Digital Approaches to the Inscriptions of the Eastern Necropolis of Iulia Concordia: from Autoptic Analysis to TEI-based Edition

In 1873 a wide necropolis was discovered half a kilometre east of the wall of the ancient roman colony of Iulia Concordia, today’s Concordia Sagittaria in the Veneto region. The Eastern Necropolis, also known in Italian as “Sepolcreto dei Militi”, hosted almost 300 sarcophagi commissioned by a remarkable variety of people, differing by gender, provenance, social role, and job, who lived between the 3rd and early 5th Century AD. Although two thirds of the tombs are uninscribed, the inscriptions provide important data about common people and the social and linguistic evolution of the city over almost two centuries. The aim of this thesis is to create XML files of these inscriptions according to the TEI/EpiDoc standard. Even though the EAGLE website already provides similar documents, this project proposes data enrichment, adding more information to show the complexity of the necropolis, focusing particularly on the people buried and connecting each file in an integrated system. Moreover, the EpiDoc encoded transcripts and detailed descriptions are the base for proper digital and critical editions, based on the author’s autopsy and enriched with a complex apparatus, making them suitable for both non-specialized and scholarly viewers. In the written work, the history of epigraphy and its tools and methods will be presented. Then the history of the Necropolis will be provided to give the archaeological context. The last two paragraphs will show how the XML files are structured and which visualization method was chosen.