Celtic Divine Names in the Inscriptions of the Roman Province Germania Inferior 
Werner Petermandl, Elisabeth Steiner
Within the FWF project Celtic Divine Names in the Inscriptions of the Roman Province Germania Inferior. A Case Study on Religion in the Context of Cultural Contacts and Cultural Transfer (P 29274-G25), a digital edition was created that for the first time assembles all Celtic divine names attested in inscriptions of Germania Inferior. The edition further considers the inscribed objects and their iconography. It will, in particular, serve to examine the religious situation in an area which is characterised by the clash of different religious traditions and cultic practices as a result of its incorporation under Roman rule. Epigraphical sources are especially important for the analysis of the relevant phenomena, as in the entire Roman Empire there are hundreds of Celtic divine names recorded in inscriptions. On the other hand, only ten Celtic divine names can be found in literary sources. However, the edition will not only be useful to focus on religious aspects in a narrower sense but also on social issues and corresponding mentalities of the dedicants worshipping divinities addressed by Celtic names. Furthermore, research on the spread and persistence of the Celtic language in the Roman province Germania Inferior will profit from this endeavor. On the whole, the project can be considered a helpful tool to contribute to the overall topic of Romanization.
In addition to a printed volume providing a thorough analysis, the digital edition of the relevant inscriptions offers immediate access to the EpiDoc data forming the basis of research. The objective was to create the digital representation from the data already gathered with as little extra effort as possible. This entailed especially the creation of a conversion process from the Leiden Conventions for epigraphic markup to EpiDoc. A tailor-made approach was implemented which partly drew on already existing solutions and guidelines (reference for conversion of Leiden markup to EpiDoc, Chapel Hill Electronic Text Converter – CHET-C). The data were enriched with references to Pleiades, Trismegistos, Clauss/Slaby, Epigraphical Database Heidelberg, ubi erat lupa and a project specific thesaurus for the archaeological and iconographic description of the inscriptions and their carriers. Exact geographic location of the modern finding spots was also added where possible. Resulting TEI data and facsimiles are stored in the trusted digital repository GAMS. The publication layer was implemented based on the Bootstrap framework, images are provided by a IIIF-compliant image server and viewer. Inscriptions can be browsed via fulltext search, structured indices and map views. All data is published under Creative Commons BY-NC.
The digital edition not only allows for time and place independent access to the inscriptions, but also enables constant updating of the research data. Furthermore, the linked open data approach maximizes re-use by dissemination of the data to platforms like Pelagios Commons and Trismegistos. The project exemplifies fruitful interdisciplinary cooperation between the fields of Ancient History, Archaeology and Digital Humanities, opening up the data to all research communities.
References:
- Bodard, Gabriel, Elli Mylonas, Tom Elliott, Simona Stoyanova, Charlotte Tupman. “EpiDoc Guidelines: Ancient documents in TEI XML”. http://www.stoa.org/epidoc/gl/latest/index.html and https://sourceforge.net/projects/epidoc.
- Cayless, Hugh, Elli Mylonas, Gabriel Bodard, Tom Elliott. 2011. “Chapel Hill Electronic Text Converter (CHET-C)”. http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/chet-c/chetc.html and https://sourceforge.net/p/epidoc/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/chetc-js.
- „Geisteswissenschaftliches Asset Management System (GAMS)“. https://gams.uni-graz.at, hdl.handle.net/11471/521.1.
- „Pelagios Commons”. http://commons.pelagios.org.
- “Pleiades”. https://pleiades.stoa.org.
- Spickermann, Wolfgang. 2018. “Celtic Divine Names in the Inscriptions of the Roman Province Germania Inferior”. https://gams.uni-graz.at/fercan, hdl:11471/504.50.
- „Trismegistos“. https://www.trismegistos.org.