Athenians Project

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Athenians Project is a multi-year, ongoing project of compiling, computerizing and studying data about the persons of ancient Athens. By applying modern technology to ancient data, over a 100,000 entries have been digitized and maintained in an Empress Embedded Database for over 30 years. The project is headed by Professor John S. Traill of the University of Toronto in the Classics Department. [1]

Contents

The Athenians Project began back in the 1970s to preserve and make searchable the age-faded, handwritten card-files of Dr. Benjamin Dean Meritt. Meritt had written information about the persons of ancient Athens and accumulated the card files over the preceding 40 years. This included data collected by Johannes Kirchner who also lent his work to the field of epigraphy and prosopography of ancient Athens in his book Prosopographia Attica . Published back in 1901, Kirchner's Prosopographia Attica had 15,588 entries, was limited to the pre-Augustan period, and contained only registered Athenian citizens. [2]

Athenians Project data is available in two main parts. The first is a set of hardbound printed volumes titled "Persons of Ancient Athens" of more than 100,000 entries and typeset in ancient Greek. The second is a relational database of Athenians data which is used to search data using a computer in a variety of ways for further study. The Athenians prosopography Project includes Athenian citizens at home and abroad, slaves, resident aliens, and foreigners honored at Athens—all the known men and women of Athens from the beginning of alphabetic writing to the Byzantine period. [2]

Part of the data is made available to anyone via the Website Attica. Website Attica is designed to be complementary to the published volumes of "Persons of Ancient Athens" (PAA). [3] There are currently 21 published volumes of PAA and at least one more was scheduled to be published within the next two years. [2] The Athenians Project is Toronto's designedly complete database of all "Persons of Ancient Athens". [4]

Searches in the Website Attica may be made on about 10,000 names, all within half of volume four, the entirety of volume five, and the first third of volume six of "Persons of Ancient Athens", i.e. names beginning with the letters beta through delta. The possible searches range from selecting every person in a particular Deme or of a specified profession to more sophisticated searches, e.g. to find all Athenians who lived between specified years and/or are related to a certain person and/or are attested in a class of document, etc. [5]

History

The Athenians Project is the lifeblood of Professor Emeritus John Traill, a world-renowned expert and instructor in "Latin and Greek Scientific Terminology" at the University of Toronto. He has published 24 books and edited an additional 5 books on Greek inscriptions, the topography of Athens and Attica, and on the people of ancient Athens. For the last 3 decades he has directed the Athenians Project. [6] At the beginning of the 1980s, Traill, with the support of the University of Toronto, applied for and received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grant to use relational database software technology to store the ancient Athenian data. During the next 30 years, over 100,000 entries have been entered as ancient Greek characters and stored using an Empress Embedded Database.

John Traill's project had its origin in the work of Benjamin Dean Meritt to maintain current data on Athenian prosopography. Like Traill, Meritt saw the potential of the computer to make his paper resources at the Institute for Advanced Study dynamic and expandable. By 1972 Traill was at work entering data. [7] Meritt was an emeritus professor of Greek epigraphy at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. [8]

Based on the Meritt card-file at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, "Persons of Ancient Athens" also includes full references with texts to document each biographical fact. [2]

Based originally at Victoria University in the University of Toronto, formerly Victoria College, Athenians Project is now located in the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto. [6]

Related Research Articles

Attica Historical region of Greece, including the city of Athens

Attica, or the Attic peninsula, is a historical region that encompasses the city of Athens, the capital of Greece and its countryside. It is a peninsula projecting into the Aegean Sea, bordering on Boeotia to the north and Megaris to the west. The southern tip of the peninsula, known as Laurion, was an important mining region.

Deme Administrative unit in ancient Athens

In Ancient Greece, a deme or demos was a suburb or a subdivision of Athens and other city-states. Demes as simple subdivisions of land in the countryside seem to have existed in the 6th century BC and earlier, but did not acquire particular significance until the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC. In those reforms, enrollment in the citizen-lists of a deme became the requirement for citizenship; prior to that time, citizenship had been based on membership in a phratry, or family group. At this same time, demes were established in the main city of Athens itself, where they had not previously existed; in all, at the end of Cleisthenes' reforms, Athens was divided into 139 demes to which one can be added Berenikidai, Apollonieis, and Antinoeis. The establishment of demes as the fundamental units of the state weakened the gene, or aristocratic family groups, that had dominated the phratries.

Sounion Greek cape at the southernmost tip of the Attic peninsula

Cape Sounion is the promontory at the southernmost tip of the Attic peninsula, 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) south of the town of Lavrio, and 69.5 km southeast of Athens. It is part of Lavreotiki municipality, East Attica, Greece.

Decelea, Dekéleia), was a deme and ancient village in northern Attica serving as a trade route connecting Euboea with Athens, Greece. It was situated near the entrance of the eastern pass across Mount Parnes, which leads from the northeastern part of the Athenian plain to Oropus, and from thence both to Tanagra on the one hand, and to Delium and Chalcis on the other. It was situated about 120 stadia from Athens, and the same distance from the frontiers of Boeotia: it was visible from Athens, and from its heights also might be seen the ships entering the harbour of Peiraeeus.

Phyle is an ancient Greek term for tribe or clan. Members of the same phyle were known as symphyletai, literally: fellow tribesmen. They were usually ruled by a basileus. Some of them can be classified by their geographic location: the Geleontes, the Argadeis, the Hopletes, and the Agikoreis, in Ionia ; the Hylleans, the Pamphyles, the Dymanes, in the Dorian region.

Trittys Ancient Athenian subdivision

The trittyes, singular trittys were part of the organizational structure the divided the population in ancient Attica, and is commonly thought to have been established by the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC. The name trittys means "third", and is named such because there were three types of regions in each trittys. There were thirty trittyes and ten tribes named after local heroes in Attica. Trittyes were composed of one or more demes; demes were the basic unit of division in Attica, which were the smaller units of population that made up the trittyes..

Laches was an Athenian aristocrat and general during the Peloponnesian War.

David Malcolm Lewis was an English historian who was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford. He is most renowned for his monumental two-volume edition of the inscriptions of Archaic and Classical Athens and Attica. His breadth and depth of knowledge was so widely admired that for decades he was invited by other scholars to comment upon and improve a high proportion of all book manuscripts in the field of Greek history before they went to publication.

The Greek-language inscriptions and epigraphy are a major source for understanding of the society, language and history of ancient Greece and other Greek-speaking or Greek-controlled areas. Greek inscriptions may occur on stone slabs, pottery ostraca, ornaments, and range from simple names to full texts.

Josiah Ober is an American historian of ancient Greece and classical political theorist. He is Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor in honor of Constantine Mitsotakis, and professor of classics and political science, at Stanford University. His teaching and research links ancient Greek history and philosophy with modern political theory and practice.

Antiochis was one of the ten tribes (phylai) into which the Ancient Athenians were divided.

Benjamin Dean Meritt was a classical scholar, professor and epigraphist of ancient Greece. His father was a professor of Greek and Latin at Trinity College.

Robert Parker (historian)

Robert Christopher Towneley Parker, FBA is a British ancient historian, specialising in ancient Greek religion and Greek epigraphy.

Alopece was an asty-deme of the city of Athens, but located exterior to the city wall of Athens. Alopece was situated only eleven or twelve stadia from the city, and not far from Cynosarges. It possessed a temple of Aphrodite, and also apparently one of Hermaphroditus.

Aiantis was a phyle of ancient Attica with six demes, the deme with the greatest area was Aphidna.

Aigeis is the tribe name of a phyle of Ancient Greece who as a tribal group inhabited a number of demes of the area of Greece known as Attica.

Pandionis is a phyle of ancient Attica, which had eleven demes at the time of its creation, which is when the phyle was created as part of a group of ten phylai.

Ptelea was a deme of ancient Attica of the phyle Oineis, sending one delegate to the Athenian Boule. It is the setting for Menander's Heros.

Sterling Dow was an American classical archaeologist, epigrapher, and professor of archaeology at Harvard University.

John S. Traill Canadian scholar

John Stuart Traill is a Canadian academic, author and founder of the Athenians Project. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto.

References

  1. Traill, John. “Classics: Athenians Research Project” Archived 2011-07-06 at the Wayback Machine , "Classics: Athenians Research Project" Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto, Volume 10, May 2003, retrieved November 3, 2010
  2. 1 2 3 4 Traill, John. “A Prosopography of Ancient Athens”, "A Prosopography of Ancient Athens", retrieved October 18, 2010
  3. Jones, Charles Ellwood. “AWOL: The Ancient World Online”, "Ancient World Online - ISSN 2156-2253", March 13, 2010, retrieved October 18, 2010
  4. Cargill, Jack. "Athenian Settlements of the Fourth Century B.C.", (1995), pp IX
  5. Traill, John. “Website Attica”, Website Attica, retrieved October 9, 2010
  6. 1 2 ”Biography of John Traill” Archived 2011-07-06 at the Wayback Machine , University of Toronto, retrieved October 10, 2010
  7. Rigsby, Kent J., “Three Books on Greek/Roman Names/Prosopography” "Three Books on Greek/Roman Names/Prosopography" - ISBN   0-19-814990-5, 1994, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, retrieved October 12, 2010
  8. “Obituary: Dr. Benjamin Merritt, Emeritus Professor, 90” "The New York Times", July 8, 1989, retrieved October 12, 2010