Roman Perseus Art & Archaeology
Photographs of Roman Sites
New photography acquisition for the NEH-funded Roman Perseus has now been completed, and while we don't have comprehensive coverage of the Roman world (a Herculean task if ever there was one!), we do have thousands of new photographs from a half dozen photographers, covering some major Roman sites in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Jordan, and Croatia. The total count of over 20,350 new photographs includes the most in-depth coverage ever provided of a single site, Ostia, where photographer Maria Daniels took over 11,150 pictures using a digital camera. The next issue of this newsletter will include further details on the publication of this Ostia work. Currently, the process of organizing and captioning pictures is underway.
Pictures are being made available as they are ready, and more will appear in stages during winter-spring 2000. Right now, you can already find pictures of some sites in Spain, Portugal, Jordan, Croatia, and Italy by searching for them by name in the Lookup Tool (the box labelled "Search Perseus" on every page of the WWW site).
For example, searching for Gerasa, a well-preserved Roman city in Jordan, will bring up 45 pictures of the site, which you can view using the new Image Browser, by clicking on the Thumbnails button in the Lookup Tool's results page. You can also link from the Lookup Tool directly to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites' article on Gerasa, and see the pictures appended there.
Roman Topography and Architecture
Platner and Ashby's A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome is one of the primary sources for the study of Roman topography. Since the dictionary documents the state of our understanding of ancient Rome as of 1929, some articles are out of date, but, a wealth of information including references to scholarship and primary source material (for example, inscriptions and ancient authors) makes Platner and Ashby a valuable introductory resource for studying the growth and development of Rome from a literary historical and archaeological perspective. A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome is nearing completion and will be made available in the Perseus Digital Library. The Topographical Dictionary will soon be made fully browsable and searchable, much in the same manner as the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites. In addition, each entry will provide links to relevant images of the city of Rome from the Perseus image collection.
Also in development are three versions of Vitruvius' work. These will provide visitors to the Perseus site with a choice of Latin, early Italian, and English texts of De architectura. This text not only provides Perseus and our collaborators with the opportunity to display multiple versions of a single work--something familiar to users of our Renaissance materials--but it also provide us with the foundation for future proposed projects. For instance, we plan to link architectural features and concepts discussed in the De architectura to images from the Perseus image collection. The creation of a basic glossary of Roman architectural terms is another possible project. Let us know if you have additional suggestions.
document placed on-line 12/29/99, LMC