Epigraphy

Epigraphy reads and dates inscriptions cut or incised into stone, metal and other durable surfaces, building comparative corpora that let a newly found inscription be dated and interpreted against thousands of others already catalogued rather than read in isolation. The German philologist August Boeckh gave the discipline its first systematic large scale project in 1825, initiating the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, a comprehensive collection of Greek inscriptions gathered from across the Greek speaking world that set the enduring standard for organizing epigraphic evidence into a searchable, comparable corpus rather than a scattered set of individual publications.

An inscription is contemporary evidence in a way a later manuscript copy of a text is not, carved once by or near the people it describes and never subject to a scribe's later copying error or deliberate alteration, which makes epigraphy an especially direct check on claims about ancient religious dedication, temple construction or royal patronage. The atlas relies on epigraphic evidence wherever a claim about ancient religious practice can be checked against an inscription contemporary with the event, distinct from and often more reliable than a later literary account of the same practice.