Meme - The Sator Square

For this project I thought I would go a little pre-internet in the search for a very, very old meme. Considering that the earliest discovered version of this meme was from the ruins of Pompeii in 79 A.D., this just might be the oldest meme in existence.

The intrigue of the meme comes from the fact that it is a Latin palindromic sentence that can be read in almost any direction. The sentence it forms is SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS, which basically translates into the meaningless sentence "The farmer uses his plough as his form of work", proving that memes have always been somewhat pointless and silly.

The square has appeared on churches, monuments, and other structures all over Europe for the last 2000 years. Some groups have come to associate it with magic and christian symbolism, which basically means that if a meme is left alone long enough, it's meaning can change in very unpredictable ways.