Greek Epigraphy & Inscriptions — ἐπιγραφαί

A working guide to text corpora, images, squeezes, script archives, and self-study material

Compiled 1 July 2026 for personal study · scope: learning the various forms of Ancient Greek through inscriptions.

See also the companion directory of living scholars in the field.

FREE / PD reusable, public domain or open   CC Creative Commons (attribution/ShareAlike on redistribution)   PERSONAL free to use, personal study only   ASK terms unstated — confirm before publishing   SUBSCRIPTION paywalled / institutional

1Text corpora & databases

The authoritative places to find the Greek text of an inscription.

2Translations & commentary

3Squeeze collections

A squeeze is a paper impression pressed onto the stone — a modern object that records the letterforms in relief. Raked-light photos of squeezes are often easier to read than photos of the stone itself, and US-held collections sit outside Greek heritage-image jurisdiction.

4Archaic & epichoric scripts

The single best thread for “various forms”: the local alphabets (red/blue/green types) and dialects before the standard Ionic alphabet. See also §15 for the syllabic scripts (Linear B, Cypriot) and the informal everyday hands.

5Open-access manuals (self-study spine)

Older but public-domain works, mostly on HathiTrust and archive.org. Search by author/title.

6Teaching resources & courses

7Reference guides & portals

8French-language resources & institutions

France runs some of the deepest epigraphic infrastructure in the field — especially for the sites the École française d’Athènes has excavated for 150 years (Delphi, Delos, Thasos, Argos…). Much of it is open access.

Also worth knowing: the PETRAE system (Ausonius Institute, Bordeaux) is France’s standard epigraphic-record database, though chiefly Latin/Gaulish material.

9German-language resources & institutions

Germany has anchored Greek epigraphy since the 19th century — both the corpus Inscriptiones Graecae (§1) and the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (§7) are German projects. A few more:

10Greek-language resources & institutions

Resources produced in Greece — several with English interfaces — including the single largest collection of inscriptions anywhere and a teaching portal built around the dialects.

11Late Roman & Byzantine inscriptions

The corpora above are mostly Classical and Hellenistic. To follow Greek forward into late antiquity and Byzantium — Christian, Late Roman, and medieval Greek — these are the specialists, and were the payoff of the Italian and Turkish searches. Many Asia Minor texts also live in the German Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien (IK) series and in PHI.

12Regional & bilingual corpora (Greek-inclusive)

Region-specific corpora — some wholly Greek, some mixing Greek with Latin (and at times Hebrew, Aramaic, or Etruscan). Purely Latin databases (CIL, Clauss-Slaby/EDCS, and the like) are deliberately left out.

Thinner or partial coverage worth knowing: for Egypt, no dedicated open epigraphic database surfaced at the American University in Cairo or the Egyptian Museum — Greek Egypt is reached mainly through CPI (above), Trismegistos (see Tools — its heartland), and the Bernand editions within PHI. For Jordan/Nabataea, see the open-access Corpus of Nabataean Aramaic-Greek Inscriptions (Ca’ Foscari) and the Jordan Journal for History and Archaeology. In the Balkans, Prometheus pairs inscriptions with interactive maps and audio; and Romanian Scythia Minor (Histria, Tomis, Callatis) is served by the print ISM and PHI’s Scythia Minor region — mixed Greek/Latin, no dedicated open Greek corpus.

13Adjacent field: Greek papyri

Papyri are a different medium from stone, but they preserve everyday and cursive Greek hands — a further set of “forms” of the written language. The essentials (the net-new from the CUA guide, which is otherwise papyrology or Latin epigraphy we already cover):

14Low Countries & Nordic scholarship hubs

As you anticipated, these are mostly scholarship — publishers, institutes, and teaching portals — rather than find-spots, since the region lay in the Latin West. A few are indispensable even so.

Denmark is thin for Greek epigraphy specifically: Copenhagen’s strengths are the P.Haun papyri (§13) and a world-class Greek coin cabinet, not an inscriptions corpus; Danish and Aarhus scholarship reaches Greek inscriptions through the international databases already listed.

15Other scripts & genres of written Greek

Greek was written in far more than the monumental stone-cut alphabet — on clay, pottery, lead, metal, and plaster. These corpora cover the forms most unlike the standard lapidary script: the earliest syllabic Greek, a parallel syllabary, the informal everyday hands, the miniature legends of coins and seals, and scratched graffiti — exactly the “various forms” you're after.

16Editorial conventions & digital tools

How editions encode damage, restorations, and abbreviations — you must read these fluently to use any corpus.