Persons of Ancient Athens
Return to initial screen
Tips for Searching Athenians
When you fill in the form and hit "Do search" the search immediately begins to show the results on the screen. Examples of two such results are shown under Samples in the introductory Description of Entries file. The search form is color-coded to match the samples: a search term applying to the line with names should be entered in one of the blue background slots, anything to do with the reference or text belongs in one of the two pink slots, and searches on function (id) or date should be put in the brown slots. The information that can be searched and retrieved is similarly colored in the two samples -- in general anything in the first line or a later kin line is blue, the references are shown in pink, and the information supplied by the id line is brown. The search is not done on the database, but directly on the formatted text, so knowing exactly how the text is worded will help to get the desired results.
Here are a few ideas about getting the most out of the searches.
Counts
When the search is finished, totals are supplied in a yellow line below the last item, giving "Number of entries found:" and "number of persons (main entries):". The "main entries" include the main ids (functions) of each person and the "kin" they are related to, as well as the dates assigned to these items. They do not include additional entries for that person in the database: alternate restorations of the person's name, or additional listings of the person for auxiliary (usually Roman, but also Η ΚΑΙ, Ο ΚΑΙ) names, or readings that have been superseded (ghosts), or cross-references to the person's name (alternate spellings, for instance).
How to limit
NB. The search should be designed so that it produces a manageable number of results. The results of large open-ended searches will terminate after 10,000 items have been retrieved. You can limit the number of entries:
- by number: searches can be refined by limiting the range of entries. In the "6-digit num" box, you can enter a range of 6-digit numbers. For instance, specifying 270005-282190 will limit the search to names beginning with Γ; see the table below for ranges of 6-digit nums in each letter.
- by gender: click the "female or "male" under "Sex:" to limit the search to that gender.
- by date: use the "from" and "to" boxes to define a span of years for the search (minus numbers are employed for years earlier than the year 1). You can also specify "undated"; about 1% of the persons in the database have no assigned date.
- by main entry: clicking the "Main entries only" box will exclude ghost names whose nums are enclosed in brackets, alternate names and entries for auxiliary Roman names, both of which have an asterisk before their nums, and cross-references. See Description: num for more on the different categories of entries.
NB if this box is checked, Sample 2, the entry for ΑΝΝΙΟΣ in Description: Samples, will not be retrieved because it is not the main entry for this person (it bears an * before its num).Names
Terms to be searched for in the name line of the entries should be entered in a blue slot with blue letters: there are two slots for searching for names, "Main name" and "Added names/place", and one more slot for "Kin names/place". Only the first name (e.g. ΑΒΡΥΛΛΙΣ or ΑΝΝΙΟΣ in our samples) will be retrieved from the Main name box. To search for a demotic, or ethnic, or additional name (e.g. ΧΟΛΛΕΙΔΗΣ, ΜΑΡΚΟΣ, or ΠΥΘΟΔΩΡΟΣ in sample 2), use the "Added" slot. NB if there are plural additions to the name, they should be entered in the proper order and connected by ".*" (a wildcard, meaning "any number of characters between": see the note about blue boxes at the beginning of the Search Form). All letters given in the blue-labelled slots must be unicode capital Greek letters. For the relation slot (which does not have blue lettering) see Relation below.
NB: The Kin names/place slot can have both the name of the kin and additional names (eg, ΜΙΚΙΩΝ.*ΚΗΦΙΣΙΕΥΣ in sample 1), with the same use of wildcards. All kin (if at least the first letter of the name is preserved, and they have demotic, ethnic, or phyle) have their own separate entries in the database.
Variant spellings
Orthographic variants in names are preserved in the database, e.g. ΦΙΛΙΣΤΕΙΔΗΣ and ΦΙΛΙΣΤΙΔΗΣ, as are variant forms of demotics and ethnics, e.g. ΜΙΛΗΣΙΑ and ΜΕΙΛΗΣΙΑ, ΒΑΤΕΥΣ and ΒΑΤΗΘΕΝ, ΚΟΛΩΝΕΥΣ and ΚΟΛΩΝΗΘΕΝ, and modifications of demotics for women and metics, e.g. ΕΚ ΚΗΦΙΣΙΕΩΝ, ΕΚ ΣΟΥΝΙΕΩΝ, ΕΜ ΜΕΛΙΤΕΙ, ΕΝ ΚΟΛΛΥΤΩΙ. In many instances a serach for an abbreviated form of a demotic or ethnic will suffice (e.g. ΑΧΑΡ). Wildcards can also be used: Μ[Ε]*ΙΛΗΣ will find all the people with ethnics beginning with ΜΕΙΛΗΣ or ΜΙΛΗΣ. Cross-reference entries will remind you of the existence of variant spellings (a search for ΑΓΑΘΟΚΛΕΑ will show also cross-references to ΑΓΑΘΟΚΛΙΑ, ΑΓΑΘΟΚΛΕΙΑ etc). The numbers of cross-references are not in bold, and they are omitted altogether if "Main entries only" is checked.
Relation
The Relation box is blue because relationships are given in the name lines of the results, but it is not labelled with blue lettering because it accepts only English terms without wildcards. In addition to the common family relationships, e.g. son, daughter, father, mother, the Relation box can have terms such as curse, grave, associated, earlier, later, honoring, honored, on vase, on coin, on dedication, on pinakion, etc. For the full list see Description: Table of Links.
Description
Any item from the function-date-status segment (shown in brown in the Samples) may be entered in Description, using significant consecutive letters exactly as they occur in the results (no wildcards). Some useful searches include: "Status: NA" (include the colon! see Description: stat), "Possibly the same as", "Treated in", "relative of," "cross" (to select cross-references only), and all functions such as archon, ephebe, bouleutes. Note that a simple search for the commoner functions, like grave(stone), ephebe, bouleutes, ded(icant), will produce a large number of results (see How to limit above). Compound searches involving name, description, and date, for example, give more useful results. And sometimes doing the same search in Description will supplement the results from another search: "honor" in Description includes "honored by demos" (not in Relation), while "honor" can be a relation found from, e.g., a dedication (but not included in Description).
Refs and Texts
The abbreviations used in the references are listed in the Description file; e.g., for Corpus refs (used without the 'IG') see the listing under 'I' in Description: Abbreviations. Finding-places can be retrived via the "Comment on ref" box (e.g., just enter "Rhamnous" to find persons whose details we know from inscriptions found there), and the "Cf." comment, which adds more recent editions of the reference. This line also includes comment on the text, giving, for instance, the original of a letter that have been corrected in <>s in the text itself. The actual Greek texts are hard to search because there are so many epigraphical interruptions in the form of brackets, dots, etc. Also the correct diacritical is required for the upper and lower case unicode Greek used. A more effective method of searching texts may be to use the browser's Find function on a set of results on the screen: some browsers ignore diacriticals.
PA
Entries with a PA number, with or without S(undwall)/D(avies), can be found by typing the number in the PA field. To find only one specific number, add a space before and after the number: " 27 " will find only PA 27. "27" (without the spaces) will find any PA number containing the 2 digits "27" (eg, 275 or 127). Putting "D" or "S" in this field will find the entries treated by the author specified.
Unique names
The blue box at the bottom of the search form, outlined in red and labelled "List unique names that match pattern", cannot be combined with any other search criterion. It simply makes a list of every name (not every person) that meets a specified pattern, making full use of wildcards. It has been included to help with the restoration of texts, epigraphical, papyrological, or literary.
Table. Number of records in Athenians by initial letter Section Numbers Entries Persons Broken names* 011010–099815 3,997 3,987 Alpha 100005–252000 22,020 17,744 Beta 260000–269320 1,165 938 Gamma 270005–282190 1,641 1,330 Delta 300010–379730 10,527 8,553 Epsilon 380000–453410 13,005 10,612 Zeta 460005–469895 2,123 1,739 Eta 480000–489690 2,284 1,820 Theta 500000–519200 4,800 3,890 Iota 530000–543245 2,900 2,203 Kappa 550000–589555 8,756 6,917 Lambda 600000–618660 4,369 3,399 Mu 630010–664040 7,090 5,741 Nu 700005–722750 4,539 3,532 Xi 730000–735530 1,022 823 Omikron 740045–751325 1,841 1,477 Pi 760000–797780 7,706 6,090 Rho 800010–802630 422 345 Sigma 810005–871950 7,223 5,946 Tau 875010–896750 3,157 3,543 Upsilon 900015–902520 336 227 Phi 910020–968080 7,215 5,759 Chi 970020–995280 2,473 1,995 Psi, Omega 996020–998140 98 87 Total 120,709 97,697 * Names of which the intial letter is not preserved.