The MAP project deals with the way ancient societies (Greek and West-Semitic) named their gods, considering divine “onomastic sequences” in ancient sources, namely combinations of various elements identifying the gods (nouns, epithets,...
moreThe MAP project deals with the way ancient societies (Greek and West-Semitic) named their gods, considering divine “onomastic sequences” in ancient sources, namely combinations of various elements identifying the gods (nouns, epithets, titles, appellatives, sentences, etc.). The epigraphical evidence is recorded in an Open Access Database, using three levels of data recording:
• 1: the “source”, a document which contains one or several testimonies.
• 2: the “testimony”, a group of onomastic elements that refer to one or several deities and are combined to form an “onomastic sequence”.
• 3: the “element”, the minimal “unit of meaning” within the testimony. It is a semantic and non-grammatical category.
Each sequence is analysed through a formula, explaining how all the components are combined. To schematise the link type among the elements, we use four different operators: + coordination; # qualification; / juxtaposition; = explicit equivalence.
The onomastic elements can be studied as nodes in a network of cooccurrences, in which all elements that appear in the same testimony are linked to one another. Such networks can represent the entire database or have a particular focus (region, period, onomastic element, semantic category, etc.) This allows us to visualize a large amount of data and to analyse the testimonies from the database using statistical tools.
However, networks of cooccurrences do not describe very accurately the relationship between the different elements of a testimony. It is also necessary to consider the complex structure of divine onomastic sequences that is represented by formulae in the database. This can be done by attributing one or several operators to each edge of the network, in order to show the type of link between two elements.
The advantages and limits of applying network analysis to the MAP database will be illustrated by the case study of Stratonikeia in Caria.