Naughty or not, Padihorpakhered, a powerful Egyptian priest who lived 2,700 years ago, learned from his father, Horsiese, also a priest, how to cheat time immemorial and assure that their names would be remembered thousands of years after they died.
They scratched their names into the sandstone sides of one of Egypt’s great monuments in the holy city of Thebes.
In other words, they put graffiti on the temple walls, becoming the ancient equivalent of today’s “taggers,” the self-described urban artists who put their marks in public places.
It may surprise laymen to know that even thousands of years ago, people were writing “Kilroy Was Here” (in whatever language) on their own buildings. But the fact is that ever since archeologists began digging up Egypt’s ruins, they have been finding antiquarian graffiti written and cut into it. That means Horsiese and his son weren’t even close to being the first graffiti artists.
Yet only recently have archeologists begun to view the graffiti as a serious object of study. Previously, archeologists viewed it pretty much the way they would the idea of somebody today scratching on Egypt’s hallowed ruins: as a criminal act and a cultural abomination.
The rethinking, though, is vividly illustrated in a just-released academic tome on the Luxor Temple in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings by scholars at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. The $250 book and portfolio devote several pages to reproducing ancient graffiti found in the temple, including the inscribed footprints of Horsiese and Padihorpakhered on the temple roof.
“Ancient graffiti was at most only sporadically recorded until perhaps 20 years ago, when people realized it provides valuable information about the history of the monuments themselves,” said Peter Dorman, an Egyptologist at the institute and editor of the book, which is part of the institute’s Epigraphic Survey project. Its highly technical and expensive books repose in university libraries and archeological museums around the world.
“If you look back 50,000 years ago,” said Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a University of Chicago psychologist who has studied the psychology of art, “you see cave art in which people left their handprints stenciled against walls.
“The best guess is it was the same thing that drives graffiti, the cave people stenciling their handprints to leave their mark on the environment. It is a very universal impulse. It’s perhaps partly territorial,” like dogs leaving their mark on trees.
Examples of graffiti on royal Egyptian buildings go back at least 3,400 years. Even older graffiti is found on rocks and in caves along desert roads traveled by Egyptian traders 5,000 years ago.
The ancient graffiti differs from modern graffiti, Dorman said, in that it was not created as an act of vandalism, but was the privilege of the tiny portion of society then that knew how to read and write, the priests and scribes. Their graffiti is usually an expression of religious piety, never off-color.
“It should be looked upon as votive inscriptions,” Dorman said, “written by those wanting their names associated with the gods depicted in the formal wall inscriptions.”
How Horsiese and Padihorpakhered, who wrote on the temple hundreds of years after it was built, succeeded in keeping their names alive for 2,700 years is a case in point.
Thebes was built 2,000 years before the birth of Christ as a sacred city along the Nile River where pharaohs and queens were buried in stupendous tombs and temples.
In 1400 B.C., King Amenhotep III, ancient Egypt’s wealthiest pharaoh built the 600-foot-long Luxor Temple in Thebes as a place to commemorate his reign and his piety, and as a place for succeeding generations to honor his memory.
He died before the temple was finished. A few years later, one of his successors, the boy king Tutankhamen, ordered artisans to decorate the Colonnade Hall portion of the temple to commemorate Tut’s reign. Tut, who died at age 19, never saw the finished hall, an 85-foot-long chamber supported by immense, 60-foot-high columns.
About 700 years later, Horsiese and Padihorpakhered showed up as priests in the temple. By then it had been altered and claimed by many generations of pharaohs who followed Amenhotep III and Tut. As “stolists,” priests who ritually dressed statues of the gods in the temple each morning, Horsiese and his son were big shots in Thebes, then a 1,300-year-old city.
The priests had access to the stairway to the temple roof, and they may have gone up there as a part of frequent ritual processions that marched along Thebes’ broad avenues.
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Whatever placed them on the roof, on a few occasions both men carefully chose smooth, blank portions of sandstone roofing slabs to stand on. Then, using some sort of sharp tool, they or their servants etched the outline of the priests’ sandals, then incised hieroglyphic messages inside the sandal outlines. One, written by Padihorpakhered, translates as:
“The god’s father, great stolist, Horsiese, son of the ears (of the king), the prophet and leader Padihorpakhered”
Because the father and son also left their names on the walls of several other temples in Thebes, their graffiti is well-known to scholars who record and translate the pharaonic wall hieroglyphs and art.
Scholars now realize that such graffiti tells something about the times Horsiese and son lived in and about how the temples were used then, said James Allen, curator of Egyptian art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“They tell us a great deal about what those monuments meant to Egyptians then and how long the buildings were used and by whom,” said Allen.
The footprints on the roof, for example, show that the temple was still in very active use 700 years after it was built.
About 100 years later, mercenary soldiers from Anatolia (Turkey), chiseled messages on the exterior walls of Colonnade Hall. They came from a culture known as the “Carians.” Nobody has decoded their alphabet, so their messages remain untranslated, though they are believed to be declarations of devotion to various gods.
About 300 years before Christ was born, people began roughly incising messages in Greek script low along the temple walls.
“Amerus, son of Loloutos” said one, written sometime around the time of Christ, paying his respects to Egypt’s principal god, Amun. In another, a medic spending his second tour of duty in Egypt, pays his respects:
“Ptollion, medic of the cohort for the second time, gives thanks to Ammon (Amun) . . .”
Those reflect Greek influence in Egypt from the time they ruled there after Alexander’s conquest in 332 B.C. to long after it ended with Cleopatra’s death in 30 B.C.
“We know that the temple was still very actively used then,” said Dorman, “because the Greek graffiti was inscribed near the bottom of the walls. That shows the halls weren’t yet silted in by sand or covered by trash.”
As well, there are examples in many temple walls of tourists from Greece carving their names in the Greek era, Allen said.
“Just the fact that it shows there was a tourism industry 2,000 years ago is something I find fascinating,” Allen said.
About 120 years ago, French archeologists were the first to go to the Valley of the Kings and begin to try to copy the formal tomb and temple inscriptions. Not long after, in 1894, James Henry Breasted, the University of Chicago’s first Egyptologist, arrived to do the same.
Breasted eventually founded the Oriental Institute and, in 1924, the Epigraphic Survey, which has been in Luxor ever since.