The MAMA XI Project
Aside from a small number of texts which appeared in short articles for the journal Anatolian Studies (MAMA XI 36, first published by Calder 1955; MAMA XI 45, published by Calder 1956; MAMA XI 176, published by Ballance 1969), most of the 387 monuments recorded in Phrygia and Lykaonia by Calder and Ballance in 1954–1957 were never published. The Calder-Ballance papers bequeathed to Oxford University in 2007 included a complete set of hand-written descriptions of the monuments recorded in 1954–1957. For several monuments, Ballance had produced careful line-drawings and preliminary transcriptions of the Greek and Latin texts. However, no commentaries existed for any of the monuments, and very many of the inscriptions had clearly not been looked at since they were first copied in the field. The entire MAMA XI corpus has, therefore, been edited ab initio for this website from Calder and Ballance’s photographs, squeezes and notebook copies.
MAMA XI 314 (Perta), photograph taken by Michael Ballance in August 1956
Squeeze of MAMA XI 314, digitised in 2008 by Maggy Sasanow
MAMA XI 314, original 1956 notebook copy
MAMA XI 314, handwritten description produced in the late 1950s by Michael Ballance
MAMA XI 314, Michael Ballance's line-drawing
The corpus is divided into 24 city and regional chapters, fourteen of them in Phrygia, ten of them in Lykaonia and the Roman province of Galatia. Most of these chapters correspond to ancient cities and their dependent territories, as for example in the case of the Phrygian city of Akmoneia (the modern village Ahat), where Calder and Ballance copied 32 monuments, published here as MAMA XI 99–130. In a few cases, we have grouped monuments by region rather than city-territory, as for example in the case of a remote part of the Anatolian steppe south-west of Lake Tatta (Northern Lykaonia, MAMA XI 275–293), which cannot be confidently assigned to the territory of either of the nearest ancient urban centres (Perta and Laodikeia). A short geographical introduction is provided for each city and region.
The full corpus was published online (Version 1.0) on 14 September 2012. The site introductions, text editions, translations and commentaries are the sole responsibility of Peter Thonemann, excepting the monuments of the Phrygian Pentapolis (MAMA XI 134–156), which are the joint responsibility of Édouard Chiricat and Peter Thonemann, and MAMA XI 133, a new fragment of Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices, edited by Robert Pitt, which has yet to be added to the online edition. The photographs, squeezes, line-drawings and original notebook copies were digitised by Maggy Sasanow at the Oxford Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. The completed editions were encoded and marked up in xml using EpiDoc electronic editorial conventions by Charles Crowther, with assistance from Édouard Chiricat. The website, based on a transformation of the EpiDoc xml files to html web-pages, was designed by Joseph Talbot and constructed by Charles Crowther, using scripts by Henriette Roued-Cunliffe for the initial conversion of word-processing documents to draft xml files and Alex Dutton for the construction of the mapping interface. Further administrative assistance of various kinds was provided by Maggy Sasanow, Dimosthenis Papamarkos, Andrew Fairweather-Tall and Erica Clarke.
Version 1.0 of the website is based on static html pages; a second online edition, with improved search facilities, is expected to follow by the end of 2012. Corrections to the first edition would be very gratefully received; please contact peter.thonemann@classics.ox.ac.uk or charles.crowther@classics.ox.ac.uk. The final version of the corpus will be published in print form in 2014 as a Roman Society monograph. Individual texts in the corpus should be cited in the following form: “MAMA XI 000”.
Go to the city and regional introductions
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