Cretan Institutional Inscriptions @ ILC4CLARIN

The CLARIN-IT Repository hosted at the ILC4CLARIN Centre provides the community with a collection of epigraphic records pertaining to the Cretan institutions of the period between VII and I century BC, with insights into the political realities of Crete and their institutions.

The database, named Cretan Institutional Inscriptions and built by using the EpiDoc Front-End Services (EFES), is the outcome of the PhD research project Kretikai Politeiai: Cretan Institutions from VII to I Century BC, carried out at the Department of Humanities of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice from 2016 to 2019 with the aim of highlighting the specificity of each context in the period between the rise of the poleis and the Roman conquest of Crete.

The main component of the database 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 database includes also 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).

The Web site dedicated to the dataset is hosted by CLARIN-IT; the Web application to interact with the dataset is hosted by the ILC4CLARIN Centre.

The dataset description sheet and the Web application description sheet are released with a free license.

The body responsible for the publication of the dataset and the Web application is the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities of the Department of Humanities of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where a Research Unit at Third Parties of the Institute for Computational Linguistics “Antonio Zampolli” of the National Research Council of Italy has been established.

For further information, please contact Irene Vagionakis.