Epigraphy — The Papyrologist-Epigraphist

The Papyrologist-Epigraphist — reads what survives on stone, sherd, papyrus and tablet, lacunae and all.

Documentary corpora at the artifact grain: papyri, the Latin/Greek and Levantine and Sicilian inscription databases, the Continental Celtic, Italic and Tyrsenian editions, ogham stones, Hittite tablets — the shelves where fragment search and findspots earn their keep.

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The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these 40 answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): lat 195,110 · grc 77,311 · xna 36,758 · eng 26,155 · hit 21,209 · non 20,442 · tam-Latn 10,705 · ett 6,259 · gmy 5,890 · tel-Latn 5,103 … and 94 more (nabu axis epigraphy lists all).

The desk’s instruments

• Documentary corpora at the artifact grain: papyri (papyri-ddbdp), the Latin inscriptions of the Empire (EDH, with genre/province/material facets), the Continental Celtic (RIIG), Italic (ItAnt, CEIPoM), Etruscan and Raetic (TIR) editions, ogham stones, Hittite tablets (TLHdig), and the Levant (IIP).
• The fragment desk: the --fuzzy trigram index covers the documentary shelves — papyri-ddbdp, EDH, EDR, Elephantine, ORACC and open-etruscan (4.0M passages as of 16 October 2026). The other epigraphic shelves (RIIG, ogham, ItAnt, Rundata…) are searched with plain search --axis epigraphy.
• The timeline desk: 1,426,438 documents carry a date or place (as of 16 October 2026 — CDLI’s tablets, the Korean and Japanese waves, the Heidelberg inscriptions and the papyri foremost), so --from/--to, --century and --place scope the stones and sherds by when and where. EDH’s genre facets (--type/--province/--material) live.
• The gazetteer: nabu place NAME resolves a findspot against the Pleiades gazetteer (42,404 places in a derived index — millisecond lookups) and counts this library’s holdings found there; an inscription’s nabu show names its findspot with the Pleiades id.

Working the epigraphy desk

The generic desk surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable epigraphy               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync epigraphy                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis epigraphy          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis epigraphy                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis epigraphy   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu place Segesta                    # the place card — Pleiades id, period band, coordinates, holdings found there
nabu search --fuzzy ']ανδρα μοι εν['  # damaged-line substring search, typed straight off the edition
nabu search manibus --type epitaph --province Britannia  # EDH genre facets composing with a text query (dis manibus on British epitaphs)
nabu search "στρατηγ*" --from 101 --to 300 --place oxyrhynch%  # the Oxyrhynchite strategoi by date and provenance
nabu search "στρατηγ*" --century 2 --axis epigraphy  # a query scoped to one century (negative = BCE, no year 0)
nabu search --century 2 --axis epigraphy  # term-less browse — every 2nd-c. inscription in corpus order, the century the content filter
nabu show urn:nabu:ogham:e-dev-001 --parallel  # an ogham stone beside its transliteration sibling
nabu search --lemma precor --axis epigraphy  # CEIPoM equivalence keys reach the Iguvine Tables' pesnimu

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

• “What survives from Segesta, across every corpus here?” → nabu_place Segesta — The gazetteer card (Segesta/Egesta, Pleiades 462487 — settlement, archaic to late-antique, 37.94, 12.84) plus per-source holdings of documents carrying that upstream-asserted Pleiades id, and a labelled tail of findspot text-mentions not yet id-linked.
• “Wage receipts from Oxyrhynchus?” → nabu_search μισθός (place: oxyrhynch%) — Documentary papyri hits with provenance-filtered dating — the DDbDP at the artifact grain, lacunae preserved.

Terminal setup

• Ogham (pgl): nabu spaces the letters with U+1680 (stemline-continuing) so they do not merge; install font-noto-sans-ogham.
• Old Italic / Runic: the inscription text is stored in Latin transliteration (the language tags name the alphabet); the native blocks surface only in headwords — install font-noto-sans-old-italic and font-noto-sans-runic for those.
• Cuneiform / Hittite tablets: stored in Latin transliteration, so no cuneiform font is needed.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.