The DAMOS project aims at collecting in a searchable, electronic corpus all the published Mycenaean texts in order to provide a versatile tool for their further investigation.
DĀMOS collects for the first time in a searchable, annotated electronic corpus all the published Mycenaean texts.
For scholarly use the Linear B texts are usually published transliterated into Latin letters according to the conventions established by CIPEM (Comité International Pérmanent des Études Mycéniennes, affiliated with UNESCO): text files reproducing such current paper editions have been imported into an Sql database and the epigraphical data which are usually conveyed by the transliteration conventions have also been imported along with the texts, so that important epigraphical information relative to the contexts of syllable/syllabogram, word, line and text (e.g. the chronology of a given text and its attribution to a particular scribe) is available for searches.
The texts are then being manually annotated for morphology and syntax (with particular attention to case and case syntax) and provided a translation and additional lexical information (e.g. the Indo-European root, if reconstructible) for each word.
One feature of DĀMOS that particularly deserves to be mentioned is that its structure allows for multiple simultaneous analyses of a given linguistic unity: for example different hypotheses for the meaning or the grammatical value of a word can be entered and ranged according to their grade of probability. This feature is essential for work with a corpus like the Mycenaean one, where the deficiencies of the script and the fragmentary state of many texts make many interpretations uncertain and dependent on context and comparison with other texts of the corpus.
Another important feature of DĀMOS is that it aims at looking at Mycenaean in its entirety, and, consequently, at being as complete as possible: working with as scanty data as Linear B texts provide us with, it is important to try to gather all the existing material and available information about it. To that effect the files reproducing the current editions, before being imported in the database, have been extensively revised and updated with the many new joins of fragmentary tablet, new readings and new findings (both from old and new sites) which are otherwise scattered in the literature. In this way DĀMOS gives the important possibility to work on a complete and updated data set for Mycenaean.
Pictures and drawings of each document will be possibly added in a further phase of the project. Compatibly with copyright matters, our aim is to make the database, at least in some of its parts, freely accessible in an online version.