Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration Database

Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration Database

This website serves as a companion to Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration and as a repository for evidence illuminating ideologies and experiences of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin during the period spanning roughly 300 BCE to 600 CE. The data presented here are intended to be useful to a wide variety of potential audiences, including ancient historians and researchers in critical prison studies.

Click here for a video tutorial on how to use the database features.

Data are categorized by type, comprising Documentary, Literary, Archaeological, and Visual evidence. For an explanation of each data type, see Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration p. ix. In Documentary and Literary records, “Publication” typically lists only theeditio princeps, with abbreviations according to the Checklist of Editions. When available, re-editions can be found by clicking the Trismegistos link on each record.

Records presented here are meant to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. On each topic more examples could be adduced, and we plan continually to add to the collection; we do not make any claims to comprehensive coverage, even with our narrow remit of extant evidence illuminating experiences or ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean world. This database is also a work in progress, and it is nowhere near complete. It will be continuously updated and expanded throughout 2027, including the addition of new commentaries on sources. If you would like to contribute to the project, please email Mark Letteney. Feel free to email as well if you have a question about any one piece of evidence which does not have a commentary — responding will offer an inducement to write on the text, object, or space and incorporate it into the database. When commentaries are written by a team member other than Letteney or Larsen, author name(s) are indicated at the end of the record.

Ongoing financial support for the database is provided by the Department of Religion at Princeton University, which also supports improvements to the system and its data. A wide variety of funders contributed to the creation of this database. We would like to thank the University of Washington, the Carlsberg Foundation, the University of Copenhagen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Southern California, Princeton University, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Simpson Center for Humanities and the Carol Thomas Endowment at the University of Washington for their generous support in creating the initial version of this database.

Unless otherwise indicated, data collected here is shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. This means that you are free to share and adapt material for non-commercial purposes if you give appropriate credit to the Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration Database (including a link) and that any derivative use is also shared with these same license terms.

The database was engineered by Hallvard Indgjerd, and the code itself is Open Source, licensed under a GPL-3.0 License. Please feel free to download the source code on Github and adapt it for your own projects.

The database began as a collaboration between Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney, and has grown considerably thanks to a tremendous team of researchers who lent their expertise at various points. Niels Bargfeldt, Rebecca Levitan, Evan Isak Levine, and Naomi Reiss contributed significantly to data collection and interpretation as part of the Materiality of Incarceration in Mediterranean Antiquity Project. We also received invaluable support from a number of talented and dedicated students, including Emi Brown, Liam Dulany, Krysta Fauria, Stine Askgaard Fredholm, Karen Bruntse Jacobsen, Line Maria Kristoffersen, Kirsten Ring Rossing, Maria Ovi, Sophie Stone, and Jared Swan.

Finally (with apologies) the fine print: This application uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous usage statistics (for the sole purpose of letting our patrons know that people are using the database and that they should continue to fund its upkeep), a secure session cookie when you sign in, and a small local browser cache to speed up data loading. We do not perform any advertising or behavioral profiling. By continuing to use the site you consent to this limited data use; you may clear the cache or cookies via your browser settings at any time. To opt out of Google Analytics you can install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on