Cretan Institutional Inscriptions: A New EpiDoc Database

The paper presents the database Cretan Institutional Inscriptions, which was created as part of a PhD research project carried out at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari. The database, built using the EpiDoc Front-End Services (EFES) platform, collects the EpiDoc editions of six hundred inscriptions that shed light on the institutions of the political entities of Crete from the seventh to the first century BCE. The aim of the paper is to outline the main issues addressed during the creation of the database and the encoding of the inscriptions and to illustrate the core features of the database, with an emphasis on the advantages deriving from the combined use of the TEI-EpiDoc standard and of the EFES platform.


Introduction 1
In many other documents, again, the meaningful terms are well preserved, but their context is irreparably lost, as in the case of the inscription from Milatos I.Cret. I 21 2 of the third or second century BCE, where the term kosmos, perfectly legible, is completely surrounded by lacunae (l. 2, [---] κόσμον [---]). 13 More challenging are the cases where the meaningful terms themselves are lost. For example, in the building inscription from Gortyn I.Cret. IV 258 of the second century BCE the verb epimeleomai (to take care of) clearly indicates that the name of the promoter of the initiative was originally written on the stone (l. 2, [---ἐπε]̣ μελῆθ̣ ε[ν ---]). Analogously, in the treaty between Hierapytna and another city whose name is lost I.Cret. III 3 6, of the late third or early second century BCE, the terms menos (month) and edoxen (it was decreed) are preserved, but the names both of the month and of the promoter of the decreeing are lost (ll. 1-2, μηνὸς [---] τάδε ἔ ̣ δ[οξ]ε̣ ν τ [---]). In these cases, therefore, I have deemed it appropriate to consider these absences too, taking account also of the additional terminology connected to "institutional" actions, such as nouns like month, or verbs like to take care of, to decree or to vote (psephizo), or even prepositions and articles like epi ton, which in dating formulas reveal, for example, the originary mention of the tribe in oce. Dealing with extremely fragmentary records, therefore, I took the approach of paying due attention to the excerpts from the originary contexts and to the voids, which could lead to a better understanding of formulaic expressions and of their variations.
In the rst place, my shift toward an eminently epigraphic approach derived from the diculty of dealing with the epigraphic attestations of the institutions in any other way. These attestations, in fact, were so strictly interconnected with their context as to be hardly extractable from the inscriptions where they occurred; to analyze them required having the complete texts of those inscriptions constantly at hand. This practical need then led to my decision to prepare new editions of the inscriptions, mainly because many of them were outdated, and also because of the discovery of Gérard Genevrois's admirable monograph on Cretan institutional terminology (Genevrois 2017), which denitively dissuaded me from conguring my study in a way that could have ended up overlapping too much with his work.

17
Immediately after this discovery I was able to shift from creating a traditional collection of editions of the previously selected six hundred inscriptions to creating it as a born-digital epigraphic collection because of another event that also happened in 2017: the appearance of a powerful new tool for digital epigraphy, EpiDoc Front-End Services (EFES). 4 Although I was already aware of the many benets deriving from a semantic markup of the inscriptions, 5 what really persuaded me to adopt a TEI-based approach for the creation of my epigraphic editions was actually the great facilitation that EFES oered in using TEI-EpiDoc, which I will discuss in the following section.

The Benefits of Using EpiDoc and EFES
The possibility of semantically encoding internal features of the texts denitely opens wide the doors to enriched ways of interacting with epigraphic editions. 9 A collection of semantically encoded inscriptions, in fact, could be queried in a very accurate way, allowing digital epigraphists to identify recurring patterns and features more easily. Furthermore, EpiDoc markup could lead to faster indexing of specic elements, such as places or personal names, that are mentioned in the texts.

21
My previous experience, however, also showed me that it is not always possible to transform these potentialities into reality quickly, especially in the context of small projects lacking the support of IT experts. And wider epigraphic projects often benet from IT support only in the initial and nal phases of the work. In some cases, the epigraphists are able to see the fruits of their intense and years-long encoding eort only at the publication stage, at the end of their work, which may be quite discouraging!

22
This is particularly true for the creation of publishable output of the encoded inscriptions. The EpiDoc Reference XSLT Stylesheets, created "for transformation of EpiDoc XML les into HTML," 10 require relatively advanced knowledge of XSLT to use them to produce a satisfying HTML edition for online publication or to generate a printable PDF. Not to mention the creation of a complete searchable database to be published online, equipped with indexes and appropriate search lters: this is far beyond the IT skills of the average epigraphist.

23
The situation is a little better for those who use EpiDoc as a tool for simplifying their research work on a collection of ancient documents, without aiming at the publication of the encoded inscriptions. The querying of a set of EpiDoc inscriptions is possible to some extent even without technical support: in some advanced XML editors, particularly Oxygen, it is possible to perform XPath queries that allow the identication of all the occurrences of specic features in the epigraphic collection according to their markup. The XPath queries in an advanced XML editor also allow the creation of lists of specic elements mentioned in the inscriptions, but to my knowledge the creation of proper indexes-before EFES-was almost impossible to achieve without the help of an IT expert.
Thus, despite the many benets that EpiDoc encoding potentially oers, epigraphists might often be discouraged from adopting it by the amount of time that such an approach requires, combined with the fact that in many cases these benets become tangible only at the end of the work, and only if one has IT support. Beyond this, EFES is also remarkable for the ease of creation and display of the indexes of the various categories of marked-up terms, which signicantly simplies comparative analysis of the data under consideration. EFES is thus proving to be an extremely useful tool not only for publishing inscriptions online, but also for studying them before their publication or even without the intention of publishing them, especially when dealing with large collections of documents and data sets. 12

26
Some of these useful features of EFES are common to other existing tools, such as TEI Publisher, 13 TAPAS, 14 or Kiln itself, which is EFES's direct ancestor. What makes EFES unique, however, is the fact that it is the only one of those tools to have be designed specically for epigraphic purposes and to be deeply integrated with the EpiDoc Schema/Guidelines and with its reference stylesheets. Not only does it use, by default, the EpiDoc reference stylesheets for transforming the inscriptions and for indexing, it also comes with a set of default search facets and indexes that are specically meant for epigraphic documents. The default facets include the ndspot of the inscription, its place of origin, its current location, its support material, its object type, its document type, and the type of evidence of its date. The search/browse page, moreover, also includes a slider for ltering the inscriptions by date and a box for textual searches, which can be limited to the indexed forms of the terms. The default indexes include places, personal names (onomastics), identiable persons (prosopography), divinities, institutions, words, lemmata, symbols, numerals, abbreviations, and uninterpreted text fragments. New facets and indexes can easily be added even without mastering XSLT, along the lines of the existing ones and by following the detailed instructions provided in the EFES Wiki documentation. 15 Furthermore, EFES makes it possible to create an epigraphic concordance of the various editions of each inscription and to add information pages as TEI XML les (suitable for displaying both information on the database itself and potential additional accompanying information). 27 Against this background, the combined use of the EpiDoc encoding and of the EFES tool seemed to be a promising approach for the purposes of my research project, and so it was. Greek-with the preservation of the local dialectal variants-and in a standardized transliteration.
This enables textual searches to be performed that would otherwise be inconceivable on an epigraphic record such as the Cretan one, which is scattered with graphic variants and lacunae, by using the indexed terms to overcome the limits of the record.

32
In addition to the inscriptions, the database includes two catalogs, whose aim is to oer some insights into the complex mosaic of the many political entities of Crete and of their institutions.
Also, the database includes a collection of the most signicant literary sources pertaining to the Cretan institutions and a list of all the mentioned bibliographic references. These four sections, "Political entities," "Institutions," "Literary sources," and "Bibliographic references," have been added to the database as pages generated from TEI XML les, which could be natively included in EFES. only the simple occurrence of the institutional terms, but also a set of connected details that were extremely valuable for examining and then classifying them according to several variables.

35
Let us now look in detail at the markup of the institutional terms. The EpiDoc Guidelines, in this respect, do not oer many details. The closest case is the one presented in the "Titles, Oces, Political Posts, Honorics, Occupations" section. 20 Here, besides suggesting that one encode "dierent types of oces, posts, and other titles" with the <w> element and the @lemma attribute for indexing purposes, it also suggests using the <rs> (referencing string) element with a @type attribute, and possibly also a @ref or @key attribute to point to an authority list of the marked-up terms. The most relevant of the two examples included in the page accordingly proposes marking up ἀρχόντων with <rs type="official" key="archon">.
Starting from this approach and expanding it, I decided to adopt the following markup for the institutional elements mentioned in the inscriptions. Each institutional term was encoded using the <rs> element with a @type attribute having the value "institution" (conceptually wider than "official"). Each <rs> has been provided with a @key attribute, used to dene a standardized transliterated base form of each institutional element; all the possible values of the @key attribute have been listed in the connected authority list.

37
Another crucial role has been played by two further attributes of <rs> that I decided to add: @subtype and @role, whose values have also been listed in the related authority lists.
These attributes have been particularly useful to my research because they have allowed the specication-on a case-by-case basis-of the nature and the role or sphere of competence of each occurrence of an institutional element. This avoided the risky operation of trying to dene them in an abstract way, on the basis of etymological speculation, or preconceptions derived from the literary sources, or not always pertinent parallels. 21 In particular, I have used the attribute @subtype to specify for each occurrence the institutional category it belongs to, such as "official" or "assembly", and the attribute @role to specify its precise function in that particular context, for example "dedicant" or "decreer", or, if its function is unknown, its eld of action, such as "cult" or "war". The combination of these attributes proved to be particularly ecient for addressing my main research questions, which were aimed at understanding the variations of the forms in which the institutional elements appear and of their role/function/sphere of competence: the same institutional element, for example an ocial like the kosmos, could sometimes appear alone as a single ocial (<rs type="institution" subtype="official" role="..." key="kosmos">), sometimes as a member of the board of the kosmoi (<rs type="institution" subtype="board" role="..." key="kosmos">). Some actions, also, turned out to be performed only by the full board of the kosmoi (for example the act of decreeing, <rs type="institution" subtype="board" role="decreer" key="kosmos">, or the promotion of building activities, <rs type="institution" subtype="board" role="builder" key="kosmos">), whereas other actions were sometimes attested in connection with single kosmoi and sometimes with their full board (for example being a dedicant: <rs type="institution" subtype="official" role="dedicant" key="kosmos">, but also <rs type="institution" subtype="board" role="dedicant" key="kosmos">).
The use of another attribute of <rs>, @ref, also allowed a direct link between the specic occurrences of institutional elements and the political entity they belong to, pointing to the authority list of the places. The possibility of linking each occurrence to its political entity, in fact, was absolutely essential given the geographical approach of my research, aimed at identifying and valorizing the institutional specicity of each political entity of Crete. 22 The attribute @ref proved to be very useful because the political entity of the institutional element very often diers from the ndspot or the origin place of the inscription, 23 and therefore this information could not be extracted from any of the metadata of the inscription itself.

39
In addition to <rs>, I have marked up the institutional terms-as well as some other signicant terms, even if not strictly institutional-with the <w> element and its attribute @lemma, as suggested also by the EpiDoc Guidelines. 24 In the cases in which the term is preceded or followed by the name of the individual holding that oce, I have encoded the name both as a prosopographical datum (with the <persName> element and its attributes @type with value "attested", @key and, where applicable, @ref, for linking the person to their political entity) and as an onomastic one (with the <name> element and its attributes @nymRef and, where applicable, @type with value "patronymic", "metronymic" or "andronym"). 25 Example 1. The encoding of an institutional element (I.Cret. I 22 4 A, l. 31).
<rs type="institution" subtype="official" role="eponym" key="damiorgos" ref="#olous">ἐπὶ <w lemma="δαμιοργός">δαμιοργοῦ</w> <persName type="attested" key="Leukos"><name nymRef="Λεῦκος">Λεύκου</name></persName></rs> 40 Besides the institutional terms and the individuals holding an oce, I also considered it useful to consistently mark up all the occurrences in the texts of toponyms and ethnic adjectives and of honored individuals, foreign rulers, and theonyms. The toponyms and ethnic adjectives I have marked up using the <placeName> element with its attributes @ref (for linking them to the relevant authority list) and, where applicable, @type with the value "ethnic". 26 The honored individuals, foreign rulers, and theonyms I have marked up similarly to the individual holding an oce, by using the <persName> element and, for honored individuals and foreign rulers, also a nested <name each <persName>, with the values "honoured" for honored individuals, "ruler" for the rulers, and "divine" for the theonyms. 27 Example 2. The complete encoding of an inscription text (I.Cret. II 23 5).

Conclusions 46
In conclusion, I would like to emphasize how particularly ecient the combined use of EpiDoc and EFES has proven to be for the creation of a thematic database like Cretan Institutional Inscriptions.