The SELECT Atlas contains evidence of the languages and cultures of Ancient Europe before Rome.

Research can be carried out on the written records that these ancient populations left us and on the macroscopic aspects of their material cultures (facies).

In the Atlas you can find:

– List and positioning of all the written records (epigraphy) of European pre-Roman cultures. Images and texts of single inscriptions are not available.

– List and positioning of ancient sites, distributed by type: settlements, necropolises, cult places, harbours, craft districts. The records referring to the archaeological cultures do not pretend to be exhaustive. The sites shown are a selection of those actually known. They are intended to illustrate the macro-periods and archaeological cultures related to the populations who have left written documents.

– Modern toponyms

– Ancient map with coastlines

– Modern map

– Clickable pop-up windows on the map generated with the search results and, for each record in the list, the most important archaeological or epigraphic information.

– Chronological determination for each record, given as a coloured bar: centuries are highlighted in different colours

– Referring infographics samples for each epigraphic or archaeological cultures are given.

 

The European Regions included in the Atlas are:

Spain

France

Austria

Slovenia

Italy

For some countries of Eastern Europe we have very poor epigraphic documentation and different kind of informations: personal names, place names, people names, glossae (adnotations) of ancient authors. These regions inclused: Albany, Bulgaria, Albania, North Macedonia, European Turkey.

The SELECT Atlas considers the civilisations of ancient Europe from the earliest written records of the 8th century B.C. to the age of Romanisation. The stage of Romanisation varies from region to region, so the upper chronological limit may also vary. In some regions, local populations continued to produce written documents in their own language or using the Latin alphabet until the 1st century AD. In others, Rome’s conquest was more radical and from the 2nd century BC, no more writing was done.

 

The ATLAS consists of two parts: the map library (EXAMPLES) consisting of selected thematic cartography and the Map Manager, the tool for building the desired map.

The Map Manager offers three possibilities:

– Wizard: by entering a keyword you can get all results contained in the Select database and select the one(s) of interest

– Advanced Search: here you can select the type of data (Epigraphy or Archaeology) and then select the fields of interest in the box below. Different types of layouts are available for background maps: modern, ancient. In the Advanced Search you can also select specific record types (e.g. site type or epigraphic media type).

In both cases it is possible to activate the geographical filter on the right of the screen.

– The geographical search, in which modern countries, regions or districts and cities, both modern and ancient can be given as search input.

 

The ancient peoples considered are listed in alphabetical order. In most cases their names (ethnonyms) are given by Greek and Latin authors.

The ancient peoples registered in the Atlas are:

Celtiberians

Cisalpine Celts

Elymians

Etruscans

Gauls

Iapigians

Iberians

Latins (only of the archaic times)

Ligurians

Lusitanians

Messapians

Phoenicians-Punics

Rhaeti

Sabellians (Oscans and Umbrians)

Siculians

Venetians