DICCIONARIO GRIEGO-ESPAÑOL
CLAROS. Concordance of Greek inscriptions (last updated: 6-3-2015)

Enter the Data Base

Presentation

Researchers working on Greek epigraphy know how laborious the location of the bibliography generated by an inscription or a series of inscriptions throughout the years can sometimes be. The purpose of the data base CLAROS is to make it easier to locate new editions of Greek inscriptions discovered throughout the last hundred years. It is designed to help not only epigraphists, but also non-specialists (historians, linguists, philologists, etc.) who may be less acquainted than the former with the task of finding their way in the bibliographical jungle this discipline has become.

Its origin goes back to 1990, when part of the team of the DGE started gathering this type of information in a MS-DOS environment in order to help us review the epigraphical material included in the dictionary. It shares the same philosophy as other sections of this website: to put at the disposal of scholars information of internal use for the DGE that would otherwise be difficult to consult.

This data base does not intend to be exhaustive and does not try to collect every edition of each inscription included. It is only the sum of the concordances included at the end of many epigraphical collections that were published since the end of the 19^th 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. Finally, we established a number of concordances through direct reading of volumes that had no concordances, such as, among other collections, GVI, ICr., Hell., IGR, INomima, ISE, ISic.MG, RDGE, Schwyzer or Sokolowski.

The very different systems of quotation followed by epigraphists, not only for 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 as laborious as compiling and entering the references.

After these two phases, a suitable and efficient computer data base was designed. Our priority has been to present all the useful information (search form, results, information on the publications, help and display preferences form) almost simultaneously without moving to a different screen, the search form being permanently visible at the top of the screen.

In the first stages of the work, we did not include those references to the less commonly quoted publications (from the 17^th, 18^th and the first half of the 19^th centuries). At that moment, this information was not a priority for the DGE. When we considered the possibility of making this data base available to a wider audience, we decided to include this type of references too. In the fourth version (21-5-2004) we included those references that we had excluded at the beginning of our work.

This new version of CLAROS contains more than 605.000 equivalences coming from over 1000 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 references to commentaries in the case of those collections that mix both types of references in their concordance, not being easy to separate them.

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

1. Among the new equivalences established through direct reading, more than 23.000 correspond to the years 1978-2010 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 finally be able to consult a quite complete on-line concordance of this valuable working tool, with more than 58.000 references for the years 1922-2010.

2. But, undoubtedly, the main contribution of this upgrade, apart from 150.000 new concordances, is the introduction of almost 180.000 external links that connect the results of bibliographical searches with digital versions of publications. There are three kinds of links, each of them in a different color:

The red links connect with PDF papers in subscription platforms, which require some kind of payment for consulting complete papers, like JStor or Periodicals Archive Online.

The green links connect with hard copies (journals or books) in PDF or JPG format that may be consulted without restrictions in all kinds of platforms or repositories (École Française d'Athènes, Köln Universität, Gallica, Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Persée, Revues.org, Internet Archive, etc.).

The blue links connect with digital editions of inscriptions, including both original editions (The Princeton Project on the Inscriptions of Anatolia in Searchable Greek Inscriptions, Inscriptions of Aphrodisias Project, Inscriptions of Israel / Palestine, etc.) and digital versions of corpora simultaneously or previously published (Inscriptiones Graecae, Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua XI, Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania, etc.).

Collections included

This list includes the collections whose concordances may be found in the data base. The sign (+) identifies those collections that have been taken from the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. The star (*) marks those collections compiled by us for volumes that did not have one. The blue color identifies those concordances included in the latest upgrade.

List of abbreviations

This list contains all the abbreviations used in the data base (in this fifth version near 6300), 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 eight files into 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.

A search form makes it possible to search for any sequence of characters on the bibliographical List of Abbreviations. This includes the links accompanying the publications that can be consulted on the Internet (currently 1528). Thus, for instance, if we search "archive.org" or "uni-heidelberg" we can recover all the entries of books and journals which include a link to Internet Archive or the Heildelberger Historische Bestände - digital.

For technical reasons, superscript numbers indicating subsequent editions are shown as regular characters between square brackets in the data base. 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 section as exhaustive as possible, since the kind of information provided by CLAROS exceeds the usual characteristics of the common bibliographical data bases. Different examples of searches allow the user to appreciate the multiple possibilities of the data base, when correctly used.

A help index is permanently active in the lowest panel, except when this panel is occupied by the display preferences form or by the full bibliographical information. This index reappears whenever a new search is executed or when you click on the Help button. The items of the help index are links to the general Help section, 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 three different stages of such process, Petra Benito, Eugenio Luján and, finally, Pablo A. García and Natalia Elvira participated in the collection of materials; Pablo A. García compiled many of the existing links to on-line journals, Natalia Elvira worked on the gathering of links to Internet Archive. 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 homage 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 devoted a great part of her work in the DGE to epigraphy and who, in the pre-computer era, worked on a manual file of concordances that was the germ of this data base. We would greatly appreciate it if our readers contact us 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 belonging to the library of the University of Salamanca. We also thank 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 of Madrid. Finally, we would like to thank Belén Martín and Vanesa Romero, from the interlibrary loan service of the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales Library, CSIC. Finally, please note that in order to read the Greek words appearing on the list of abbreviations you need to install the public domain font SPIonic, by Jimmy Adair, Scholars Press. This font can be downloaded for Windows as well as for Macintosh environments. Even without the font, the Greek transcription is relatively easy to read as it is based on the Beta Code.

Juan Rodríguez Somolinos
Diccionario Griego-Español
Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo
Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC
Albasanz, 26-28
28037 Madrid

e-mail: juan.rodriguez@cchs.csic.es