An Ancient Greek Graffito

A historical name or a stunning pun?

T R O O P E R L E A D M A N W R O T E T H I S & M A R K E R P E N

If you came across this graffito written with marker pen (say by a US soldier) on a monument in Baghdad, how would you read that last name?

Mark Erpen? Marker Pen?

That is where we stand with a graffito in Egypt from 591 BC, hacked out in huge letters on on the leg of a giant statue of Ramesses II by a Greek mercenary soldier, ending: "Arkhon son of Amoibikhos inscribed us, and Peleqos son of Oudamos."

That last name could mean in Greek "Axe son of Nobody". Was it intended as a pun?

The graffito is inscribed on the shin of a monumental seated statue of the pharaoh Ramesses II (r. 1279–1213 BC) at Abu Simbel (Upper Egypt), as shown here in the circled area:

Among a host of graffiti in both Greek and Phoenician on these statues, this is by far the longest, running to five lines:

The graffito records the expedition made in 592–591 BC by the pharaoh Psammetikhos II into Nubia that was recorded by the Greek historian Herodotus. The leader of the expedition was also named Psammetikhos: his father’s Greek name Theokles suggests that he was a resident Greek who had been given the name in honour of the pharaoh. Translated, the inscription runs:

When King Psamatikhos came to Elephantine,
those who sailed with Psammatikhos the son of Theokles wrote this,
and they came upstream above Kerkis as far as the river
permits. Potasimto commanded the non-native speakers, Amasis the Egyptians.
Arkhon son of Amoibikhos inscribed us, and Peleqos son of Oudamos.

The presence of Carian mercenaries – natives of Caria in western Asia Minor, who spoke an Anatolian language distinct from Greek – is attested in ancient sources. The Carian name Pe(l)lekōs (a transliteration of plqo in Carian, which had its own alphabet) has been found on other inscriptions, and is confidently equated by experts with “Peleqos”.

Anyone who knows Greek, however, will immediately be struck that the name Peleqos looks and sounds strikingly similar to the word for “axe” or “pick”, pelekus (πέλεκυς), and that oudamos (οὐδαμός) is Greek for “nobody”.

For a long time, then, some scholars have supposed that the name was intended to be a punning reference, possibly even one that reflects some knowledge of the famous wordplay in Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus calls himself Outis, “Nobody” (thus fooling the blinded Cyclops into claiming “Nobody has harmed me” when his fellow Cyclopes hear him bellowing in fury). The Odyssey certainly suggests that the Greeks of the archaic age took delight in wordplay.

However, many scholars today read “Pelekos Son of Eudamos” as a name, and dismiss the idea of a pun. But how might the author(s) of the graffito have expected it to be read? Writers of graffiti around the world tend simply to want to leave their mark – “X was here” – in a conspicuous location. The Ancient Greeks commissioned and used inscriptions to glorify or commemorate individuals and cities, and the scale and content of this graffito suggest something of the latter ambition: the commanders’ names and the detail of their travels down the Nile evince pride in the squadron’s status and achievements.

But if, as I would argue, Arkhōn son of Amoibikhos inscribed it alone, he wanted not only his name to be preserved for posterity, but his wit as well. The name Peleqos would have been familiar to him as a name used by Carian mercenaries with whom he served, but in inscribing it in Greek letters, Arkhōn knew that he was doing so with a pelekus. That spurred him to make a punning gesture, by adding to the Carian name a Greek father’s name that would be read immediately as “Nobody” but might also appear to represent a common Greek name “Eudamos”.

In other words, he wrote MARKERPEN in such a way that people might choose to read it MARK ERPEN - as many scholars continue to. But I cannot resist the conclusion that what he meant by it was the equivalent of MARKER PEN.

Here I explain in more detail the linguistics, the history, and the pun:

https://antigonejournal.com/2023/09/abu-simbel-graffito/