Graffiti Marking Access to Precious Pictorial Goods

This article explores New Kingdom graffiti as secondary epigraphy interacting with existing monumental visual settings. The authors examine how ancient visitors to private tomb chapels and ancient royal funerary sites engaged and marked these monuments, integrating their identities within the pictorial environment. By identifying patterns of interaction with images-as-objects and images-as-subjects, they introduce the concept of “pictorial goods”—iconographic models, religious figures or valuable items—that graffitists accessed and appropriated through their inscriptions, as conditioned by visualities structuring the reception and productive engagement with the decorations. Drawing on case studies from Thebes and Memphis, the study highlights the socio-cultural significance of graffiti as both a personal and communal practice and its role in establishing the memory contract between the living and the deceased as a form of cultural communication within the monumental landscape. The discussion incorporates theoretical perspectives on linguistic landscapes, actor-network theory, and image reception to analyse the cognitive and social dimensions of this phenomenon.