NB: Guidance for encoding information about the original and historical disposition of the text-bearing object is provided in the sections on Original location of the text-bearing object and Original date of text and/or object.
It is customary in producing an edition of a pre-modern manuscript, papyrus, inscription, and the like to enumerate the occasions on which modern persons encountered and reported seminal information about the text-bearing object, its condition and disposition, etc., together with associated bibliographic reference. The initial such observation is often the occasion of finding, sometimes in situ, sometimes in circumstances or reuse, sometimes already in the context of a modern collection. There follow other observations, culminating in the "last observed location" or "current location."
Following general TEI guidance, EpiDoc treats each such observation as a discrete event in space and time, and encodes each in a separate <provenance> element in the <history> section of the header. The type attribute is used with the following standard values to distinguish the major types of events:
Locations may be tagged in various contexts in the description of the text-bearing object: in <origPlace>, <provenance> (for find-place or modern locations). This page describes the issues that all of these locations share, rather than duplicating them in each section.
Placenames and geognames can be identified in several different ways. One way is with a <ref> which points to the an internal gazetteer. Another option is to link to an external database (Pleiades, Geonames).
For specific types of placenames see the following subsections: