In a period of intense social and political change in the Early Roman Empire, the paintings of the Nile in the Pompeian house provided the inhabitants with an opportunity to engage with shifting local and imperial Roman identities and to recreate a microcosm of the world they lived in.

"People sometimes imagine phenomena like globalisation to be creations of the modern world. In fact, if you look at the Roman Empire there are lots of parallels for some of the cross-cultural interactions that are also very much part of our own contemporary world", the researcher concluded.