Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Antichità

Within the international project EAGLE (Electronic Archive of Greek and Latin Epigraphy), the database EDR (Epigraphic Database Roma) collects texts and images of all the Greek and Latin inscriptions found in Italy and dated before the VII century C.E. Accessible on line free of charge, EDR allows researches non only on the epigraphic texts, but also on their provenience, place of preservation, artefact’s type and commitments. At the moment (march 2011), it includes almost 35000 inscriptions, of which 15000 found in the city of Rome; many of them are illustrated by one ore more images.

Since april 2009, data and metadata are recorded and revised completely on line, with a system that has allowed a considerable increase in the rythm of data entry, so that the number of inscriptions included in the database grows of hunderds of units every month. The work is supervised by a team of scholars (Maria Letizia Caldelli for the Latin inscriptions of Ostia, Maria Letizia Lazzarini and Gabriella Bevilacqua for the Greek inscriptions, Silvia Orlandi for the Latin inscriptions of Rome), who grant for the quality of the informations and take care of their correction, implementation and updating. A great part of the data entry is currently done by young scholars, most of whom work for free: dozens of graduate and postgraduate students give every day thier contribution, each one with a small amount of inscriptions, to the building of a real digital library of ancient inscriptions, that will become a more and more important research tool for historinas and archaeologists.

This digitised material is, moreover, the starting point of many different projects dealing with the dissemination of the Roman epigraphic heritage, as the possibility to manage throught his system the archaological repositories, to create virtual museums giving access via Internet to not exposed materials, to access the database also via cell phone, and so on, representing the future of the epigraphical studies.