Abstract

This paper presents the Database (DB) developed within the ERC Mapping Ancient Polytheisms (MAP) project, which aims to study the religious systems of the Greek and West Semitic worlds in the longue durée (ca. 1000 BCE – 400 CE) through the prism of “divine onomastic attributes”. By this we mean the names, epithets, verbal forms, and other designations that the Ancients attributed to their gods. The construction of such a tool, which is not without precedent, but which strives to take a quantitative and qualitative step forward, has a double objective: on the one hand, to allow the exhaustive treatment of myriads of divine denominations, by taking into account the diversity of contexts in which they appear; on the other, to use these denominations as markers of divine configurations and human agency. The complexity inherent in divine onomastic sequences requires the development of a carefully structured, flexible and precise database. Therefore, an exhaustive treatment of the latter requires the development of flexible modelling. Thus, after a terminological and historiographical discussion, we here present the structure of the MAP database, and in particular the formula analysis that allows the modelling of divine onomastic sequences.