 CE. We crawled into the vestibule of one of the older burial caves, shooing away beetles and pushing through spider webs until we came to the small doorway leading into the burial chamber.

“We are in a Jewish burial cave of the first-century CE, of the time of Jesus, and the big surprise was here on this wall,” Zissu said in the dark. Scratched on the lintel are the Hebrew letters shin, peh, nun – three times. Written 2,000 years ago, they are identical to modern Hebrew. It means rabbit.

“It is a well-known family mentioned in the Bible several times, but here it’s the first time that this name appears in the Second Temple context,” Zissu explained. “I think it marks the owners, the name of the owner of this tomb.”

The people living in the area during this period were “hyperlinguistic,” said Price. “When we talk about the basic level of literacy, graffiti show us, just from their sheer volume and also the range of the society they represent, that this part of the world, in particular, was highly literate. That is, basic literary skills were shared by a very high proportion of the population.

Back in the burial cave, Zissu pointed out another bit of graffiti, only this one was much smaller, more difficult to read and out of context. He explained that that we were looking at a 3,000-year-old-Paleo-Hebrew script that spells out the name Yonatan. As far as he could ascertain, it was written at least 2,000 years ago, perhaps copied from a coin.

“In the Second Temple period, Jews returned to this script on special occasions. It is sacred and also it reminded them of the good old days of the First Temple period,” Zissu said. “I’m always looking for these tiny graffiti because they tell a story, and then I believe that you have a direct way to somebody’s mind, without historians and formal sources, who tell their own story. Here, you can directly [read something] written by one of our ancestors 2,000 years ago.”

He chuckled. “It’s like getting an e-mail from the past.”

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