Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica (2020), by J.M. Reynolds, C.M. Roueché, G. Bodard. Available: http://ircyr2020.inslib.kcl.ac.uk. ISBN 978-1-912466-22-1.
In 1951 Joyce Reynolds first visited Cyrenaica, and began to record the inscriptions of the Roman period, working with local archaeologists and others. She continued to visit Libya almost every year until 2008, and assembled materials (including some 3000 photographs) for a corpus of over 2000 inscriptions from Roman Cyrenaica, nearly a third of which had never previously been published.
In 2007 Reynolds, Charlotte Roueché and Gabriel Bodard received a grant from the Leverhulme Trust to prepare these materials for publication in an online corpus, Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica (IRCyr); one outcome of this work was the publication of the Heritage Gazetteer of Libya, a prerequisite for organising the corpus. The work took (significantly) longer than hoped, but the appearance at the end of 2017 of the open source EFES publication platform opened new possibilities. EFES is now the basis for the IRCyr digital publication, which means that it is compatible and consistent with other EpiDoc publications, and especially future instalments of the Inscriptions of Libya corpus.
A characteristic aspect of inscriptions in Cyrenaica is that they very frequently contain a detailed calendar date. A collaboration with Frank Grieshaber of Heidelberg (ORCID), and Mark Depauw (ORCID), supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, allowed us to develop a prototype database of dated texts, GODOT, showing our inscriptions within the framework of dated materials from the Roman period. It is our hope that other scholars will both contribute to and benefit from this resource.
In 2018 a grant from the Society for Libyan Studies enabled Simona Stoyanova to set up an EFES edition of the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica. Working with EFES allowed Roueché to further refine the analysis of the original collection of texts: filling lacunae, identifying duplicates, and enriching the bibliography. It also allowed her to share the material with others, most importantly with Catherine Dobias-Lalou, who, with her profound knowledge of the texts and of the sites, made a crucial contribution. We received further help from Hugues Berthelot, from Denis Feissel (for the Edict of Anastasius) and Benet Salway (for Diocletian’s Price Edict); we are very grateful for translations of two texts into French by Hugues Berthelot and several texts into Arabic by Muna Abdelhamed; we very much hope that there will be more translations, particularly into Arabic.
See further the introduction to the 2020 publication.
Future editions of IRCyr will be published by a team led by François Chevrollier and Hugues Berthelot.