Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum
The Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum (abbreviated CIG ) is a collection of all known ancient Greek inscriptions at the time of its creation in the first half of the 19th century .
In 1815, at the instigation of August Böckhs and Barthold Georg Niebuhrs in particular , the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin began with the project of a comprehensive publication of all known ancient inscriptions. The beginning was to form a corpus of Greek inscriptions, the direction of which was taken over by Böckh, who was supported by Niebuhr, Friedrich Schleiermacher , Philipp Buttmann and Immanuel Bekker . The processing took much longer than originally planned. The first delivery appeared in 1825, the first complete volume in 1828. A second volume edited by Böckh followed in 1843. The other volumes (Volume 3, 1853 and Volume 4, 1859) were edited by Johannes Franz or Ernst Curtius and Adolf Kirchhoff . Another index volume by Hermann Röhl followed in 1877 .
In contrast to earlier inscription corpora, which were mostly arranged according to types of inscription, the inscriptions in the CIG were printed in geographical order. As with the older collections, the inscriptions were usually not checked by autopsy , but reproduced from older handwritten sources or prints. All comments were made in Latin. In total, the CIG contains around 10,000 inscriptions.
Increased exploration of the Mediterranean countries led to a sharp increase in the number of known inscriptions in the 19th century; Instead of possible supplementary volumes, the Prussian Academy began in 1868 with a complete revision of the Attic inscriptions, from which the Inscriptiones Graecae emerged , which, like the corpus of Latin inscriptions ( Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum ) , which had begun in the meantime, applied the autopsy principle from the outset.
The Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum is largely out of date, but has not yet been replaced by modern collections for some regions.
