New Interpretive Study of the Evolution of Slavery in Hellenistic and Roman Greece

"The overall long-term goal of this project is to create an electronic archive of all Greek manumission inscriptions that can be of use to epigraphists (scholars specializing in the study of ancient inscriptions) and historians (of antiquity, but also of slavery in other historical periods) alike. The project was initially conceived as a way of organizing one type of data on which my own study of slavery, manumission, freedman status, and inscribing habits in Greece during the Hellenstic and Roman periods would be based, but has rapidly become more technically oriented and more precise, since all work which uses inscriptions needs to reflect a high degree of care and accuracy. The project thus aims to satisfy the needs of Greek epigraphists, to the extent that they can be satisfied when they cannot work from the stones themselves, by providing high-quality color images (and details) of every inscription, complete physical descriptions, comprehensive references to previous readings of the texts, reliable information about where the stone can now be found, and Greek texts of my reading of the stones. But I would also like to make this material accessible to non-epigraphists, and indeed to non-classicists (e.g. students of slavery in other historical periods), and have therefore included English translations of all inscriptions in this archive, information about location and context when possible, and forms of tagging (e.g. to price) that will help non-specialists to gather information from this archive. "