Practicalities of Hellenistic Ruler Cult (PHRC): Towards a semantic markup of ritual action and its social underpinnings

Practicalities of Hellenistic Ruler Cults (PHRC) is an ongoing (oct. 2015 – sept 2017) Marie Curie-funded project in Greek epigraphy and digital humanities focussing on the ritual action and the social agency of cults for rulers in Hellenistic Asia Minor, Cyprus and the Aegean Islands. It will produce a linked, open (CC BY-SA licensed) database of about 150 EpiDoc xml-encoded inscriptions (decrees and dedications) with commentary and translation (English, Italian). Users (researchers, teachers, students) can browse the database through Greek lemmata, English descriptors (support and content-related) and a geo-blog with active Open Streep Map-based maps.
The challenge for PHRC consists in developing a consistent and flexible model for semantic tagging concerning both ritual practice and social agency. Europeana EAGLE vocabularies currently leave these domains unexplored as they focus on support-related descriptors. The recently released Liège project Collection of Greek Ritual Norms (CGRN) provides a first set of categories fit for Greek religion, while the semantic markup for social agency remains out of the remit of this project.
Starting from this state of the art, PHRC aims at further developing, testing and sharing a coherent and augmentable model of semantic annotation for ritual action and agency related to cultic honours for human benefactors in the Hellenistic period.
The paper showcases some of the challenges, solutions and problems met during the first year of development of the project. A speaking example is related to religious dedications, where semantic annotation must give account of the following data: vocabulary of the offering; the triangle actor/dedicated good/recipient; syntax of the dedication (genitive, dative, accusative, hyper + genitive); social status of the involved persons; context.