I.Sicily

Available

 * text corpora
 * home page

Editor

 * Jonathan Prag

Description
I.Sicily is a project to create a comprehensive corpus of inscribed texts from ancient Sicily in TEI-XML/EpiDoc, together with bibliography and images. The corpus aims to include all inscriptions in all languages, including Greek, Latin, Phoenician/Punic, Oscan, Hebrew, Sikel and Elymian, spanning the period from the 7th century BC to the 7th century AD.

The project is based at the Faculty of Classics of the University of Oxford. The project is directed by Jonathan Prag (University of Oxford, UK). The project is currently (2020-2025) part of the ERC Crossreads project, of which Jonathan Prag is the Principal Investigator.

The corpus was founded on a legacy dataset of metadata records for c.2,300 inscriptions (created 2000-2005), which was converted into EpiDoc (2013-2015) and published online (January 2017) with a grant from the University of Oxford. The project is now steadily expanding the corpus through bibliographic work and a long-term programme of autopsy of inscriptions in the collections across the island of Sicily. The corpus currently contains c.3,300 records, primarily of inscriptions on stone (expected total c.4,500) and is in the process of expanding to include other categories of epigraphic material (instrumentum domesticum, texts on ceramic and metal, etc.). As part of the Crossreads project, the corpus aims to incorporate palaeographic, linguistic, and petrographic data in the coming years.

A major focus of the project is collaboration with the museums and collections of Sicily, and the ongoing programme of autopsy aims to locate and identify texts in collections. The project maintains a database of sites and collections on the island, and through this offers searchable catalogues of each museum collection.

Links

 * About I.Sicily, the project's blog
 * Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi, Syracuse, Italy
 * Crossreads project