20 Ancient Messages That Read Like Modern Internet Comments

On a wall at Rome’s Palatine Hill, in a room where young attendants at the imperial court were trained, someone scratched graffiti onto the wall: a picture of a young man standing before a crucified person. Except that this person has a donkey’s head. Beneath it is written in Greek, “Alexamenos sebete theon,” meaning “Alexamenos worships his god.” Found in 1857, it was no expression of devotion but of mockery. A graffito made in the late second or early third century CE, this was an anti-Christian joke, inscribed to last.

A clay tablet bearing wedge-shaped cuneiform script from about 1900 BCE, housed at the British Museum, records a Sumerian proverb: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young wife did not fart in her husband’s lap.” Dr. Paul McDonald named it the oldest joke on record in a 2008 survey of ancient humor. It might just be the oldest. Nobody’s sure.

In 2022, excavators at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, in northern England, unearthed a building block made of carved sandstone. It has been dated to c. 200-300 CE and depicts a phallus, in Roman culture a protective good-luck talisman known as a fascinum, beside the inscription SECVNDINVS CACOR, which is a garbled rendering of “Secundinus cacator,” “Secundinus, the sh*tter.” A protective charm has been transformed into a taunt for a rival.

An inscription on the exterior wall of the Inn of the Muledrivers in Pompeii, written by a passing traveler in quantitative elegiac couplets, a formal poetic meter, reads: “We have wet the bed, host, I confess we have done wrong. If you ask why, there was no chamber pot!” (CIL IV 4957). It is a comic confession, but one which places the blame squarely on the innkeeper.

An angry patron at an inn in Pompeii (CIL IV 3948) left an indelible message on the wall: “May such lies deceive you, innkeeper: you sell water and drink unmixed wine yourself.” It’s a scathing one-star review, complaining that the host served water but drank wine himself.

Someone scratched an erect penis, a fascinum, onto a bakery wall in the Pansa district of Pompeii, hoping to deflect the evil eye. Next to it is the phrase Hic habitat felicitas, which means here dwells happiness. It’s a protection spell with a joke attached, a good-luck charm carrying a cheerful message for customers.

One graffito on a Pompeii wall, cataloged CIL IV 8767, claims that the man who wrote it, Floronius of the 7th Legion, was “known” by only six women. He then supplies the moral: ‘Too few for such a stallion.”

On gravestones all over the Roman Empire, between the 1st century BCE and the 3rd century CE, the words “N.F. F. N.S. N.C.” are found. This is short for Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo, or “I was not, I was, I am not, I do not care.” This is an Epicurean saying, and since the belief that death is nothing to fear was a popular tenet of that school of philosophy, the saying was so common that people abbreviated it to just the initials.

Within the Bar of Prima in Pompeii, Severus, a rival for Iris’s affections, had written on the wall that Successus, the weaver, was begging Iris to have mercy on him, and she would not give it to him. And below, Successus replied: “Envious one, why do you get in the way? Submit to a handsomer man.” (CIL IV 8258 and 8259.) This graffiti exchange was preserved in plaster for eternity.

The latrine of the House of the Gem, in Herculaneum rather than Pompeii, had this little inscription on its wall: “Apollinaris, doctor to Emperor Titus, defecated well here.” Titus was emperor from 79 to 81 CE, and presumably this Apollinaris, if it was indeed him, wrote his own boast. But even a doctor to an emperor needs some validation for his feces.

One of the oldest jokes known to us is found on an Old Babylonian clay tablet dating from between 1900 and 1600 BCE. It is housed in the British Museum: “A dog walks into a tavern and says: I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one.” It’s pretty much the joke as we understand it today, but scholars believe that the punchline included a pun on eyes or doors that is now lost.

In fifth-century BCE Athens, citizens voted to exile politicians by writing their names on broken pieces of pottery called ostraka. More than 11,000 ostraka have been found in the Athenian Agora. The ancient writer Plutarch tells us of one illiterate man who claimed that he just voted to exile Aristides because he was sick of hearing people call him “The Just.” Other ostraka get even more specific. One just says, “Megacles, son of Hippocrates: Adulterer.”

A Latin poem written in a formal poetic meter and mocking the wall for having to bear such boring writing has been inscribed on the plaster of some of the buildings in Pompeii, such as the basilica and the theater district (CIL IV 1904 and 2461). This is a funny comment on graffiti, written in graffiti.

In ancient Sumer, kids were expected to write insult poems for school. These poems, known as “Scribal Dialogues,” were written in scribal schools called Edubas from about 2000 to 1700 BCE. They were an assignment that all students were required to write, not an act of rebellion. The students at school were essentially writing essays that made fun of each other’s handwriting and vocabulary.

The administrative records from Deir el-Medina, the Egyptian village where state-employed craftsmen who built royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived, have some interesting information about workers who were absent from their duties. For example, Ostracon BM EA 5634, dated to Year 40 of Ramesses II (ca. 1250 BCE), records absences because of “brewing beer” or “drinking beer with Asby” or for medical reasons. This was a routine matter, not a case of worker shirking, because beer was an important food item.

The tomb of Ramesses VI in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt was created around 1140 BCE. Between 300 BCE and 300 CE, more than 1,000 graffiti messages were written by visitors in Greek and Latin inside the tomb. One said: “I visited and I did not like anything except the sarcophagus.” Another wrote: “I cannot read the hieroglyphs.”

Maeshowe is a Neolithic stone tomb in Orkney, Scotland. It was constructed around 2800 BCE, long before the first Viking ever set foot in Orkney. During the 1150s CE, Vikings hunkered down in Maeshowe to escape a winter storm, and they carved about 30 runic messages into the walls of the tomb. One message, which reads, “Tholfir Kolbeinsson carved these runes high up,” suggests that the Viking, Tholfir Kolbeinsson, wanted to be sure to be credited with his reach as well as his carving.

Another 1150s graffito (No. 16 in the standard catalog) is also in Maeshowe in Orkney: “These runes were carved by the man most skilled in runes in the western ocean,” writes this anonymous Viking. This one is separate from the “high up” comment, but it’s still another private boast.

Sometime between the 9th and 11th centuries CE, a Viking in the employ of the Byzantine emperor as part of his Varangian Guard, a specialized mercenary force, inscribed runic characters on a marble balustrade in the upper gallery of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). Found in 1964, what remains legible is “…ftan”. This fits the typical Old Norse formula for “Halfdan carved these runes.”

In 1st-century CE Rome, a man called Tiberius Claudius Secundus had his tombstone carved by his partner, Merope. It reads: “Baths, wine, and sex ruin our bodies, but baths, wine, and sex make life worth living.” (Epitaph, CIL VI 15258) It is a formal grave marker that uses humor to make peace with mortality itself.

This content was created with the help of AI.