Epigraphic database for ancient Asia Minor

The Institute for Ancient History of the University of Hamburg has been working on and preparing an epigraphic database over the past years, in which all Greek and Latin inscriptions of several different regions from ancient Asia Minor are collected. Primarily the Hamburg epigraphic database fulfilled a supporting function in the wider context of the "PHI-Greek Epigraphy Project", sponsored by the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI), under the direction of Kevin Clinton. The PHI-project aims at creating an electronic corpus of all ancient Greek inscriptions and papyri. The concept was created by Glen Bowersock and Christian Habicht in Princeton during the 1980's and was realised by Donald McCabe within the PHI-Project until 1991. The Hamburg project started in 1993 and followed on directly and conceptionally from the Princeton project. The latter with its scientific claim and respective regional limitation, contained a complete compilation of inscriptions which differed from the normal PHI maxims, that according to the principle of the masses - regionally random and by chance depending on the actual compilation levels of publications - furthered the database of collected inscriptions from the whole Greek-speaking world. From 1993 until 2006 the Hamburg project was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and research is now financed by the University of Hamburg only.

The first blocks of inscriptions, which were supplementarily added to those of ionic Ephesos which Donald McCabe had worked on until 1989, have been published by the PHI and can be accessed via a CD, which was produced at that time, or the website of the PHI-Epigraphy Project. In a second step it was worked on the inscriptions of Lydia, a region in the centre of ancient Asia Minor. Especially the expert knowlegde of Peter Herrmann was of great benefit, because his epigraphic research in this region lasted for decades. Since 2002 the project concentrates on inscriptions from the territory of the Roman province Galatia.

Because of technical and organisational difficulties the Hamburg project is now independent from the PHI and offers the results of the work to science on a website of its own.