Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica

Joyce Reynolds and colleagues at King’s College London are beginning a three-year project to publish the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica, along with supporting materials, images, and a detailed geographical gazeteer.

From the IRCyr project website (http://ircyr.kcl.ac.uk/):

In 1948 Joyce Reynolds, of Newnham College Cambridge, then based at the British School at Rome, started a series of regular visits to Libya, to study the inscriptions of the Roman period. She worked initially in Tripolitania: her epigraphic corpus, the Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania, written with John Ward-Perkins, was published in 1952, and remains the authoritative work. In 1951 she first visited Cyrenaica, and has worked since then on the inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica, working with local archaeologists and others from Italy, France, the U.K. and the U.S.A.. She has continued to visit Libya almost every year since then, and has assembled materials for a corpus of some 2500 inscriptions from Roman Cyrenaica. Nearly a third of these have never previously been published, while others have only appeared in versions which can be very much improved, and better understood, as a result of re-reading. The collection is made up of transcriptions, and illustrations for about half the texts; the bulk of the remainder are illustrated in photographs held only in the archives of the Libyan Department of Antiquities at Cyrene. The Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica project has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, to publish this material as an online corpus; the team will be drawing on experience gained in publishing the online corpus of the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias. Images held in Cambridge, Rome and Cyrene will be scanned to illustrate the collection. The new corpus will be presented as a series of documents; but it will also link to an online map of Roman Cyrenaica, being prepared as part of the Pleiades project, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Material collected by Reynolds and her colleagues will be used to map ancient sites on that map, with a fullness which was not possible within the necessary limitations of its predecessor, the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World.


 * Centre for Computing in the Humanities