Ancient Greek Religion Seen Through Data Science – From Biographies of Things and Places to Understanding Ritual, Society and the Imagination of the Divine

Abstract

This paper arises from a research-based teaching project (“Die Biographie eines Heiligtums. Computergestützte Visualisierung und Analyse mit georeferenzierten Datenmodellen”), held during the summer term 2019 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Based on a case study focussing on the area of Sounion and the Laureotike, with the authors, aided by a group of students, developed a data structure concept for the critical analysis of ancient sanctuaries that takes into account their landscape setting, cults and worshipped deities, as well as ancient worshippers. In order to facilitate the evaluation of large amounts of data sets, a preliminary GIS-based graph database was established and first data sets were entered. The paper presented here outlines the data structure as well as the configuration of the provisional tool and aims to illustrate how our understanding Greek religion is improved by large and highly diverse data sets.

Keywords

• gis
• ancient greek religion
• sacred landscape
• material culture
• written testimonies
• ritual practice