Archival Work 2007-2014

Before the launch of the Musawwarat Graffiti Project, the graffiti of Musawwarat had been the subject of two previous documentation projects, the first led by Ursula Hintze and the second led by Pawel Wolf. Ursula Hintze photographically recorded c. 700 graffiti from across the Great Enclosure in the 1960s. She numbered and described each of the graffiti entities in a card catalogue and began to classify and describe the graffiti corpus she had recorded.

In the 1990s Pawel Wolf took over the study of the Musawwarat graffiti. Wolf recognised the strong selectivity of Hintze’s graffiti record and aimed to create a more comprehensive photographic documentation. He photographed about 2500 graffiti and prepared aluminium foil impressions of many of these. The collection of descriptive data on pictorial graffiti was not part of his documentation strategy. Due to other commitments Wolf eventually discontinued the project.

Although both researchers published a number of articles on a small selection of graffiti, the overall graffiti corpus remained unpublished. The Musawwarat Graffiti Project, therefore, is the most recent attempt to record, study and publish the rich graffiti corpus of the Great Enclosure. Both, Hintze's and Wolf's data collections are available to the Musawwarat Graffiti Project and are part of the overall study and publication process. The respective sets of documentation have been digitised and/or are in the process of being catalogued for inclusion into the Musawwarat Graffiti Archive.

Text: Cornelia Kleinitz (2014)