About

The Department for Ancient History at the University of Hamburg has been working on and preparing an epigraphic database over the past years, in which all Greek and Latin inscriptions from the regions of ancient Asia Minor shall ultimately be collected. In the beginning, the Hamburg epigraphic database continued and enlargened the work of the "Princeton Project on the Inscriptions of Anatolia", part of the "PHI-Greek Epigraphy Project", sponsored by the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI), under the direction of Kevin Clinton. The concept was created by Glen Bowersock and Christian Habicht in Princeton during the 1980s and was realized by Donald McCabe within the PHI project until 1991. The Hamburg project started in 1993 following the rules and the conception of the Princeton project directly. The latter aimed for a complete compilation of inscriptions from a given region thus differing from the usual PHI maxims which according to the principle of mass-production - regionally random and by chance depending on the actual compilation levels of publications - furthered the database of collected inscriptions from the whole Greek-speaking world. Because of technical and organizational difficulties, the Hamburg project is now independent of the PHI and offers the results of the work to the scholarly audience on a website of its own.

At first, the Supplementum Ephesiacum, on which Donald McCabe had worked until 1989, had been published by the PHI and was to be accessed either via a CD, being produced at that time, or the website of the PHI-Epigraphy Project. In a second step, the Hamburg database was established containing the inscriptions of Lydia, a region in the center of ancient Asia Minor. Especially the expert knowledge of Peter Herrmann whose epigraphic research in this region lasted for decades, was of great importance. Since 2002 the project has concentrated on inscriptions from the territory of the Roman province Galatia under the guidance of Helmut Halfmann who supports the project to date. From 2015 on Kaja Harter-Uibopuu has been in charge of the database. For a start, we now aim at completing the database of the province Galatia by adding the inscriptions of Philadelphia and Antiochia ad Pisidium.
From 1993 until 2006 the Hamburg project was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, afterwards, research has been financed by the University of Hamburg solely.

During the university’s campaign for sustainability starting with a corporate design of websites containing projects in the humanities, the epigraphic database of ancient Asia Minor was revised also in 2015. The structure and idea of the project were kept. To secure long-term management of the data sets the data structured by SQL were modeled into XML standard and the structures were integrated in the MyCore-Frameworks provided by the local IT-center. Thanks to Dr. Hagen Peukert who was in charge of the technical implementations the searching tools of the database were enlarged by providing the possibility to search for inscriptions by date and medium. The presentation of single entries was also modified and now holds a stone description, and photographs of the stone (as far as the copyrights allow) in addition to the traditional fields.

In 2020, we decided to use EpiDoc as the XML standard for our inscription data - both for the texts and the meta-data. For this purpose, the data already available in the XML standard were automatically transformed into the EpiDoc structure, and a new, optimized structure for the inclusion of new inscriptions was also created. We would like to thank our colleague Dr. Pietro Liuzzo.

Following on from this, Prof. Ralf Möller and his team Dr. Sylvia Melzer, Dr. Magnus Bender, Thomas Asselborn and Florian Marwitz of the CHAI-Institute (Humanities-Centered Artificial Intelligence) developed/created a new web interface. The work on EDAK was supported by the DFG Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts and the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures.

Publications:

H. Halfmann / C. Schäfer, Epigraphische Datenbank zum antiken Kleinasien, in: M. Fell / C. Schäfer / L. Wierschowski (Hrsg.), Datenbanken in der Alten Geschichte. St. Katharinen 1994, 17-25.
M. Alpers / H. Halfmann, Epigraphische Datenbank zu Lydien. Ein Arbeitsbericht, in: Elmar Schwertheim (Hrsg.), Forschungen in Lydien (Asia Minor Studien; 17). Bonn 1995, 1-17.
M. Alpers / S. Urban, Beta-Code und Datenbank in den Altertumswissenschaften, in: M. Fell / W. Spickermann / L. Wierschowski (Hrsg.), Machina computatoria. Zur Anwendung von EDV in den Altertumswissenschaften. St. Katharinen 1997, 49-65.
M. Alpers / H. Halfmann / B. van Wickevoort Crommelin, Vom Nutzen epigraphischer Datenbanken: Das Hamburger EDV-Projekt "Lydien", in: Stefanie Mühlenbrock (Red.), Studien zum antiken Kleinasien V (Asia Minor Studien; 44). Bonn 2002, 181-193.
P. Probst, The Hamburg Epigraphic Database for Asia Minor, in: Sema Atik (Hrsg.), X. Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology, 9-11th March 2006 in Ankara (in print)
H. Peukert / F. Weise: Epigraphik trifft Informatik: Modellierung epigraphischer Daten, poster presentation at the conference "Forum CA3 2016", Hamburg 2016. [Abstract]
H. Peukert / F. Weise: Entwicklung einer Internetanwendung zur griechisch-lateinischen Epigraphik unter Berücksichtigung von Datennachhaltigkeitsstrategien, talk at the conference 'FORGE 2016 – Forschungsdaten in den Geisteswissenschaften. Jenseits der Daten: Nachhaltigkeit für Forschungsanwendungen und Software', 14th-16th September 2016 at the University of Hamburg.
S. Melzer / S. Schiff / F. Weise / K. Harter-Uibopuu / R. Möller: Databasing on demand for research data repositories explained with a large epidoc dataset, in: CENTERIS 2022 - Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems: 150-153, 4 S., SciKA Endgültig publizierte Version
S. Melzer / M. Klettke / F. Weise/ K. Harter-Uibopuu / R. Möller: EpiDoc Data Matching for Federated Information Retrieval in the Humanities, in: Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems, FedCSIS 2023: 1069-1074, 6 S., Vol. 35, ACSIS (Annals of Computer Science and Intelligence Systems - ACSIS; Band 35) DOI: 10.15439/2023F1515