Pictorial and textual graffiti have attracted the attention of archaeologists, anthropologists, epigraphists, historians and philologists since the very early stages in the development of humanities as academic disciplines. Such graffiti have been considered as unique testimonies of everyday life in antiquity, otherwise very hard to detect. Moreover, the practice of writing messages and making drawings on any surface available for scratching has been diachronic and surprisingly perennial; if the thousands of graffiti documented in Pompeii can be considered as indicative, then it seems probable that the graffiti phenomenon was as widespread in antiquity as it is in modern times. Recent monographs, such as Langner 2001, Baird and Taylor 2011 and Keegan 2014 have provided a particularly rich body of new data as well as a holistic approach to this particular body of evidence.

 

Graffiti depicting ships, in particular, have been extensively used by specialists as important ship iconography sources, which provide information on ancient ship types, rigging and gear, or naval architecture (e.g. Crumlin-Pedersen and Munch-Thyem 1995; Auger-Sergent 1996, Gonzales and Font 2007), with Lucien Basch's (1987) work still being the most comprehensive publication for the ancient Mediterranean. For the historical periods that followed the Roman Empire, especially in the eastern Mediterranean, numerous studies have resulted in a significant body of evidence (see e.g. Goudas 1911, Basch 1986, Ovtcharov 1995, Imhaus 2009, Babuin and Nakas 2011, Damianidis 2014), and ship graffiti have
appeared in diverse publications with a broader scope, regarding ship iconography or graffiti in general. A comprehensive study to address the multilevel significance of their analysis, however, is still lacking.