DICCIONARIO GRIEGO-ESPAÑOL
CLAROS. Concordance of Greek inscriptions (last updated: 11-1-2006)

Enter the Data Base

Presentation

Researchers working in Greek epigraphy know how laborious can be sometimes the location of the bibliography generated by an inscription or a series of inscriptions throughout the years. The purpose of the data base CLAROS is to make easier the task of locating new editions of Greek inscriptions appeared all along the last hundred years. It is designed to help the epigraphists, but particularly, we think, the non specialists (historians, linguists, philologists, etc.), less acquainted than those to find their paths in the bibliographical jungle into which this discipline has turned.

Its origin goes back to 1990, when part of the team of the DGE started gathering in a previous version under MSDOS environment this type of information in order to help us in the task of reviewing the epigraphical material included in the dictionary. It has the same philosophy of other sections of this web page: to put at the disposal of scholars information of internal use for the DGE that would be difficult to consult in other way.

This data base has no claims to be exhaustive and does not try to collect every edition of each inscription included. It is only a sum of the concordances included at the end of many epigraphical collections that were published since the end of the Nineteen Century. In addition, we have included a certain number of concordances prepared by the authors of the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum for volumes that had an incomplete concordance or had no concordance at all (more than 100). Finally, we made a number of concordances through direct reading of volumes that also had no concordance (those are more than 250). Among them can be mentioned for instance collections such as GVI, ICr., Hell., IGR, INomima, ISE, ISic.MG, RDGE, Schwyzer or Sokolowski.

The very different systems of quotation followed by epigraphists, not only for what regards the abbreviations, but also numbers of volume, years, pages, numbers of inscription, etc., have been systematically unified, as far as possible. This work of revision has been no less laborious than compiling and entering the references.

To these two phases of the work it followed the design of a suitable and efficient computer data base. Our priority has been to present all the useful information (Search Form, Results, information on the publications, Help and Sort Form) almost simultaneously without shifting the screen, the Search Form being permanently visible in the top part of the screen.

In the first stages of the work we left aside those references to the less commonly quoted publications (from the 17th, 18th and the first half of the 19th century). At the moment, this information was of secondary importance for the DGE. When we considered the possibility of making this data base available to a wide public, we decided to include also this type of references. In the fourth version (21-5-2004) we entered those references that we left aside at the beginning of our work.

This fifth version of CLAROS contains more than 450.000 equivalences coming from more than 750 collections. In general terms (with the main exceptions of the concordances of SEG and BE), we only collect references to editions and translations, not to commentaries that do not include the Greek text or a translation. We think that, once the editions are located, it will be easy to find further critical bibliography. Nevertheless, we have exceptionally gathered also references to commentaries in the case of those collections that in its final concordance mix both types of references, not being easy to separate them.

In this fifth upgrade we want to emphasize two specially significant facts:

1. Among the new 65.000 equivalences, more than 18.000 correspond to the years 1978-2004 of the Bulletin Épigraphique of the Revue des Études Grecques. It has been an arduous work but from now on the users of the BE will be finally able to consult a complete on-line concordance of this valuable working tool, with more than 53.000 references for the years 1922-2004.

2. An interesting, although at the moment modest qualitative jump, is the inclusion, for the first time, of external links connecting the results of the bibliographic searches with the electronic Greek text reproduced in the servers of other projects. To test the model, we have included systematic links to the inscriptions published in Charlotte Roueché's electronic edition Aphrodisias in late Antiquity (King's College, London), as well as to those printed publications reproduced in PDF format in the volumes 80 to 133 of the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik (Köln Universität). We have also included links to a small number of inscriptions of Aphrodisias collected in the Data Bank of the Greek Epigraphy Project of the Packard Humanities Institute, as well as to some texts from Egypt published in Sammelbuch and reproduced in the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri inside the web page of the Perseus project. In the future we hope to develop this working line.

Collections included

This is the list of epigraphical corpora whose concordances are to be found in the data base. The sign (+) means the concordances are taken from the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. The asterisk (*) means the concordances were made by ourselves for volumes without one. Blue color identifies those collections whose concordance has been included in this last update.

List of abbreviations

This list contains all the abbreviations used in the data base (in this fifth version near5000), together with the complete bibliographical information. You can reach this list either from the links in this Presentation or from the data base window: when you click the button Abbrev., the first of the eigth files in which the list is divided is loaded in a new window to allow several sections of the list to be opened at the same time.

Most of the journal abbreviations are those of L'Année Philologique. Exceptionally, we follow other abbreviations, especially for some of the most commonly quoted journals. In such cases the user will find in this List a link from the abbreviation used by L'Année Philologique to the abbreviation followed in the data base.

The abbreviations of epigraphical inscriptions are generally those of the DGE Lists, though there are several exceptions. For publications not included in the lists of the DGE, we adopted concise but clear abbreviations.

On the other side, a search form allows to search for any string of characters in the bibliographical List of Abbreviations.

For technical reasons, superscript numbers indicating subsequent editions appear in the data base in normal type between square brackets. For instance, when searching for SIG², IGBulg.1² or IG 1³ we have to write SIG[2], IGBulg.1[2] or IG 1[3], etc. In every entry of the List there is an example of concordance showing the way of quoting every publication.

Help

We tried to make the Help as exhaustive as possible, since the kind of information provided by CLAROS exceeds the usual characteristics of the common bibliographical bata bases. Different examples of searches allow the user to appreciate the multiple possibilities of the data base, when correctly used.

A Help Index permanently active in the lowest panel, except when this panel is occupied by the Sort Form or by the Full Biblio Info. This Index reappears whenever a new search is executed or when you click the Help button. The items of the Help Index are links to the appropiate sections of the Main Help, which appears in a new window.

This Data Base was designed by Juan Rodríguez Somolinos and Jose Luis Rodríguez. The collecting and reviewing of the data was done by Juan Rodríguez Somolinos. In two different stages of such process Petra Benito and Adela Bornia first, and Eugenio Luján later, collaborated in the collection of materials. We are also grateful to Francisco Fernandez Izquierdo and Francisco Tosete Herranz, of the Institute of History of the CSIC, for their technical advice and support. The name chosen for the data base is a modest hommage to the great epigraphist Louis Robert, discoverer of the oracular temple of Apollo in Claros and of many of its fascinating inscriptions, part of them unfortunately still unpublished. We also want this instrument of work to be a memorial for our colleague Conchita Serrano, who dedicated to epigraphy good part of her work in the DGE and who, in the pre-computer era, worked on a manual file of concordances that was the germ of this data base. We will greatly appreciate if our readers contact us by letter, fax or electronic mail at the addresses below and provide us with new concordances that should appear in this Data Base. At the moment, we thank the former collaborator of the DGE Ma. Paz de Hoz, who provided us with a computer version of the concordances of her volume on Lydian inscriptions, as well as with some books of the library of the University of Salamanca. We thank also our colleagues Helena Rodríguez Somolinos and Pilar Boned, who brought us some volumes from the libraries of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia and the Universidad Complutense in Madrid.. A final remark - please note that in order to read the Greek in the List of abbreviations you need to install the public domain font SPIonic, by Jimmy Adair, Scholars Press. This font can be downloaded free for Windows as well as for Macintosh environments. Even without the font, the Greek is relatively easy to read as it is based on the Beta Code.

Juan Rodríguez Somolinos
Diccionario Griego-Español
Instituto de Filología
Duque de Medinaceli, 6
28014 Madrid

Fax: 91-3690940
e-mail: somolinos@filol.csic.es