This website is the fruit of the collaboration between the Departments of Ancient History and Classical Philology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. It was funded by the H.F.R.I. within the framework of the “Science and Society” program and it consists in reorganizing and enriching a website funded by the program “Pythagoras II – Strengthening of Research Teams in Universities” (2005-2007).
This website contains 73 inscriptions in ancient Greek.
The ancient Greek inscriptions are texts written on hard material (stone, metal, clay), which have been discovered in all areas where lived Greeks or speakers of Greek, throughout different periods of ancient history, from the 8th c. B.C. until the late 3rd c. A.D.
These inscriptions include decrees, laws, treaties, letters, accounts, lists, dedications, epitaphs, contracts, oracles, curses, boundary stones. They provide an abundance of information on various aspects of public and private life, while at the same time they constitute important testimonies for the evolution of the Greek language.
New inscriptions are constantly being added to the thousands of existing cases. Publications of these inscriptions are scattered. Access to the epigraphic texts (but not their publications) is provided by the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) Greek Inscriptions (https://inscriptions.packhum.org/), which is organized by regions, while the publications of new texts, as well as reprints, commentaries and discussions of old inscriptions are grouped annually at the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (SEG), (https://scholarlyeditions.brill.com/sego/).
This website contains 21 papyri in ancient Greek.
Papyri and texts written in related writing materials in ancient Greek language (shells, wooden plates, early parchments) come mainly from Egypt but also from the broader European and Asian area and they date mainly from the 3rd c. B.C. until the 8th c. A.D.
Papyri have varied content. The literary papyri contain literary texts from classical and post-classical antiquity. Contrarily, papyrus documents contain texts from everyday living (bills, contracts, applications, lists, receipts, business and private letters).
The published papyri and the texts written in related writing materials are several thousand, however, the number of texts awaiting publication is multiple. In addition to the “standard” printed papyrus editions, free access to papyrus documents as well as literary papyri is provided by the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP) and Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (DCLP) electronic databases, which are available at https://papyri.info/, and the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens (HGV) database, which is available at https://aquila.zaw.uni-heidelberg.de/start.
Vassia Psilakakou