Imagining an Interactive Digital Dashboard for Roman Military Epigraphy of Roman Syria (1st–3rd c. CE)
Abstract
This paper discuses the idea of an interactive digital research dashboard that models Roman soldier inscriptions from Roman Syria as spatial, linguistic, and prosopographic data layers. Roman Syria functioned as the military imperial province on the eastern frontier, with long-term garrisons of Legions and rotating auxiliary units stationed between urban centers through the area toward the Euphrates. Texts in Latin, Greek, and Aramaic are represented by epitaphs, votive dedications, and official records that reflect different hypothetical identities, mobility, rank hierarchy, unit cohesion, religious practice, and epigraphic habit variability. Their spatial patterns, however, have never been visualized through purpose-built analytical interfaces.
The logic and structure of a digital dashboard prototype integrate three key pillars: (1) digital corpora encoding using EpiDoc; (2) geospatial data processing and spatial statistics using QGIS; and (3) persistent indexing of inscribed individuals and texts.
The dashboard could implement dynamic filters (unit, rank, language, inscription type, material and other “typical” elements), but its main core and problematic issue lie in addressing multilingual and multi-script complexities inherent to Roman military corpora from Syria. Inscriptions in the region shift fluidly between Latin, Greek, and Aramaic, often within single texts, reflecting different language environments, pragmatic translation decisions, and highly localized identity and epigraphical habit strategies. The talk will focus on the technical possibilities for solving these and on several other problems of digital research of multilingual military epigraphy along Rome’s eastern frontier.