Post-cocturam graffiti on Roman pottery containing the name of the vessel. The examples from Hispania Citerior
Adela Duclos  1@  
1 : University of Zaragoza - Universidad de Zaragoza [Zaragoza]

In the last years, studies on everyday writing in the Roman world have been boosted, which has led to the revaluation of materials such as graffiti on pottery or walls, which until recently were ignored or relegated to the background. In the specific case of post-cocturam graffiti on ceramics, although there is still a lack of systematic studies on it, the multitude of materials that have been published in recent decades provide sufficient data to raise some preliminary reflections of great interest.

The graffiti on pottery from the Imperial period come mainly from domestic contexts and contain texts which, in general, must be related to everyday life. These have been found throughout Hispania Citerior, in a wide variety of locations ranging from urban centres to small rustic villae, indicating the widespread spread of literacy even in areas that have not provided any other type of written documents. Most of these are marks of ownership, ranging from simply the name of the owner of the object to more complex warnings to unauthorised users. Sometimes even jokes, dedications or erotic messages were inscribed on these vessels. Most of the graffiti from this area date from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. This is related to the rise of the terra sigillata and the widespread use of writing, which was widespread in these two centuries and which later declined in the 3rd century AD.

On this occasion we want to compile a collection of those graffiti on pottery from Hispania Citerior, the ones that have been studied and published to date, in which the name of the owner is written next to that of the object itself. This is a common formula for marking the ownership of ceramic objects, which provides us with an interesting list of terms to designate tableware and kitchenware, of which panna (bowl) is the most common. This compilation is a further step towards the systematisation of this type of inscriptions, which is one of the most common types of writing in Roman-era domestic spaces.


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