The Astypalaia Graffiti
Astypalaia is a remote island in the Aegean. It is rocky, windswept and until recently best known for its ancient cemeteries. However, in 2010, Dr. Andreas Vlachopoulos, a specialist in prehistoric archaeology was leading students in fieldwork on the island, when he chanced upon a curious discovery. For carved on the limestone rocks overlooking the Bay of Vathy were a series of sexually explicit graffiti, thought to be around 2500 years old.
Before the erotica was inscribed onto the rocks, the inhabitants of Astypalaia confined their graffiti to motifs relating to the sea, which no doubt dominated island life. But between the fifth and sixth centuries BC, something changed. Pictures of at least four giant phalli appeared instead of the usual ships and the spirals representing waves. One from the fifth century showed two phalli with the name “Dion” underneath. Under another, the author boasts: “Nikasitimos was here mounting Timiona.”
The inscriptions are important on one level because they show us that it wasn’t merely the elite who were literate. “Whoever wrote the erotic inscription referring to Timiona was very well trained in writing,” said Angelos Matthaiou, for more than 25 years the general secretary at the Greek Epigraphic Society in a 2014 interview with The Guardian newspaper. “The letters have been very skillfully inscribed on the face of the rock, evidence that it was not just philosophers, scholars and historians who were trained in the art of writing but ordinary people living on islands too.”
Perhaps more importantly, the graffiti shows that same-sex relationships were also acceptable in everyday Greek society, and not just amongst elite warriors and legendary heroes. For the sexual conquests described in the graffiti of Astypalaia are between men. Experts now believe that during the fifth and sixth centuries, Astypalaia housed a military garrison- making soldiers the authors of the graffiti. These soldiers were not shy about their conquests- they were proud of them- hence the size of the phallic symbols and the boldness of their boasts.
Astypalaias’ erotic graffiti is amongst the oldest in the world. Nearly as old, although nowhere near as explicit, is graffiti from the Middle East that provides the only source for a long, lost language.