Posted on 04/14/2020 12:17:34 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
"I understand every language except Greek -- and it's all Greek to me!" -- /vaudevillerimshot
The graffiti I’m looking at is the two words in red on a door post.
What I take for a lambda I believe is a shorthand way of writing “ai”.
I don’t make out any word associated with vote or public office though, and I don’t think either is a proper noun.
So when they dig us up to “study” us a thousand years down the road, it’s archaeology?
LOL..it is an interesting language. Have forgotten a lot . Never get a chance to speak it. Forget trying to write in Greek.
I’ve heard that from people who’ve taken it as their language in divinity school — easiest is to learn to read it, then after a while to speak it.
Right, because it’s archaeology, not desecration, not graverobbing.
English translation / transcript of the video narration:
I’m stumped, what is the link?
From the very beginning, archaeologists noticed copious amounts of graffiti on the outsides of buildings. In the late 1800s, scholars began making careful copies of Latin inscriptions throughout the ancient Roman world, including Pompeii, and cataloging them. This effort is a boon to scholars like Benefiel, since more than 90 percent of Pompeii's recorded graffiti have since been erased by exposure to the elements...
In the ancient Roman world, graffiti was a respected form of writing -- often interactive - not the kind of defacement we now see on rocky cliffs and bathroom stalls. Inside elite dwellings like that of Maius Castricius -- a four-story home with panoramic windows overlooking the Bay of Naples that was excavated in the 1960s -- she's examined 85 graffito. Some were greetings from friends, carefully incised around the edges of frescoes in the home's finest room. In a stairwell, people took turns quoting popular poems and adding their own clever twists. In other places, the graffiti include drawings: a boat, a peacock, a leaping deer...
Benefiel's study of Pompeii's graffiti has revealed a number of surprises... She's found that declarations of love were every bit as common then as they are today and that it was acceptable for visitors to carve their opinions about the city into its walls. She's discovered that the people of Pompeii loved displaying their cleverness via graffiti, from poetry contests to playful recombinations of the letters that form Roman numerals.
And she's found that Pompeians expressed far more goodwill than ill will. "They were much nicer in their graffiti than we are," she says. "There are lots of pairings with the word 'felicter,' which means 'happily.' When you pair it with someone's name, it means you're hoping things go well for that person. There are lots of graffiti that say 'Felicter Pompeii,' wishing the whole town well."Reading the Writing on Pompeii's Walls | Smithsonian Magazine | Kristin Ohlson | July 26, 2010
Kind of a tossup on whether to excavate more before the next eruption or wait and let future archaeologists use (improved?) methods that better preserve the treasures.
The rest should be left for later. Some have worried that the volcano will have a serious eruption again and rebury everything, so let's quick dig. And the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum is speculated to have a second, lower storey -- AFAIK based on absolutely nothing. Their dream is that there's an identical library under the first one with another box of scrolls. The story of the wasteful destructive "study" of the scrolls should be enough to convince most that the buried Roman towns should be left there for a long while yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsOHvP1XnRg
:^)
A drone flight over the ancient city and and the new excavations leads us to discover the newly uncovered domus, including: the House with the Garden with its splendid triclinium frescoes and painted portico; the House of Orion with its First Style paintings and the mosaic of Orion, which is the only one of its kind; and in addition the settings of everyday life. It is an extraordinary cross-section of the daily life of the city.
The new excavations of Pompeii in Regio V revealed in an exclusive virtual tour by Massimo Osanna | Pompeii Sites | Published on April 20, 2020
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