Digital Epigraphy: Preserving Stone Inscriptions
How Unicode and 3D scanning tech combine to document ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions across the Mediterranean.
August 2025Unicode and Ancient Greek: Bridging History with Digital Preservation
By Maria Kallinikou
·
September 8, 2025
Unicode has become a critical tool for preserving and digitally representing ancient texts, including Ancient Greek. By encoding every glyph used in historical Greek manuscripts, Unicode ensures that these timeless works remain accessible and readable across digital platforms for scholars, historians, and enthusiasts alike. This blog explores how Unicode technology is keeping the voices of antiquity alive in the modern world.
1. The Greek Unicode Legacy
The Unicode Standard includes not just the modern Greek alphabet but also the ancient variants that were used in classical texts. Through blocks like the Greek and Coptic block, Unicode covers over 100 characters used in ancient inscriptions and literature. This enables:
- Accurate digital reproduction of archaic Greek letters like ᾳ and ᾳ
- Support for polytonic Greek notation required for classical texts
- Compatibility with research tools for linguistic analysis
U+03B1 - α
U+03B2 - β
U+03B2 - β
Unicode encodings for the first three alpha characters in the Greek alphabet. This system works for both modern and archaic forms.
2. Digital Archaeological Records
Archaeological Databases
Unicode-enabled databases now store thousands of ancient Greek inscriptions from Delphi, Olympia, and Delos with full textual fidelity.
3D Text Reconstruction
Laser-scanned inscriptions of the Athenian Agora can now be transcribed digitally with Unicode characters matching the exact glyphs on ancient stone artifacts.
JavaScript
Showcase Unicode in JS
// Unicode for ϊ (Kappa symbol) - used in ancient abbreviations
const ancientGreek = "\u03F0";
console.log(ancientGreek); // Output: ϊ
Example demonstrating access to Unicode characters from the Greek block
3. Modern Scholarship & Digital Tools
Unicode in Research
Scholars now use Unicode to annotate digital texts for projects like the Perseus Digital Library, preserving diacritics exactly as they appear in papyri.
Digital Epigraphy Tools
Unicode support enables researchers to create interactive transcriptions of the Epic of Gilgamesh in its original Akkadian and Greek translations.
Classical Language APIs
Greek text normalization libraries can identify obsolete character forms like the rho ligature ῤ and convert them to standard Unicode representations.
Preserve Ancient Knowledge with Unicode
Explore how Unicode encoding is keeping classical literature accessible to new generations through digital preservation. Discover tools for archivists, researchers, and developers in our GitHub repository with Greek text normalization tools.