Athenians Project is a multi-year, ongoing project of compiling, computerizing and studying data about the persons of ancient Athens. By applying modern technology to ancient data, over a 100,000 entries have been digitized and maintained in an Empress Embedded Database for over 30 years. The project is headed by Professor John S. Traill of the University of Toronto in the Classics Department.
The Athenians Project began back in the 1970s to preserve and make searchable the age-faded, handwritten card-files of Dr. Benjamin Dean Meritt. Meritt had written information about the persons of ancient Athens and accumulated the card files over the preceding 40 years. This included data collected by Johannes Kirchner who also lent his work to the field of epigraphy and prosopography of ancient Athens in his book Prosopographia Attica. Published back in 1901, Kirchner’s Prosopographia Attica had 15,588 entries, was limited to the pre-Augustan period, and contained only registered Athenian citizens.
Athenians Project data is available in two main parts. The first is a set of hardbound printed volumes titled “Persons of Ancient Athens” of more than 100,000 entries and typeset in ancient Greek. The second is a relational database of Athenians data which is used to search data using a computer in a variety of ways for further study. The Athenians prosopography Project includes Athenian citizens at home and abroad, slaves, resident aliens, and foreigners honored at Athens—all the known men and women of Athens from the beginning of alphabetic writing to the Byzantine period.
Source: Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenians_Project
Read more: Persons of Ancient Athens
Visit the database: ATHENIANS search
