Drawing Dicks Before the Internet: A Brief History

The quick answer: people have been drawing, carving and painting phalluses for as long as there are records of people drawing anything. The Romans put them in paintings, mosaics and jewellery as good-luck charms; soldiers on Hadrian's Wall carved them into stone; medieval illuminators painted them into manuscripts; and one has been cut into an English hillside for around a thousand years. The internet did not invent the dick doodle. It just made it faster to share.

Here is a short tour, with the sources at the end so you can check every stop.

Rome: the lucky charm

For the Romans, a phallus was not mainly a rude joke. It was protection. Newcastle University's archaeologists put it simply: phalli "were widespread across the Empire and were commonly believed to be a way to protect against bad luck", appearing in paintings and mosaics, on everyday objects and worn as pendants.¹

Think of it less as graffiti and more as a horseshoe over the door.

Hadrian's Wall: soldiers with chisels

Hadrian's Wall, the Roman frontier across northern Britain, is a particularly good place to find them.

In a quarry near Gelt Woods in Cumbria, Roman soldiers cutting stone to repair the Wall left inscriptions dated to 207 AD. When archaeologists from Newcastle University and Historic England recorded them in 2019, they found a relief carving of a phallus, which they describe as a Roman "good luck" symbol, and a caricature of the commanding officer in charge of the quarrying.² Eighteen centuries on, the soldiers' priorities are instantly recognisable: get the work done, draw something lucky, and make fun of the boss.

At Vindolanda, a Roman fort just south of the Wall,³ the luck sometimes ran the other way. In 2022 a volunteer found a third-century stone carved with a phallus and a name: Secundinus, together with a crude word about his bodily habits. The fort's director, Andrew Birley, said a phallus was usually a good-luck charm or a symbol of fertility, "but was probably not intended as such in this case".³ Scholars who studied the stone published their reading of it the following year.⁴

Vindolanda also holds one of the oddest finds of the lot: a wooden phallus from a second-century ditch, found in 1992 and catalogued for years as a darning tool, until two archaeologists looked again and published a new interpretation in 2023. Wooden objects only survive in very particular conditions, and they describe it as the first known disembodied phallus made of wood recovered anywhere in the Roman world.¹

Dorset: the giant on the hill

The Cerne Abbas Giant is a figure cut into a chalk hillside in Dorset, and very much anatomically complete. For a long time nobody knew how old he was, and the theories ranged from an ancient fertility symbol to a likeness of Hercules to a mockery of Oliver Cromwell. In 2021, after a year of analysing soil samples from the figure, National Trust archaeologists concluded that he was probably first made in the late Saxon period, around a thousand years ago.⁵

The Middle Ages: the margins

Medieval books were made and decorated by hand, and the painters used the margins for all sorts of things: animals, jokes, monsters and scenes that seem to have nothing to do with the text.

One copy of the Roman de la Rose, a famous French poem, made in Paris in the fourteenth century and now in France's national library, is known for the pictures along the bottoms of its pages. It came from the workshop of Jeanne and Richard de Montbaston, who ran a bookmaking business in Paris in the mid-1300s. Its most famous image shows a nun harvesting the fruit of a tree whose fruit is, unmistakably, phalluses.⁶ It has been attributed to Jeanne herself, though nobody can be sure which of the workshop's painters designed it. You can see the manuscript yourself: the library has put it online.⁷

Perhaps the most well-known image that the atelier produced: that of the bawdy nun harvesting the fruits of a rather well-endowed tree.

Toilet walls: the name for it

By the twentieth century the doodle had found its natural home: the inside of the toilet door. In 1966 the folklorist Alan Dundes, of the University of California, Berkeley, published a study of graffiti in American restrooms and gave it a name: latrinalia.⁸ If there is a Latin-sounding word for it, it has definitely been studied.

So what changed?

Not the drawing. A Roman soldier with a chisel, a Parisian illuminator with a brush and a teenager with a marker on a toilet door are all doing the same thing: making a mark that is a bit lucky, a bit rude and a bit of a joke, and leaving it where someone else will find it.

What the internet changed is the audience. A carving at Vindolanda was seen by whoever walked past. A drawing now can be seen by anyone with a link. Which is either the culmination of two thousand years of human progress, or a warning sign. Possibly both.

Sources and notes

1. Newcastle University, "Vindolanda phallus: discarded Roman artefact may have been more than a good luck charm" (press release, 20 February 2023), on Rob Collins and Rob Sands, "Touch wood: luck, protection, power or pleasure? A unique wooden phallus from Vindolanda Roman fort", Antiquity (2023). ncl.ac.uk ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Newcastle University, "Roman soldiers' graffiti at Hadrian's Wall quarry to be recorded" (press release, 27 February 2019), on the Written Rock of Gelt quarry inscriptions, recorded with Historic England. ncl.ac.uk ↩

3. Archaeology (Archaeological Institute of America), "Carved Insult Unearthed at Vindolanda Roman Fort", 31 May 2022. archaeology.org ↩ ↩²

4. Alex Meyer, Alex Mullen and Joonas Vanhala, "A Scato-sexual Message: The Secundinus Stone with Phallus from Vindolanda", Britannia (2023). doi.org ↩

5. National Trust, "Cerne Giant", on the 2021 study of the giant's age. nationaltrust.org.uk ↩

6. The Values of French project, King's College London, "Creation and collaboration in a fourteenth-century Parisian atelier: Jeanne and Richard de Montbaston and the Histoire ancienne" (14 January 2019). tvof.ac.uk ↩

7. Roman de la Rose, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 25526, on Gallica, the library's digital collection. gallica.bnf.fr ↩

8. Alan Dundes, "Here I Sit: A Study of American Latrinalia", Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 34 (1966). ↩