The Project

The Digital Database of Late Roman Consular Dates (DataCons) was developed from a four-year doctoral project at the Department of History, King’s College London. A key aim of this project is to systematically collect all material dated by Roman consular dates and published up to the present, thereby creating a comprehensive and continuously updated resource. The project received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP). Further support for its digital implementation was provided by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College, with the KCL Central IT Cloud Department kindly providing ongoing hosting services.

DataCons is dedicated to serving users by offering a comprehensive, readily updatable and easily navigable database of late Roman consular documents. This initiative addresses the ever-expanding corpus of material, a dynamic accumulation that traditional paper publications find challenging to maintain cohesively. In doing so, the project intends to support research in late Roman history, and more specifically, on late Roman consuls and consular dating, helping to address issues including but not limited to:

• Contemporary understanding and usage of consular dating by central authorities, provincial authorities, provincial users, and any possible differentiation by material type.
• The working of the imperial and ‘post-imperial’ bureaucracies in disseminating information.
• The problem of late Roman communications and relations between the two halves of the Roman world, including the western successor kingdoms and Constantinople in the early Byzantine period.

Besides having a direct application in historical research, DataCons is intended to encourage and facilitate research on and with ancient documents, with particular focus on issues of dating, data collection and visualisation, and pattern recognition. To this end, it has sought to provide as much information as possible, for both a single piece of evidence and populations of items. A dedicated prosopographical section informing on ‘Scribes and People’ being mentioned within the dataset is accessible here.

In addition to this, a second section dedicated to statistical analysis and modelling is also being prepared. Our research team has developed a geospatial model to predict regional dissemination times and is now working to make users able to navigate through its results via an interactive map:

At the current stage of the project, DataCons offers virtually all published Latin and Greek papyri and inscriptions from CE 476 to 541, along with nearly sixty imperial laws, encompassing over 1,200 items. The project’s most immediate goal, however, is to compile a comprehensive collection of documents covering the period from Diocletian’s accession in 284 to Heraclius’ death in 641. In pursuit of this objective, updates and expansions are continuously underway. As part of these efforts, a broader collection of over 4,800 documents dating from 284 to 541 has already been gathered. This expanded dataset will be made available to the public as soon as the necessary funding for its publication is secured.

The database did not start from scratch. Immense acknowledgment is due to the scholars who have contributed to publishing this vast and scattered scholarship over centuries. The three core pillars of DataCons are the latest revision of Egyptian papyri included in Chronological Systems of Byzantine Egypt, Second Edition by Bagnall and Worp (2004), and the Latin and Greek epigraphic sources in Consuls of the Later Roman Empire by Bagnall, Cameron, Schwartz, and Worp (1987), and Chronological systems in Roman-Byzantine Palestine and Arabia: the evidence of the dated Greek inscriptions by Meimaris, Kritikakou, and Bougia (1992). Subsequently, the corpus was updated through March 2022 using a variety of major scholarly references, academic journals, epigraphic and papyrological corpora. Whenever available, links to the relevant tab or to digitised images stored in external databases are provided.

The Team

Dr. Marco Dosi	Co-Principal Investigator	marco.dosi@kcl.ac.uk
Professor Peter Heather	Co-Principal Investigator	peter.heather@kcl.ac.uk
Kieran Baker	Statistical Modelling Lead	kieran.baker@kcl.ac.uk
Dr. Alex Cline	Database Developer	alexander.cline@kcl.ac.uk
Archie Licudi	Database and Web App Creator	archie.licudi@kcl.ac.uk

Bibliographic Abbreviations in Use

For a full list of abbreviations cited in the database (Edition Reference), please refer to the following resources:

• For papyri and ostraca:
  • J.F. Oates et al., (eds.), Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, 5th ed. (Atlanta, 2001), accessible from here
• For inscriptions:
  • M. Dosi, Consular Dating and Consular Dissemination in Late Antiquity. PhD dissertation, King’s College London, 2022.
  • G. Tsolakis, ‘Epigraphic Abbreviations,’ in E.Sverkos, G.Tsolakis, Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. Consolidated Concordances for Volumes XLVI – LX (1996 – 2010), 2021, Leiden: Brill, XV-CXXVI, accessible from: here
• For journals and other corpora:
  • Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edn)

Citing DataCons

The full bibliographical reference of this database is as follows:

Dosi, M., Heather, P., Licudi, A., Cline, A. & Baker, K. (2024), DataCons: The Digital Database of Late Roman Consular Dates. King’s College London Central IT Services. London. Accessible from: https://datacons.kcl.ac.uk

The database can be abbreviated as DataCons or DC.

If you want to cite an item, this can be referenced by mentioning its unique identifier, for example, DC-4599, or its URI: https://datacons.kcl.ac.uk/texts/4599/

While we do not expect you to cite the DataCons unique identifier each time you source a document from DataCons (unless you choose to do so for specific reasons, such as addressing information contained in the document’s page in DataCons), we kindly request that you acknowledge the contribution of DataCons in your work, even with just a general mention.

An earlier and smaller version of the dataset was released as an open-access CSV UTF-8 file on Zenodo. The full bibliographic reference for this dataset is as follows:

For the data paper and dataset:
Dosi, M. (2024). ‘The DataCons Project: An Open-Access Archive of Late Roman Consular Dates.’ In Journal of Open Humanities Data, 10: 9, 1—8. DOI:https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.130

For the dataset only:
Dosi, M. (2023). The DataCons Project: An Open-Access Archive of Late Roman Consular Dates (2.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. DOI:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10251711

As with the database, it is not required to reference the unique identifier in every instance, but please ensure appropriate acknowledgment of the dataset's use.

Credits

We extend our heartfelt thanks to the following individuals and organisations for their indispensable contributions to this project:

• KCL Central IT Services Cloud Department
• The Arts and Humanities Research Council and the London Arts and Humanities Partnership
• The Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London
• King’s Digital Lab, especially Dr Ryan Heuser
• The numerous database testers, whose individual contributions will be acknowledged once the testing phase is finalised

We are deeply thankful for their support, expertise, and dedication, which have been instrumental in bringing this project to fruition.