I WAS HERE

The source: a clay tablet the size of a bar of soap, made in Mesopotamia around 3100 BCE. It's an administrative account of barley distribution - a receipt. The writing is proto-cuneiform, from the period when writing was still becoming writing, and much of it remains only partly deciphered. Along the bottom edge someone rolled a cylinder seal across the wet clay, leaving a man, hunting dogs and boars. A personal mark pressed into a grain tally.

Every mark humans have ever made says the same thing. We only changed the medium. Norse guards carved their names into the marble of Hagia Sophia. Roman tourists scratched graffiti into Egyptian monuments that were already ancient to them. Pompeii is covered in it. And five thousand years before any of that, someone rolled their seal across a receipt for barley.

So I didn't deface the tablet. The tag is on the wall beneath it, where the museum label goes. "TESLA WAS HERE" isn't Tesla's hand - he was obsessively orderly and would never have sprayed a wall. It's ours. It's what we scratch underneath something to say: this mattered, and someone was here.

A caption, not vandalism. Testimony.

Original: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/329081 Met accession 1988.433.1, public domain.