Vatican Museums

The series “Monuments of the ancient Christians”, inscriptions from community cemeteries in Rome, both open and underground (see Sections XV, XVI, XVII), begins with this group of walls. The documents offer a “window” on the world of Christianity in the first centuries, providing valuable elements for the understanding of social classes, religious conceptions, ideas about death and the afterlife, languages spoken (Greek and Latin), educational levels and forms of illiteracy, trades and professions, the use of symbolic and decorative elements, burial vocabulary and the names of people, the reuse of materials, and the impoverishment of writing techniques. There are also other late-ancient inscriptions of unknown origin, not connected with any certainty to the Christian sphere. The texts on these three walls are almost all in Latin (with only a few in Greek).