The RIIG project, the “recueil informatisé des inscriptions gauloises”, is an ANR JCJC project which started on 1 January 2020, for a duration of four years (48 months). It aims at a complete and perpetuated editio maior of the Gaulish inscriptions of the French territory known to date, at the updating and modernization of the previous editions, at the renewed publication of each inscription with a precise contextualization, at the preparation of a sociolinguistic analysis, and at the provision of an updated archaeological and linguistic bibliography.
The Gaulish language is a continental Celtic language. The first written evidence of it in Gaul goes back to the very beginning of the 2nd century BC, and the last to the 4th century AD. In southern Gaul and along the Rhone axis, the Gaulish populations used the Greek alphabet to write their own language. After the Roman conquest, the Latin alphabet gradually replaced it. These two writing systems are called "Gallo-Greek" ( Gaulish language in Greek alphabet) and "Gallo-Latin" ( Gaulish language in Latin alphabet). The Gallo-Greek corpus contains about 400 inscriptions, and the Gallo-Latin corpus at least as many. In northern Italy, there are also Gallo-Etruscan inscriptions (Gaulish language in Etruscan script).
This consultation platform will soon deliver a series of inscriptions that correspond to the online edition of the data published since 1985 in the Recueil des inscriptions gauloises and its complements. These are the Gallo-Greek inscriptions (RIG I, G-1 to G-275) and the Gallo-Latin inscriptions on stone (RIG II.1, L-1 to L-16) as well as the Gallo-Greek inscriptions published since 1988 in various supplementary articles.
The Gallo-Latin inscriptions on instrumentum will be treated in a later project.
The data can be consulted in the Corpus tab. The records are presented according to the Petrae model and follow the TEI-XML EpiDoc scheme.
The numbering of the original RIG (G for Gallo-Greek and L for Gallo-Latin) has been abandoned in favour of a logic by archaeological sites, which emphasises the context of discovery and allows future data to be accommodated by incrementing the information in a continuous manner. Older references remain available, however. Sorting can be done by major French regions, by department or by commune, but also by type of text, by medium or material, by graphic system or by period.
Each record provides location information, a set of data relating to the place and conditions of discovery. The biography of the object is available in the conservation history as well as the different autopsies that may have been carried out. The details relating to the support of the inscription have been harmonised and updated, aligning as far as possible with the thesauri of Eagle and Pactols; for the ceramics, the general typology followed is that proposed by Michel Bats in 1988 (Bats 1988, 23-25) and by category of ceramics in Dicocer.
The description of the inscription and the characteristics of the writing are followed by the edition of the text. This online edition is intended to be as accurate and accessible as possible. Where appropriate, different readings of the same inscription are proposed, indicating their author and their degree of certainty (high, medium, low), in order to indicate possible hypotheses and to keep a record of previous research. The linguistic analysis of each interpretation is accessible by ticking the "linguistic characteristics" box, as well as a comparison of all the proposals in order to be able to easily compare them. All the details allowing this synthetic and simplified visualisation are available in the critical apparatuses and in the comments of each member of the RIIG team. The readings and related comments are easily identifiable by tags. The person responsible for each comment is clearly indicated in order to identify the source of each hypothesis.
In the Grammatica section, the elements of morphology (declensions of nominal themes and verbal forms) and the few elements of syntax known for the Gaulish language are gathered. Data on the layout of letters and elements of palaeography will also be found shortly.
Sociolinguistic remarks are provided as a basis for a more extensive sociolinguistic study, which will be the subject of a monograph concluding this ANR project.
Information on the archaeological contextualisation of the inscriptions is also available in the Sites tab, where a summary is given of the general context of the discovery of places that have yielded inscriptions in language. It is completed by an archaeological bibliography that provides information on all aspects of the site, which the RIIG is not intended to provide.
All the bibliographical references used in the RIIG are available in the Bibliography. Wherever possible, links are provided to make the documents available online directly. You can also subscribe to the Zotero group of the project.
All this documentation is provided in Open Access, under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. Registration records have a DOI and URI so that they can be properly cited and participate in Linked Open Data. References to the entry in other online databases are also available. Finally, the XML file of each entry can be downloaded.
The work of enriching the platform is still ongoing and will continue throughout the project.