Statues, Stelai, and Turning Posts in Greece, c.565–c.465 BCE

This essay is about Greek sculpture of the Archaic and Classical periods but addresses larger issues of method. It argues that iconography, while indispensable, is a limited way to study sculpture. As an alternative, it addresses some of the ways in which Greek sculptural monuments could intervene in landscapes. It examines the connections between statues, stelai, turning posts and boundary stones in the Greek imagination. A secondary goal is to advocate an approach to Greek epigraphy that goes beyond semantics to include the connotative aspects of visual features such as mise en page and the difference between epigraphic and metrical line breaks. Examples include the class of “Man-and-Dog” stelai, the “Mourning Athena” from the Athenian Acropolis, and inscriptions from Athens, Eleusis, Troezen, and elsewhere.

Saxa Loquuntur

This survey offers a brief introduction to the main bibliographic and heuristic tools for the study of Greek epigraphy with links to epigraphic websites.

Epigraphic Squeezes: Digitisation, Publication, and Enhancement

"Epigraphic squeezes are a key tool for research and teaching. They also have historical and documentary value. They are reliable copies of inscribed text and become the only evidence that remains if inscriptions are lost or destroyed. This paper describes the Venice Squeeze Project for the preservation and enhancement of epigraphic squeezes in the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. For the initial phase of the project, the Ca’ Foscari University collection of epigraphic squeezes was published in the digital ektypotheke E-stampages. The current phase involves developing a web application to digitise epigraphic squeezes according to the metadata architecture of E-stampages. The first part of this paper describes the background of the Venice Squeeze Project and methodological issues, which fostered the partnership with E-stampages. The second part describes the relational database that was set up to digitise the Ca’ Foscari collection. The third part introduces the project initiatives to promote a network of Italian institutions interested in digitizing their collections of epigraphic squeezes. Keywords: Greek epigraphy, squeezes, database architecture"

Collezioni di calchi epigrafici: una nuova risorsa digitale

This paper presents E-Stampages, a new digital tool for Greek Epigraphy. It publishes online a relevant number of squeezes from the collections of the Laboratory Histoire et Sources des Mondes Antiques (HiSoMA) of Lyon, the École française d’Athènes and the Laboratory of Greek Epigraphy of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. It stands out among similar resources for the accurate organisation of metadata, that is based upon ‘holistic’ concept of squeeze, and the 3D reconstruction. The paper describes the collaboration between the E-Stampages project, coordinated by Michèle Brunet, and the Venice Squeeze Project, coordinated by Claudia Antonetti. It highlights the shared methodologies and aims as well as the peculiarities of each of them.