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. [1] [2] Greek inscriptions may occur on stone slabs, pottery ostraca, ornaments, and range from simple names to full texts. [3] [4]
The Inscriptiones Graecae (IG), Latin for Greek inscriptions, project is an academic project originally begun by the Prussian Academy of Science, and today continued by its successor organisation, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Its aim is to collect and publish all known ancient inscriptions from the ancient world. As such it will eventually make all other previous collections redundant.
It is divided by regions.
I/II/III - Attica
IV - Aegina, Pityonesus, Cecryphalia, the Argolid
V - Laconia, Messenia and Arcadia
VII - Megarid, Oropus, and Boeotia
IX - Aetolia, Acarnania, West Locris and Thessaly
X - Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, Scythia, Thessalonica, Lyncestis, Heraclea, Pelagonia, Derriopus and Lychnidus
XIV - Sicily-Italy
Numerous other printed collections of Greek inscriptions exist. [5] The following abbreviations are as listed in the preface Epigraphical Publications to the Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon:
Over the last 20 years, a growing number of online databases, catalogues and corpora of Greek inscriptions have been created. A selection is offered below:
Some other inscriptions are found incidentally in
Alongside the development of online collections of Greek inscriptions, several projects have created online epigraphic tools for the study of inscriptions.
Pergamon or Pergamum, also referred to by its modern Greek form Pergamos (Πέργαμος), was a rich and powerful ancient Greek city in Mysia. It is located 26 kilometres (16 mi) from the modern coastline of the Aegean Sea on a promontory on the north side of the river Caicus and northwest of the modern city of Bergama, Turkey.
The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) is a comprehensive collection of ancient Latin inscriptions. It forms an authoritative source for documenting the surviving epigraphy of classical antiquity. Public and personal inscriptions throw light on all aspects of Roman life and history. The Corpus continues to be updated in new editions and supplements.
Epigraphy is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the writing and the writers. Specifically excluded from epigraphy are the historical significance of an epigraph as a document and the artistic value of a literary composition. A person using the methods of epigraphy is called an epigrapher or epigraphist. For example, the Behistun inscription is an official document of the Achaemenid Empire engraved on native rock at a location in Iran. Epigraphists are responsible for reconstructing, translating, and dating the trilingual inscription and finding any relevant circumstances. It is the work of historians, however, to determine and interpret the events recorded by the inscription as document. Often, epigraphy and history are competences practised by the same person. Epigraphy is a primary tool of archaeology when dealing with literate cultures. The US Library of Congress classifies epigraphy as one of the auxiliary sciences of history. Epigraphy also helps identify a forgery: epigraphic evidence formed part of the discussion concerning the James Ossuary.
Johann Wilhelm Adolf Kirchhoff was a German classical scholar and epigraphist.
The Cypriot or Cypriote syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from about the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. A pioneer of that change was King Evagoras of Salamis. It is descended from the Cypro-Minoan syllabary, in turn, a variant or derivative of Linear A. Most texts using the script are in the Arcadocypriot dialect of Greek, but also one bilingual inscription was found in Amathus.
EpiDoc is an international community that produces guidelines and tools for encoding in TEI XML scholarly and educational editions of ancient documents, especially inscriptions and papyri.
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 Leiden Conventions or Leiden system is an established set of rules, symbols, and brackets used to indicate the condition of an epigraphic or papyrological text in a modern edition. In previous centuries of classical scholarship, scholars who published texts from inscriptions, papyri, or manuscripts used divergent conventions to indicate the condition of the text and editorial corrections or restorations. The Leiden meeting was designed to help to redress this confusion.
Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (SEG) is an annual survey collecting the content of and studies on Greek inscriptions published in a single year. New inscriptions have full Greek text and critical apparatus, and studies of older inscriptions have brief summaries. The survey covers publications of inscriptions from the entire Greek world, although material later than the 8th-century A.D. is not included. Each issue contains the academic yield of a single year, delayed for a few years
The Inscriptiones Graecae (IG), Latin for Greek inscriptions, is an academic project originally begun by the Prussian Academy of Science, and today continued by its successor organisation, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Its aim is to collect and publish all known ancient inscriptions from the mainland and islands of Greece.
Otto Hirschfeld was a German epigraphist and professor of ancient history who was a native of Königsberg.
Die Deutschen Inschriften des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (DI) is one of the oldest modern endeavours to collect and redact medieval and early modern inscriptions in Europe. The project was instituted by the German linguist Friedrich Panzer (Heidelberg) in association with the historians Karl Brandi (Göttingen) and Hans Hirsch (Vienna) as an interacademic venture of epigraphical publication in 1934. Encompassed are inscriptions ranging from the Early Middle Ages to the year of 1650 localized in the areas that are today known as the Federal Republic of Germany, the Republic of Austria and South Tyrol. By now the epigraphical research centers involved have published 81 volumes. An individual volume contains usually the inscriptions of a single city or Landkreis respectively called Politischer Bezirk in Austria. The venture is supported by the German Academies of Sciences in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Göttingen, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Mainz and München as well as the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The Reichert-Verlag is the publishing house of the scientific editions.
Wilhelm (William) Dittenberger was a German philologist in classical epigraphy.
Max Fränkel was a German Jewish classical scholar, philologist, epigrapher and librarian. His primary area of study was classical Greek. He did not interest himself in the physical stones of the inscriptions or archaeology but in the texts themselves. His collection of Greek inscriptions from Pergamon is still a standard reference source. He was the father of the archaeologist Charlotte Fränkel (1880-1933), and of the classicist Hermann Fränkel, who in 1935 emigrated to America.
Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen was a German archeologist and philologist in classic epigraphy.
Inscriptions of Aphrodisias was a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy that aimed to publish the inscriptions of the Greek ancient site of Aphrodisias online. Apart from aiming for a digital publication of the inscriptions, the experience from this publishing process was intended to be used for further development of the guidelines of the EpiDoc collaborative, on which the publication was based.
René Cagnat was a French historian, a specialist of Latin epigraphy and history of North Africa during Antiquity.
Siddham: The Asia Inscriptions Database is an open-access resource for the study of inscriptions from Asia. Siddham was established by the European Research Council with start-up funding from the project Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State. The first focus of Siddham was Sanskrit epigraphy, mainly of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries CE, but the platform is designed to accommodate inscriptions from all periods and regions. The corpus is vast: in South Asia alone, the estimated number of historic inscriptions is 90,000.
The Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum is a collection of ancient inscriptions in Semitic languages produced since the end of 2nd millennium BC until the rise of Islam. It was published in Latin. In a note recovered after his death, Ernest Renan stated that: "Of all I have done, it is the Corpus I like the most."
The Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, also known as Northwest Semitic inscriptions, are the primary extra-Biblical source for understanding of the society and history of the ancient Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arameans. Semitic inscriptions may occur on stone slabs, pottery ostraca, ornaments, and range from simple names to full texts. The older inscriptions form a Canaanite–Aramaic dialect continuum, exemplified by writings which scholars have struggled to fit into either category, such as the Stele of Zakkur and the Deir Alla Inscription.
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