Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 16, 2025
Suspended animation finds no fuller symbolism than the sculptor here presents to us in abstract form. The boys of Montepulciano have scratched Messer Aragazzi's sleeping figure with graffiti at their own free will. Yet they have had no power to erase the poetry of Donatello's mighty style.
The antiquary Leland mentions two Roman inscriptions as built into the city wall near Southernhay, but they are gone, and besides the inscribed dagger we have only a seal of Severius Pompeyus, and sundry graffiti or funereal pottery, in the way of literary relics of Roman Exeter.
Determined that the Khedive should have something for his money, Burton and his company had, to use Mrs. Burton's expression, "returned triumphantly," with twenty-five tons of minerals and numerous objects of archaeological interest. The yield of the argentiferous and cupriferous ores, proved, alas! to be but poor. They went in search of gold, and found graffiti!
Ali Hamid's son took us the next day on fast-trotting camels to visit some graffiti on basaltic rocks about eight miles distant. Here we found representations of animals chiselled on the hard rocks, similar to those we saw in Wadi Gabeit; we could recognise gazelles, camels, and elephants, and we thought the artist also had intended to depict giraffes, mongooses, and other strange beasts.
The Khedive opened the exhibition in person, and walked round to look at the graffiti, the maps, the sketches of ruins and the twenty-five tons of rock, as nobody had more right; and Burton and M. Marie the engineer accompanied him. "Are you sure," enquired the Khedive, pointing to some of the rocks, "that this and this contain gold?"
Miriam comes as close to it as a lady may in her exultations over the drenched Egyptians. Terence is full of it, and the graffiti exhumed in Italy further enlighten us as to the deadest portion of one of the dead languages. Slang is one form of popular poetry.
Amongst the bones we found carved wooden objects which looked as if they had originally served as crosses to mark the tombs, in which the corpses had been permitted to decay prior to their removal to the charnel-house, or koimêthêria, as the modern Greeks call them. We stayed two days at Eriosh to study the graffiti and tombs.
They were traders, or dealers in land, or money-lenders or other 'well-to-do' persons. The labourers and servants of Calleva must be sought among the native population, and the graffiti testify that this population wrote Latin. It is a further question whether, besides writing Latin, the Callevan servants and workmen may not also have spoken Celtic. Here direct evidence fails.
The law is that nothing taken out of storage is the same as it was when put in, and this law, hieroglyphed in those rude 'graffiti' apparently inscribed by accident in the process of removal, has only such exceptions as prove the rule. The world to which it has returned is not the same, and that makes all the difference. Yet, truth and beauty do not change, however the moods and fashions change.
It has, indeed, been suggested by doubters, that these graffiti were written by immigrant Italians, working as labourers or servants in Calleva. The suggestion does not seem probable. Italians certainly emigrated to the provinces in considerable numbers, just as Italians emigrate to-day. But we have seen above that the ancient emigrants were not labourers, as they are to-day.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking