I am an ongoing collaborator with the ISicily Project, directed by Prof. Jonathan Prag (Merton College, Oxford), which seeks to digitise in open-access the entire corpus of inscriptions from ancient Sicily. In the summers of 2022 and 2023, I worked with Jonathan to catalogue and conduct autopsy on all of the inscriptions from Thermae Himeraeae (modern Termini Imerese) on the northern coast of Sicily. Thermae Himeraeae had a long history. It was founded by the Carthaginians, and with subsequent Greek and Roman phases. It eventually became an Augustan colony after the defeat of Sextus Pompeius in the late first century BCE.
Our work focused primarily on the collections of the Museo Archeologico Regionale Antonino Salinas, both what it has on permanent display and what is stored in its Depositi (‘storerooms’). Our work was focused primarily on cataloguing what inscriptions were still stored in the museum (comparing our results to those in other published collections), and to undertake a fresh autopsy of every inscription. This latter process involved taking detailed measurements of the stone and of the height of the letters on each line, re-reading the text and other accompanying images or symbols, noting any typographical or orthographic trends or anomalies, and photographing the front and rear faces.
The text I am working on in the photo below is a small funerary plaque for a man named Gnaeus Kanius Lucillianus, who lived for 38 years, and for whose spirit the anonymous dedicator of this plaque commends to the Dii Manes (the ‘Shades of the Underworld’). Autopsy of the stone revealed a few intriguing features about the way in which the mason carving the letters went about his work. The mason ran out of room at the end of line 3 and had to hastily shove in the ‘VS’ at the end of Lucillianus, and misspelled ‘vixit’ (he lived) in line 4 at ‘vixitit’.
Back in our offices, we used this data to create full new digital editions of each text through EpiDoc (an established, internationally recognised, mark-up language that produces machine-readable and therefore fully searchable texts).
With this mark-up we can encode a variety of details, including the specifics of the names and numbers mentioned in the inscription. We can encode places where the mason has abbreviated names and common phrases, and provide expansions for those abbreviations, as well as to provide various details about the location(s) where the stone was found, and where the stone is currently located. This inscription, and all the others we studied in Thermae Himeraeae, has now been fully published on the iSicily database for everyone to be able to access, and in a format that can be read and used by all. I’m now systematically working through the encoding of all of the inscriptions of Lipari, a chain of volcanic islands off the northern coast of Italy.
