Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania

Available

 * 2009 first digital edition: http://inslib.kcl.ac.uk/irt2009/
 * 2021 second digital edition: https://irt2021.inslib.kcl.ac.uk/en/

Authors

 * J. M. Reynolds and J. B. Ward-Perkins (1952/54), British School at Rome
 * First enhanced electronic reissue (2009) by Gabriel Bodard and Charlotte Roueché, King's College London
 * Second enhanced electronic reissue (2021) by Charlotte Roueché, Gabriel Bodard and Irene Vagionakis
 * with photographs from the Ward-Perkins Archive by permission the British School at Rome Digital Collections

Description
From IRT 2009 the project website (accessed 2014-07-15):

This online publication is an enhanced electronic reissue, published in 2009, of The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania, by J. M. Reynolds and J. B. Ward-Perkins in collaboration with Salvatore Aurigemma, Renato Bartoccini, Giacomo Caputo, Richard Goodchild and Pietro Romanelli, Published for the British School at Rome in 1952. Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania 2009 was prepared by Gabriel Bodard and Charlotte Roueché, with new translations by Joyce Reynolds, maps by Hafed Walda and full illustration from the Ward-Perkins photographic archive of the British School at Rome.

The website includes all introductory material, texts, and discussion from the original publication, with addenda and corrigenda from 1955 completely incorporated; supporting materials including descriptions and historical records are enhanced and expanded for a more general audience. Photographs (previously available only by visiting the library of the British School in Rome) have been included, completely new translations added, and multiple indexes and tables of content generated from the digitally encoded content. (These replace, and should be thought of as an alternative, arguably better, representation to the hand-collated indices of the print edition.)

The edition is enhanced with digital maps (the contents of a geodatabase viewed through Google Maps) and a search engine, both of which were not possible on paper or in the 1950s, and therefore are completely new. The representations of the individual texts also take advantage of the latest techniques in epigraphic encoding (EpiDoc) and rendering (dynamic, multiple views, hyperlinked internal notes and cross-references to other online materials), providing a very different experience from a printed book, much more in-line with what people expect from a publication of this kind in the 21st century.

From IRT 2021 the project website (accessed 2023-01-30):

In this publication we have built on the work of Joyce Reynolds and John Ward-Perkins when they published Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (IRT) in 1952 (republished online in 2009). Our aim is to enhance that collection in a more sustainable form, and to include an account of all inscriptions which have been published since then. Reynolds and Ward-Perkins set a very valuable precedent by inviting contributions from many Italian scholars; at the end of the Second World War the importance of collaboration was perhaps even clearer to them than it is to us today. Over the succeeding years they also worked with many other colleagues, particularly Libyan. Today collaboration is not only just as valuable, but it is also far easier to achieve than ever before.

The inscribed and painted texts presented here have all been previously published by a range of expert scholars. They have been assembled and curated by Charlotte Roueché, and their publication in this format has been enabled by her colleagues, Gabriel Bodard (London) and Irene Vagionakis (Bologna). We have received contributions, guidance and support from many other colleagues: for details see Team

We have endeavoured to provide a richly documented collection of these materials in a format which is easily accessible, easily searched, and freely available. We have included all the inscriptions of which we are aware. We have retained, and continued from, the entry numbers used in IRT 1952, and in the digital republication of that volume, IRT 2009; there is therefore no particular significance to the numbering, but we hope that the rich indexing will make materials easy to find. The bibliography can be viewed in date order, making it clear what has been published since 1952. There has also been much discussion of many of these texts; but we have limited ourselves to recording only the publications which report and document the texts themselves. Discussion and interpretation can change over time, but we hope that this will provide a useful record, and one to which it is easy to refer, for scholars who publish more profound studies.

Such a collection is never complete — at this moment new discoveries are probably being made. Nor can it be perfect: there will be simple errors, and there will also be inaccurate information — for example, as to the present locations of some of the inscriptions. The collection is published with an open licence, allowing its reuse for academic purposes and public benefit (CC-BY-NC-SA); we very much hope that colleagues will use it in that way, and so build on our work as we have built on the work of others.