Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

• 1. Introduction

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  The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum is a project that began with a simple but staggering ambition: gather every Latin inscription ever carved, scratched, or painted across the entire territory of the Roman Empire. Not a selection. Not a highlights reel. Every one. In 1847, a committee formed in Berlin to do what hundreds of scholars over preceding centuries had only managed piecemeal. They were going to organize the written evidence of an entire civilization. What they produced would eventually fill 17 volumes across roughly 70 parts, recording approximately 180,000 individual inscriptions. The questions that drive this documentary are the ones the project itself was built to answer. Who left these messages behind, and what did they have to say? How do you reconstruct a word that has been missing from a stone wall for a thousand years? And what does it mean that a project started in 1853 is still being updated today?

• 2. Mommsen and the Berlin Committee

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  Theodor Mommsen was the leading figure of the 1847 Berlin committee, and he would go on to write several of the volumes covering Italy himself. The project he helped launch was formally founded in 1853, within the institution now known as the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Before the committee existed, Latin inscriptions had been described by scholars in scattered publications with no common standard and no shared system of organization. The committee's first task was to bring all of that prior work under one roof, while also going further than any previous effort had gone. Scholars did not simply sit in libraries and compile earlier references. Much of the work required personal inspections of sites and monuments, traveling to the original locations to examine the stones directly. The first volume appeared in 1863, roughly sixteen years after the committee was first convened.

• 3. Reading Stones Nobody Can Find

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  Some of the inscriptions the early editors needed to record had already disappeared by the time they went looking for them. A stone that one scholar had seen and described in an earlier century might be gone by the mid-1800s, lost to construction, erosion, or simple neglect. For those cases, the editors developed a careful method: they compared every earlier published version of the inscription against the others, trying to reconstruct an accurate reading from the collective memory of previous witnesses. It was philological detective work, reasoning backward through layers of handwriting and transcription to reach something close to what the original carver had put there. Each entry in the collection includes drawings showing the letters in their original size and position, as well as an interpretation that reconstructs abbreviations and fills in missing words. The language of the entire collection, appropriately, is Latin.

• 4. Geography of an Empire

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  Volumes II through XIV of the collection are organized geographically, divided according to where the inscriptions were found rather than by period or subject. Volume II covers the Latin inscriptions of the Iberian Peninsula. Volume VI covers Rome itself. Volume VII collects the inscriptions of Britain. Volume VIII turns to Africa. The approach reflects a core principle of the project: the inscriptions are ordered by geography and by system, following the shape of the empire as it actually existed across the landscape. Volume I, in two sections, stands apart by covering the oldest inscriptions up to the end of the Roman Republic. Other volumes depart from the geographic scheme entirely: Volume XVI, for instance, collects military diplomas, while Volume XVII is devoted entirely to milestones. A planned Volume XVIII will bring together the Carmina Latina Epigraphica, the verse inscriptions written in Latin.

• 5. What the Stones Record

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  Public inscriptions and personal ones together throw light on every aspect of Roman life and history, from official decrees carved on monuments to the graffiti scratched onto the walls of buildings in Pompeii. Volume IV covers the wall inscriptions of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae, a category so extensive it has grown to include multiple supplementary parts. The sheer range of what Romans put in writing on durable surfaces is part of what makes the collection so valuable. Milestones record the distances between points along roads. Military diplomas record the honorable discharge of individual soldiers. Domestic objects carry the marks of their makers. Volume XV, covering the Latin inscriptions of Rome with a focus on what the collection calls instrumentum domesticum, the everyday tools and objects of the household, reveals a world of commerce and craft that formal histories rarely preserve. A two-volume Index of Numbers correlating inscription numbers with volume numbers was published in 2003 to help researchers navigate the accumulated mass of material.

• 6. Still Being Written

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  The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities continues to update and reprint the collection today. New editions and supplements have appeared steadily over the decades since the project began in the nineteenth century. The most recent volumes in the Auctarium Series Nova include a publication from 2021 on the ancient city of Praeneste and its archaeology and epigraphy, a 2022 study of how the editor Heinrich Dressel compiled the amphora inscriptions from Rome for Volume XV, and a 2023 volume devoted to the Carmina Latina Epigraphica, the very category of verse inscription that a future Volume XVIII is planned to collect. The 2024 volume, Studia militaria et epigraphica, addresses military and epigraphic studies. Each new addition reflects the same tension that has animated the project since 1847: the archive is never finished, because the ground has not finished giving up its stones.