The legality of graffiti, in the sense of writing or drawing on public property, varied significantly over the course of the Uzdumalian Empire. Under the first emperor Inighar it was entirely legal, as a holdover from the Pre-Imperial days, and for a brief period in the reign of Drevis IV it was considered a felony of forfeiture, usually of a hand, and prosecuted with vigor under Drevis IV's "No Leaf Falls" regime, following the theory that suppressing apparently small acts of vandalism would prevent a neighborhood from falling into lawlessness. For most of the era, however, vandalism by graffiti was a seldom-prosecuted misdemeanor. Graffitists were shooed away if caught in the act, but rarely was the arm of the law brought down upon them.

Before the rise of graffitomancy, the Purity Police did put considerable effort into preventing excessive vandalism of Intriangular walls and public buildings, in the interest of preserving an unblemished appearance, in accord with the virtue of restraint. As the government became more dependent on graffitomancy as an important means of monitoring the health, welfare, and morale of the citizenry, the policy for Intriangular walls changed: the surrounding areas were less heavily patrolled, and the resulting graffiti was removed daily, after the graffitomancers had their opportunity to observe and record the products of the previous day. In the wealthier parts of the empire, this was often done with high-pressure water hoses; elsewhere, it was scrubbed by hand, a rather slower process. Either way, this cleaning was performed by troupes of Sudsy Men orgnanized on a weekly basis by local government Virtue offices. Some Sudsy Men were paid a pittance for the work, and glad to get it; others were pulled from local prisons on day release, and of course paid nothing.

Ancient Graffiti

Some graffiti survives from the pre-Uzdan peoples of Zuder, and much of what we know of the profane vocabulary of Zuderian comes from these remains. The richest sources of Zuderian graffiti have been the ruined walls of Curuddak, in what would become western Old Uzda, and the Temple of the Dynasties, found in the excavations midway between Kreyinte and the Uzdan border. (Some contemporary scholars claimed superstitiously that it was the unearthing of this temple that inspired the rash of heresies that sprang up in that region in the late fifth and early sixth centuries UE.)

In both Ancient and Lower Zuderian, for example, it seems that the obscene term for the clitoris, "purrut", was often used as a term of high regard. (Both the obscenity and this sense of the word are confirmed by the Horturat 27, in which "purrut" and "buupulu" are given as examples of obscene terms: "Far be it from me to use words that are obscene and profane, but when you appear to me so nakedly, I cannot help but praise you as a clitoris of the highest degree, while begging you to forgive me as the merest fart.") Purrut carries its literal meaning in many graffiti as well, and one graffito punningly uses it in both senses: "Zenu, you're a true clitoris -- you really know how to put your tongue on my clitoris."

Graffitomancy

In 461, Baron Izrik of Druz published his monograph On the Interpretation of Graffiti, the foundational work of graffitomancy. Many today consider Izrik the father of modern mass-psychometrics, for while many of the Uzdumalians who used his methods considered them mystical, they worked for entirely non-mystical reasons. The Izrikian Graffitaxonomy and his proposals for its application showed keen insight into the ways that various individual behaviors, meaningless in themselves, can, taken in the aggregate, be surprisingly sound predictors of shifts in group dynamics. Izrik identified several indices that might be used to measure relative psychic restlessness, physical deprivation, (group) Driff, indifference, and temperament in a population. The content of the graffiti was considered entirely irrelevant; instead the important data included the number of individual graffiti, the ratio of marked to unmarked surface area, the proportions of different colors, and a variety of graffito types that might or might not be present on a given surface.

Izrik also provided preliminary guidelines for recording and analyzing these metrics over time, and in fact developed a number of original methods of statistical analysis that have proved to be of great general use. Later works of graffitomancy built on Izrik's work mainly in the area of proposing more sophisticated statistical methods, rather than calling for any major revisions to his indices or interpetation thereof, until the rise of Evidence-Based Graffitomancy, around the beginning of the seventh century UE. Evidence-Based Graffitomancy urged practitioners to engage in systematic testing of how well the predictions of graffitomancy were borne out in practice, and to use this "best evidence" in revising the systems used in making future predictions. It similarly called for testing standard interventions (for example, the soon-discredited "blue wash" method) for their efficacy. Modern psychometrics, of course, still hews to these basic principles today.

See also:

Color

Driff

Heretical Sects of Uzda

Zuder