Initiated by Dr Jerome Mairat, this project has received funding from the John Fell Fund at Oxford for a 12-month period (June 2024 to June 2025).

With assistance from Dr Joseph Sheppard and Jonathan Setzer, the aim is to edit and translate over 100,000 coin inscriptions documented in the Roman Provincial Coinage (RPC) reference work.

Expanding Access to Ancient Texts

RPC will become the first major reference work for ancient coins to fully expand and translate all inscriptions into English. By structuring coin records according to the EpiDoc guidelines—a standard for annotating ancient texts—this initiative will enhance public access and provide a valuable resource on local forms of Greek and Latin. This will benefit a wide scholarly audience, including epigraphers, linguists, papyrologists, philologists, historians, and interested non-specialists. For an explanation of epigraphic notation, please visit the conventions page on the RPC website.

Artificial intelligence for Efficient Translation

Editing and translating such a vast number of inscriptions is a monumental task. To accomplish this efficiently, Jerome Mairat has fine-tuned an open AI model capable of:

• Editing inscriptions in Koine Greek
• Translating them into English
• Encoding the texts in EpiDoc, the standard digital format in epigraphy

This approach accelerates the process while ensuring accuracy and consistency across the dataset.

Introducing the Audio Feature

With the texts available, a new audio feature has been implemented. Users can listen to the full inscriptions by clicking the speaker icon next to any Greek or Latin text. Since there was no single pronunciation of Latin or the Koine Greek dialect across the regions and times covered by RPC, the audio recordings adopt pronunciations that reflect the historical development of each language in the Mediterranean:

• Latin inscriptions: Read using the Ecclesiastical (Church) pronunciation, which aligns more closely with modern Italian. This method differs from classical pronunciations, with letters like C, G, and V pronounced as in Italian.

• Greek Inscriptions: Read with modern Greek pronunciation, which may not have significantly diverged from how Koine Greek was spoken in eastern cities like Antioch. Features include silent rough breathings, diphthongs shortened to pure vowels, and letters beta and phi pronounced as fricatives.

For more information on the evolution of Latin and Greek pronunciations from antiquity to today, you can watch Luke Ranieri’s video series on the polýMATHY YouTube channel and Ben Kantor's Koine Greek.