Pompeii's '11,000 graffiti' is a catalogue, not a wall count
The famous figure comes from a corpus that also covers Herculaneum, Stabiae and painted notices. And one charcoal scrawl reopened the eruption date.
The often-quoted “11,000 pieces of graffiti” at Pompeii comes from a catalogue, not a count of scratches on one city’s walls. Volume IV of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL), first published in 1871, collects the wall-inscriptions of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae. By 1971 its numbering had reached CIL IV 10913.
The corpus mixes different kinds of writing. Alongside the casual scratches people cut into plaster, it includes the big painted notices, such as election endorsements, that sign-writers put on house fronts. Its supplements have also published wax tablets and texts on amphoras. It grew in stages. A 1909 supplement added nearly 4,000 wall-inscriptions found in the decades before. A third supplement, issued between 1952 and 1971, added the Herculaneum texts and about 2,000 more from Pompeii. Texts found since the 1970s are still being published, with a fascicle in 2023 and another still to come. Any single headline number blends very different things.
Some writers even joked about how crowded the walls had become. One well-known graffito, CIL IV 1904, opens:
“Admiror paries te non cecidisse ruinis…” (“I am amazed, wall, that you have not fallen into ruin…”) — anonymous Pompeian graffito
The scribble that reopened the eruption date
In 2018, diggers in the House of the Garden in Regio V found a charcoal note reading “XVI K NOV”, the 16th day before the Kalends of November, or 17 October. Charcoal was thought to fade fast, so this suggested an October 79 eruption. That challenged the 24 August date in Pliny the Younger’s letter to Tacitus.
Researchers later tested the idea. In October 2023 they wrote “XVI K NOV 2023 ARCHEOLOGIA SPERIMENTALE” in oak charcoal on the same wall. After ten months it was “essentially unaltered” and still perfectly legible. The note could therefore date from October 78, ten months before an August eruption. A 2022 survey by DePauw University’s Pedar Foss found 24 August in about 95% of the manuscripts of Pliny’s letters about Vesuvius.
The question remains open. For the victims themselves, see the plaster casts that still hold their bones.
Sources & references
4 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 3 independent sources.
