We are very excited to announce the receipt of an ERC Advanced Grant award, under the acronym ‘Crossreads‘, with the full title ‘Text, materiality, and multiculturalism at the crossroads of the ancient Mediterranean‘.

‘Crossreads’ will offer the first coherent account of the interactions and interplay of linguistic and textual material culture in ancient Sicily over a period of 1,500 years. Sicily was a multilingual, multicultural region at the crossroads of the ancient Mediterranean, colonised and invaded repeatedly by Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans. History has traditionally prioritised literary texts, creating a Helleno- and Romanocentric narrative, which often relegates the island to a footnote. However, the inhabitants, native and immigrant, did write and those texts survive, engraved on a variety of durable materials – the practice of epigraphy. These texts embrace a broad socio-economic range, across public and private life. Proceeding from an unparalleled unification and exploitation of all the texts from the island (7^th cent. BCE – 7^th cent. CE) in a single corpus, ‘Crossreads’ will combine the insights from the collected corpus with the insights and analysis resulting from three major subprojects. These will explore the historical linguistics of the texts, the social, economic and practical materiality of the stone texts, and the physical forms of the writing systems employed – and interactions between all these aspects. Building upon a successful pilot project (I.Sicily), ‘Crossreads’ will bring all these inscribed objects together for the first time in a comprehensive, open-source, digital corpus using international standards to encode text, images and contextual data. The project pioneers the use in ancient epigraphic studies of new digital tools in palaeography and linguistic annotation, and offers the first petrographic analysis of the use of stone on the island. No such analysis has been attempted on this scale nor across this range of material, and it promises unparalleled insights into the cultural interactions at the heart of the Mediterranean, between Greek East and Latin West, North Africa, indigenous voices, and others.

The project (2020-2025) will be directed by Professor Jonathan Prag (Oxford), and will employ a six  post-doctoral researchers: firstly to develop a comprehensive corpus of all the inscribed texts in all formats from ancient Sicily; secondly to work on linguistic analysis of this material; thirdly a palaeographic analysis; and fourthly, the petrographic analysis of the stones employed in monumental epigraphy on the island. For the palaeographic analysis, we are excited to be collaborating with colleagues at King’s Digital Lab (KCL), in development of the Archetype software platform. For the petrographic analysis, we look forward to a highly productive collaboration with Professor Paolo Mazzoleni and colleagues at the University of Catania, Sicily.

Following on from the exhibition ‘voci di pietra’ (voices of stone) at the Museo Civico Castel Ursino in Catania, the University of Catania has joined forces with the original collaborators in the exhibition (the Museo Civico, the Comune di Catania, the CNR-ISTC, the Liceo Artistico Statale “M.M. Lazzaro”, and the University of Oxford) to bring together leading scholars on the epigraphy of Catania and ancient Sicily for a 2-day conference. The conference will take place on 16 and 17 March 2018, in the University of Catania (ex Monastero dei Benedettini, Piazza Dante) and in the aula consiliare of the Palazzo degli Elefanti, Piazza Duomo.

Do join us if you can!

We are excited to announce the possibility of a funded doctoral scholarship to work with the I.Sicily data/project on the epigraphic culture of Sicily and the impact of digital publication. This forms one part of a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Centre on the theme of Publication beyond Print.

Catania Museo Civico inv.354=ISic0297; cover of Gualtherus 1624; XML for ISic0297

The Leverhulme Doctoral Centre will challenge the dominance of the printed word in the study of human culture and society, by examining other media used before, alongside and after print. It will question the assumptions that self-expression, political community and intellectual progress are best served by printing. To do so, it will range across both historical media (some still in use), such as inscriptions and handwriting, and new digital media. In this way, it will ask how past methods of publication without print help us to understand future ones, and how emerging technology helps us to think about cultural history. It will bring students of communication into dialogue across differences of time, language, discipline and technology, from the humanities to social sciences.

For admission from October 2018, ten topics are offered for study. Of those ten, five will be funded this year, depending on the applications received. One of those topics will exploit the I.Sicily corpus to develop a post-print study and publication of the pre-print epigraphic culture of the island of Sicily (full advert in pdf here). I.Sicily is a digital (EpiDoc) corpus under continuous development, based in the Faculty of Classics, with a track record of combining digital innovation with collaborative research and local dissemination projects (browse around this site for more!); additionally, the PI is editing in parallel the new edition of the Sicily volume of the definitive paper corpus of the Berlin Academy, Inscriptiones Graecae XIV.1². Sicily offers unique opportunities for analysis of a regional epigraphic culture over more than a thousand years – the island is a richly multilingual and multicultural region at the heart of the ancient Mediterranean; I.Sicily offers a rich digital dataset with possibilities for further development – the ideal basis for such an innovative approach. The project will offer extensive opportunities to engage with the Leverhulme Doctoral Centre ‘Publication beyond print’, with reference both to the ancient pre-print publication world and to the challenges and possibilities of the post-print world of the digital humanities.

The deadline for applications is noon on 9 March 2018. For more information on how to apply, see the doctoral centre webpage. Please get in touch with jonathan.prag(at)merton.ox.ac.uk directly if you have any questions!

One of the things we hope that I.Sicily will make possible is the active exploration of data on Sicilian epigraphic culture – you will be able to filter the data held in I.Sicily actively on the website, and you will be able to download any dataset you build with the filters as a .csv file (or you can just download the complete datatable). Once you have a csv file, you can start to explore the data for yourself in other ways.

As a first trial, we have been putting some of the data into the powerful free visualisation service offered by Tableau Public:

As an example, this visualisation uses a map-base from OpenStreetMap and plots the number of inscriptions on stone known from the north-east corner of Sicily. This is a work in progress, and we shall add more variables and hopefully interactivity over the next few days, so watch this space.

We now have 3238 records in the I.Sicily database, but we’re not yet online (not long now!) – why not? The major challenge throughout this stage of the project has been moving from an old, flat Access table of metadata (i.e. information about the inscriptions: bibliography, provenance, description, classification, etc.)…

Screenshot of part of the Access table

….to the much richer and more flexible XML EpiDoc format.

Provenance information encoded in TEI-XML

There is a lot that we can add in this process: if you compare the provenance information in the table with that in the Epidoc, the former just has place names, whereas the latter has Pleiades URIs (Unique Reference Identifiers) for the ancient place names, Geonames URIs for the modern places, and specific geodecimal degree coordinates for the precise locations where known. All of this information can be added in during the conversion process (thanks to the marvellous James Cummings), and while this involves manually creating tables of this information, doing it once, e.g. for each placename, outside the main table is far quicker and simpler than adding all of this for each individual record. In deciding to use Pleiades as our primary reference for ancient place names, we have taken the opportunity to edit and improve the Pleiades data for Sicily (and sometimes the data in OpenStreetMap and Geonames as well) – the benefits are cumulative all round (thanks to Valeria Vitale for doing most of this work, and Jeffrey Becker at Pleiades for continuing support!).

The same thing can be done (and we are doing so) for many of the other types of information. The EAGLE project has generated a number of online vocabularies for many of the classifications used in epigraphy (the problem of course being that every epigrapher uses these slightly differently, or with slightly different words – and different languages – so one of the major contributions of these vocabularies has been an attempt to try to align and translate terminology). During the conversion process we are incorporating reference to the URIs for Inscription Type (e.g. honorific), Object Type (e.g. altar), Material (e.g. limestone), and Execution Technique (e.g. engraved).

In all these cases, one benefit of taking the time to do this now, is that ensures that we clean up and normalise our own data. In the long term, the holy grail is that adding in all of these references to the XML opens the door to Linked Open Data, connecting the information which we’re putting online to other related datasets and resources (for an easy example of this in action, have a look at the page for Syracuse in Pleiades, and then look at all the ‘Related content from Pelagios’ in the frame on the right side of the page: in due course, you could expect to see I.Sicily content referenced here too).

A further key part of this process is making sure that all of our records are clearly and uniquely identifiable. Internally we can do this without difficulty, and every record (i.e. every inscription) has its unique I.Sicily number (ISic 0000). We will in turn maintain each of those identities as a URI: http://www.sicily.classics.ox.ac.uk/isicily/inscriptions/0000. But we want to make sure that those identities make sense to others and are recognisable, and crucially that they align to any existing identities for the inscriptions. Indeed, that was one of the original objectives behind the first database, collecting all the traditional bibliographic references and trying to align them to ensure that there was a single record for each inscription. But now there are multiple digital online identities too. For Sicilian epigraphy the key existing resources are the Epigraphic Database Roma (EDR), which has about 2000 Sicilian records (on all materials); and the PHI Greek epigraphy database [this link is to the more accessible version which does not require JAVA], which has entries for c.1800 Greek inscriptions on stone from Sicily. Ideally, we want all of our records to cross-reference all of their records. Unfortunately, at this stage, there is no quick way of achieving this, and so in recent weeks I have been manually adding the EDR and PHI numbers to the I.Sicily records (a slow process, but much quicker within the simple framework of the flat Access table). One potential solution to this particular problem is the Trismegistos project, which began life working on ancient Egypt, but now aims to generate unique identifiers for all ancient papyrological and epigraphic texts. If every project references via a TM number, then they can all be aligned much more easily. We have recently exchanged data with Trismegistos and we now have TM numbers (many of them new) for about 90% of our records (huge thanks here to Mark Depauw). In the future we hope to collaborate with Trismegistos for the recording of names and people also.

Finally, we are doing our best to improve the information on the current location of the inscriptions, which curiously seems to be something that epigraphers have not always been very diligent about recording. We are working closely with several of the Sicilian museums already (in particular the Paolo Orsi Archaeological Museum at Siracusa, and the Museo Civico of Catania) to improve the cataloguing of their collections, and so to be able to provide inventory numbers. As part of that process we are providing a URI  for every archaeological collection (and in due course every public archaeological site/park), which will enable the proper linking of inscription and museum records, and the conversion will embed that information in the XML also.

This whole process of data enrichment and conversion is very nearly complete. When it is, we hope to put a ‘beta’ version of I.Sicily online, to enable people to start using and testing the site and to help us develop it as a resource. You may have noticed that the thing that we haven’t really talked about much so far is the texts themselves (and there will be images too). At this stage the project has deliberately concentrated on the metadata, since that is where our resources are much richer than those of the existing online datasets. In the first instance, therefore, most of the records will lack a proper marked-up EpiDoc text; but, having aligned our records with those of other online databases, users will still be able to get to a text for any inscription they are interested in at a couple of clicks. And we expect to convert and incorporate the majority of texts rapidly in the coming months. Our longer term goal is to build in a version of the Perseids platform to enable anyone to contribute texts or edits (subject to peer review and with due authorial credit) and so to build I.Sicily into a complete and very rich collaborative online corpus of Sicilian epigraphy.

O, and none of this would be possible without the tireless efforts of James Chartrand, at Open Sky Solutions (Canada), who is actually building all of this!

Some 1600-1800 years ago, six men decided to commemorate the fact that they had just enjoyed the pleasures of a local spring. They did so by engraving their names on the rock face above the spring. Having tracked the inscription down on a hot July day in Sicily, and stood in the spring in order to read it, I can share their feelings!

Reading IG 14.572 (with wet feet!)

View over the River Simeto valley, from the Favare spring

Finding texts of this sort tends to rely on local knowledge, and it’s only thanks to Angela Merendino and her colleagues at the Adrano Museum that I found the text, at the Le Favare spring in Contrada Polichello (Google map of location), above the River Simeto and below the modern town of Adrano (ancient Hadranum).

Precisely because of the difficulties both of finding the text and in turn of actually getting close to it and reading it (the water’s very cold, the shaded spot is beloved of mosquitos, and the lighting is very hard to modify), this inscription provides a very good example of textual traditions and transmission, and the sort of chinese whispers they can involve. The earliest report is in the 1624 edition by George Walther:

Walther (Gualtherus in his Latinised form) reports it as being 12 stades from Hadarnum, incised on rock at a spring. Note that while he accurately reports the variety of lunate and four-barred sigmas, several of the ligatured letters cause him problems, meaning that the various names are rather uncertain.

Gabriele Lancillotto Castello, prince of Torremuzza (1727-1794), in his edition of 1769 reported a text based on the edition of Walther:

It’s worth noting already that Torremuzza has omitted reference to the spring, changed one of the sigmas, and has replaced Wlater’s attempts to render what he could see on the stone with the various ligatured letters with his own assumptions. Unlike Walther, he has offered a translation of the last word.

There are a number of other reports in the subsequent century and a half, but things improve considerably with the visit of the indefatigable Paolo Orsi on 2 April 1898 (recorded in Taccuino (notebook) no. 38), who made his own transcription, recorded in the Notizie degli Scavi di Antichita of 1900:

Orsi is faithful to what he can see, almost to a fault, so the second (ΛΑΛΟC = Lalos) and third names have become Allios Bophos (instead of Lalos and Rouphos, see below); but he is the first to get ΕΥCΕΒΗC (Eusebes) right on line 2, and the first to read the Θ in the last word and so to translate the verb correctly (‘they enjoyed themselves’).

As with so many Sicilian inscriptions, Giacomo Manganaro offered the first modern and accurate edition (Parola del Passato 16 (1961), 132), but he didn’t make explicit what the text looked like on the stone, simply offering a fully edited text (he republished more fully in 1992; while Antonio Ferrua republished it in 1989, but simply repeated an earlier, inaccurate text).

The inscription is not easy to reach or photograph, and my own transcription, done at speed, turns out to be deficient in its reading of ΕΥCΕΒΗC (Eusebes)when checked against the photographs (Orsi’s version above is the right one).

Trying not to fall in…

The text of ISicily 1391

Detail of the left side of the text

The text reads:

Κελαδιαˬνὸς, Λάλος, Ῥοˬῦφος,
Φησεῖνος, Εὐσέβˬης
Παυλˬε<ῖ>νος εὐφράνθησαν (palma)

The ˬ symbol indicates that the two letters have been joined together in a ligature, such as Æ. The text can be translated as:

“Keladianos, Lalos, Rouphos (Rufus), Pheseinos, Eusebes and Pauleinos enjoyed themselves”

Three of these have Greek names (Lalos, Pheseinos and Eusebes), while the others have Roman names. Their status is uncertain, given the use of single names (which means they could be slaves, or just non-citizens), but the choice is complicated by the difficulty of dating such a text. There has been a tendency to suggest it is of the ‘Christian’ period, or ‘epoca tarda’, all of which suggest somewhere from the third to fifth century AD. More recently, Manganaro has suggested it might be of the second century AD, and certainly there is nothing about the letters and the text that requires it to be later.

Sadly not every inscription is in such a good spot for a picnic.  But with modern mapping and imaging, such remote ‘rupestral’ texts can increasingly be more easily located and recorded.