Cretan Institutional Inscriptions

The digital corpus Cretan Institutional Inscriptions aims at collecting the epigraphic sources related to the institutional elements of the many political entities of Crete, with a view to highlighting the specificity of each context in the period between the rise of the poleis and the Roman conquest of the island. The main component of the database, built by using EFES (EpiDoc Front-End Services), consists of the epigraphic collection of the 600 inscriptions constituting the core of the documentary base of the study, for each of which an XML edition compliant with the TEI EpiDoc international standard was created. Each EpiDoc edition includes a descriptive and a bibliographic lemma, the text of the inscription, a selective apparatus criticus and a commentary focused on the institutional data offered by the document. The epigraphic collection, which comes with six thematic indices (lemmata, places, personal names, persons, divinities, institutions), is searchable and browsable according to thirteen combinable filters (bibliographic reference, date, period, area, provenance, current location, inscription type, support type, mentioned places, mentioned divinities, mentioned institutions, type of mentioned institutions, sphere or role of mentioned institutions). In addition to the epigraphic collection, the database includes a collection of the main related literary sources, a catalogue of the attested Cretan institutions (assemblies, boards, officials, associations, civic subdivisions, social statuses, age classes, months, festivities and other celebrations, institutional practices, institutional instruments, public spaces) and a catalogue of the political entities of Crete (poleis, koina, dependent communities, extra-urban sanctuaries, hegemonic alliances).