Civilisation on the wall: Why graffiti, the epitaph of our times, needs to be preserved

Judging by the interest generated by the Tamil Brahmi imprimatur left behind in Egypt by an ancient intrepid Indian traveler named Cikai Korran (perhaps an ancestor of the wandering Tintin, as his first name recalls the Sanskrit word for lock of hair), the scribbles on walls that we now routinely deride as “defacements” will one day become historical wonders. These will be studied and interpreted as rare relics from the age when physical writing disappeared.

After all, apart from graffiti, we now produce little non-virtual evidence about our current civilization and ideas. We no longer put pen to paper, printing is out of fashion, even brush to canvas is being replaced by screens. What comes out of social media, glossy messages, humor, sarcasm, comments, critiques, and AI-generated hoaxes may not survive the obsolescence of the devices they create and may be limited by them. So the inscriptions of our age may well be graffiti.

When this awareness emerges, we will all want to secretly engrave our names, feelings and opinions on real walls instead of just on social media walls. Because it may be the only way to bridge millennia to communicate with people in the future. What they do with our graffiti is another matter, but these sentimental declarations of love, declarations of presence, and messily scrawled initials will be the civilizational semaphores of our time, not just Banksy’s artistic genre.

Of course, millenarian considerations of immortality may not have been what prompted Thiru Korran to announce that he had visited an imperial Egyptian necropolis 1,800 years ago. Just as Şivan, who engraved his passion for Riya in a popular tourist spot abroad in 2026, realized that it could trigger excitement and interest in 3026, he could not have predicted that the questions he had scribbled in eight places in Egypt would grow like an avalanche.

And yet, the simple phrase “Cikai Korran vara kantan (came and saw)”, the Tamil equivalent of the most widespread Greek graffiti of the time, found in the same Egyptian venues – a forerunner of the “Kilroy was here” scribbles of the Second World War – became the stuff of deep academic discussions and presentations at international conferences of Indian and foreign scholars. Of course, these also show that tourism is a much older pastime than most of us realize.

In fact, the urge to explore and leave personal traces on the canvas of time have been the twin motivators of our species; this is evidenced by the thousands of graffiti written by foreigners on Egypt’s monuments over the centuries. The fact that these are so old (the oldest found so far dates to the 6th century BC) shows how deeply rooted graffiti is in the human psyche. They are the intellectual heirs of the cave paintings that shape our understanding of prehistoric humans.
In a time when most human information and communication has been ‘dematerialized’, the importance of what is carved on hard, concrete surfaces is obvious. Like the short lines of Cikai Korran or the broad Ashokan edicts, these will judge us. Positioning, distribution, subject matter, gender representation, and the quality of the engraving will determine the future’s impression of us; flubs doom our age to be despised by generations yet to be born. It’s a sobering prospect.

A formal rethinking of the issue is needed. While ancient graffiti is decorated with care and scientific attention, modern graffiti is subjected to powerful cleaning fluids and hefty fines are imposed on the perpetrators if caught. This discrimination needs to end. By dismissing graffiti as visual garbage and ordering its deletion, we may be erasing important civilizational data of our time. Is there a case for selective protection based on an assessment of likely future interest?