The five-year economic collapse in debt-ridden Greece has turned the country into a mecca of modern graffiti, however this form of expression dates back thousands of years say archaeologists who found the world’s oldest erotic graffiti on the rocky and remote island of Astypalaia. Dr. Andreas Vlachopoulos, who specializes in prehistoric archaeology, believes that the racy inscriptions and phalluses chiselled on limestone at the island’s rocky peninsula at Vathy are from the fifth and sixth centuries B.C.

Overlooking the bay, archaeologists believe that soldiers may have been garrisoned there. The graffiti gives insight into their private lives with one specific statement in the mid-sixth century B.C. proclaiming: “Νικασίτιμος οἶφε Τιμίονα” (Nikasitimos was here mounting Timiona). Dr. Vlachopoulos says that sexual desire between men was not taboo in ancient Greece so his real area of interest was the use of the past continuous in the graffiti that indicates the length of the sexual act itself.

Epigrapher Angelos Matthaiou told the “Guardian” that the inscription referring to Timiona was written by somebody who was “well-trained in writing” with the letters skillfully inscribed, showing that literacy wasn’t reserved for ancient philosophers but even ordinary people could write.

Lower down were two penises beneath the name of Dion dating to the fifth century B.C.giving proof that humans have been sexy braggarts for centuries, however, also revealing that “even then, people were using a coded language of symbols and imagery that was quite sophisticated,” says Dr. Vlachopoulos.