Graffiti singular graffiti or graffito , the latter only used in graffiti archeology is writing or drawings made on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Modern graffiti is a controversial subject. In most countries, marking or painting property without permission is considered vandalism. Most petroglyphs and geoglyphs date between 40, and 10, years old, the oldest being cave paintings in Australia.
These stencils may have functioned similarly to a modern-day tag. The oldest written graffiti was found in Ancient Rome around years ago. The graffito features a human with the head of a donkey on a cross with the text "Alexamenos worships [his] god. The only known source of the Safaitic language, an ancient form of Arabic , is from graffiti: inscriptions scratched on to the surface of rocks and boulders in the predominantly basalt desert of southern Syria , eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia.
Safaitic dates from the first century BC to the fourth century AD. Ancient tourists visiting the 5th-century citadel at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka write their names and commentary over the "mirror wall", adding up to over individual graffiti produced there between the 6th and 18th centuries. Among the ancient political graffiti examples were Arab satirist poems. Yazid al-Himyari, an Umayyad Arab and Persian poet, was most known for writing his political poetry on the walls between Sajistan and Basra , manifesting a strong hatred towards the Umayyad regime and its walis , and people used to read and circulate them very widely.
Graffiti, known as Tacherons, were frequently scratched on Romanesque Scandinavian church walls. In the s, French soldiers carved their names on monuments during the Napoleonic campaign of Egypt.
The oldest known example of graffiti monikers were found on traincars created by hobos and railworkers since the late s. Contemporary graffiti has been seen on landmarks in the US, such as Independence Rock , a national landmark along the Oregon Trail.
