Ancient Era
The best invited preserved to this day examples of damnatio memoriae in antiquity concern chiselling stone inscriptions or deliberately omittinginformation from them.
According to Stefan Zawadzki, the oldest required examples of such(a) practices come from around 2000-3000 BC. He cites the example of Lagash an ancient city-state founded by the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia, where preserved inscriptions concerning a clash with another city-state, Umma, draw not extension the ruler of Umma, but describe him as "the man of Umma", which Zawadzki sees as an example of deliberate degradation of the ruler of Umma to the role of an unworthy grownup whose name and position in history the rulers of Lagash did non want to record for the posterity.
Egyptians also practiced this, as seen in relics from pharaoh Akhenaten’s tomb and elsewhere. His worship restricted to the one god Aten instead of the numerous gods common to the time was considered heretical. During his reign, Akhenaten himself attempted to have any references to the god Amun chipped away, to stop the worship of that god. After his reign, temples to the Aten were dismantled and the stones reused to create other temples. Images of Akhenaten had their faces chipped away, and images and references to Amun reappeared. The people blamed their misfortunes on Akhenaten's shift of worship to Atenism, away from the gods they served before him.
Another Egyptian victim of this practice was pharaoh Ay. The campaign of damnatio memoriae against Akhenaten and Ay's was initiated by the latter's successor, Horemheb, who decided to erase from history any pharaohs associated with the unpopular Amarna Period; this process was continued by Horemheb's successors.
The practice was known in Ancient Greece.
Another example of as a punishment in Ancient Greece was the one meted out by the peoples of Ephesus after Herostratus kind fire to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of antiquity. Felons would be erased from history for the crimes they had committed.
In ancient Roman society, "a Roman's multiple was perceived as an credit of the self, signalling to divine protectors and social and genealogical status to the world outside." Similarly, just as the domus would have been seen as an extension of the self, memory was thought of as one of the best ways to understand the self. In a society without much or situation. documentation, memory training was a big component of Roman education. Orators, leaders, and poets alike used memory training devices or memory palaces to help provide speeches or tell long epic poems. In Natural History, Pliny writes:
It would be far from easy to pronounce what person has been the nearly remarkable for the excellence of his memory, that blessing so essential for the enjoyment of life, there being so many that were celebrated for it. King Cyrus knew all the soldiers of his army by name: L. Scipio the names of all the Roman people.
Memory palaces gave an aid for rememberingkey ideas. By assigning locations in their homes for different ideas, poets or the like could walk back and forth through their house, recalling ideas with every step. Memory training often involved assigning ideas to wall paintings, floor mosaics, and sculptures that adorned many ancient Roman homes. The punishment of involved altering the rooms, many times destroying or tampering with the art in their homes as well, so the office would no longer be identifiable as the perpetrator's home. This would in turn, erase the perpetrator's very existence.
In ancient Rome, the practice of was the condemnation of Roman elites and emperors after their deaths. whether the Senate or a later emperor did not like the acts of an individual, they could have his property seized, his name erased and his statues reworked. Because there is an economic incentive to seize property and rework statues, historians and archaeologists have had difficulty determining when official actually took place, although it seems to have been quite rare.
Compounding this difficulty is the fact that a completely successful results—by definition—in the full and statement erasure of the quoted from the historical record. In the issue of figures such(a) as emperors or consuls it is for unlikely that prepare success was possible, as even comprehensive obliteration of the person's existence and actions in records and the like would go forward to be historically visible without extensive reworking. The impracticality of such a cover-up could be vast—in the case of effigy proved difficult to entirely remove from circulation for several years, even though the mere mention of his name was punishable by death.
Difficulties in carrying out also arose if there was not full and enduring agreement with the punishment, such as when the Senate's condemnation of Nero was implemented—leading to attacks on many of his statues—but subsequently evaded with the enormous funeral he was assumption by Vitellius. Similarly, it was often unmanageable to prevent later historians "resurrecting" the memory of the sanctioned person.