Magalia · research design and implementation · 27 October 2026
Building fasti from evidence
官职年表的证据、年代与空间
The objective is an expandable chronological framework for office-holders across the Republic and Empire. Its unit is a cited claim about a person and an office. A date key, an attestation, an inferred tenure and an institutional membership must remain distinguishable.
Assessment: intent, logic and feasibility
The requested extension is sound: consular year designations connect documents, narratives and careers; provincial and religious offices add regional and institutional histories. Building every imperial fasti at once is not feasible as a single verified transcription task. Sources differ in completeness, date precision, terminology and access. A uniform “one position, one holder, one year” table would misrepresent replacement consuls, overlapping commands and priestly colleges.
The practical improvement is to separate four layers: a checked source-transcribed modern roster; ancient witness readings; source-qualified office claims; and a review queue of unadmitted extraction candidates. Source counts describe the evidence captured, not the number of historical officials or the completeness of institutions.
What this build implements
- 125 checked imperial ordinary rosters, 30 BCE–96 CE except 13 CE: Degrassi 1952 printed pp. 3–19 and Gallivan 1981 pp. 213–218. Selected suffects are added; no T2 list is asserted historically exhaustive. The 23 BCE and 44 CE source conflicts retain competing readings.
- 779 ancient list readings, spanning 30 BCE–468 CE with source gaps, retained separately from modern full-name rosters. Source forms, apparatus, editorial omission markers and local recognition notes survive. Shared ancestry of witness traditions prevents treating agreement as independent corroboration.
- 65 office claims: 12 source-qualified governorships, 29 other provincial officials, 24 priestly claims. The last group includes four direct literary reports and twenty explicitly hypothetical identifications in Rüpke’s proposed patron list. No priestly hypothesis is presented as an epigraphic attestation.
- 643 year slots for the Degrassi research target, 30 BCE–613 CE, with no year zero. The old probe recovered 599 blocks, but 276 yield something other than two ordinary names; eight margin disagreements remain flagged. Recovery never triggers canonical admission.
- Linked record, time and place views; source inspection; URL-preserved selections; filtered CSV; a no-JavaScript record list; typed year links and four added evidence lanes on the existing chronology spine.
The modern roster is a checked transcription of specific editions, not the final consensus of all later scholarship. New work after Gallivan and Degrassi is explicitly a next-pass requirement.
Source audit: checked access, not inferred access
| Resource | Local access checked | Permitted use in this build |
|---|
| Degrassi 1952 | Selected printed roster; OCR has column and date errors | Rendered-page transcription of the admitted block; whole-scan extraction is only a review queue. An old metadata claim misread 27 CE as 27 BCE and is corrected. |
| Gallivan 1981, CQ 31, 186–220 | Revised table pp. 213–218 visually checked | Flavian ordinary roster and selected suffects. Italic proposals and incomplete names need source-qualified treatment. |
| Baldwin 1983, Fasti Cretae et Cyrenarum | Appendix I.A p. 251 and selected catalogue discussions | Province chronology, title and dating alternatives. The study explicitly treats proconsuls, legates and quaestors together; unadjudicated rows stay outside governor totals. |
| Rüpke 2008, Fasti Sacerdotum | Introductory material through the opening of annual lists | Method and the hypothetical patron reconstruction, ch.6 pp.44–45. The annual lists and biographies advertised by the publisher are not present in this local extract. |
| Piso 1993, Fasti provinciae Daciae I | Passage transcription remains outstanding | Research queue only. No named office assertion admitted from this work. |
| PIR public JSON snapshot | Individual career fields and reference keys inspected | Six dated provincial claims from explicitly named provinces. Source statements remain distinct from modern date adjudication; consulship does not fill a governorship. |
| Tacitus, Annals 4.1, 4.16–17 | Latin Library text read online | Maluginensis’ death, his unnamed son’s succession, Cornelia’s selection and Scantia’s replacement in narrative year 23 CE. No full tenure, cause of Scantia’s departure, or extra personal name is invented. |
| Haensch/Pleiades context crosswalks | Inherited derived records inspected | Administrative-seat orientation only. The reassessment independently checked Appendix IX, printed 752–755. Time-specific seat validity remains unestablished. |
Systematic acquisition and admission
- Define the institution and its changing jurisdiction. Record office title, rank, appointing authority, province version and scope period. Governors, procurators and military commanders are not interchangeable. Religious colleges, named priestly functions and ancillary personnel have separate vocabularies.
- Inventory source access. Record edition, stable identifier, exact printed/ancient locator, source version and reviewed scope. Catalogue metadata, a preview or a partial extract cannot establish access to an unseen table or biography. Deduplicate copies of the same edition.
- Extract into a queue. Keep raw transcription and OCR outside public source redistribution. Preserve brackets, gaps, restoration, alternatives and date formulae. Separately record extraction failure, missing source pages and genuine source omission.
- Transcribe and ground each claim. Check the relevant image or structured record. Separate name/identity, office role, office iteration, date basis and spatial role. A source-local person identifier is retained until positive disambiguating evidence supports a shared authority key.
- Collate rather than overwrite. Retain witness spelling, ordering, recognition and cited scholarly interpretations. Different editions and datasets are not automatically independent evidence. Explicit succession supplies constraints; first and last attestations alone do not establish endpoints.
- Fill by bounded batches. Complete the ordinary consular year framework first; then suffect attestations from diplomas, municipal fasti and acta. Build governor batches by province and institutional period. Build priestly batches by college and source album, not by political era labels alone.
- Publish a coverage statement with each batch. Distinguish checked roster, source-complete transcription, historical completeness, witness-only coverage, unresearched years, unattested slots, disputed identity and OCR failure. A later evidence revision can supersede an interpretation while preserving its source claim.
Date semantics and the chronology spine
A consulship is keyed to its historical year; suffect dates retain the source wording and do not inherit 1 January–31 December. A provincial “8/7 or 7/6 BCE” gives two alternative placements, not an uninterrupted three-year governorship. “Circa” receives no invented ±5-year tolerance. Open bounds remain open. An explicitly dated appointment or terminal report is a point at year precision, not a complete annual tenure.
Evidence windows date the documents under discussion. Rüpke’s 101–102 material cannot become a two-year priestly tenure, nor can his proposed appointment wording be turned into an attested inauguration. Source-reported ranges are labelled as such and are not promoted to day-level precision. A future four-boundary model can distinguish earliest/latest starts and ends; no certain inner interval is manufactured for the present claims.
The existing chronology bands remain the common period join vocabulary; Roman institutional era labels remain separate. The extension adds claim links and parallel evidence lanes without changing historian passage dates or narrational attribution. Window overlap establishes contemporaneity for browsing, not causation or independent corroboration. The view uses a no-year-zero convention; any export to PeriodO/xsd:gYear requires an explicit conversion (1 BCE → 0000).
Spatial analysis without false itineraries
Each place link has a role: jurisdiction, institutional city, attestation place, administrative seat context, or—only when explicitly supported—personal presence. A career inscription erected outside a governor’s province can attest that governorship without placing the tenure at the inscription’s findspot. Q. Cassius Gratus’ Lepcis Magna inscriptions illustrate this distinction.
The current map uses administrative-seat representative points to orient jurisdictional associations. It draws no province polygons, interpolated journeys or travel arrows. The old Haensch crosswalk’s “probable” seat at Perge remains qualified. Points are city-level references, not exact excavation coordinates. Rome’s point is institutional context; Gortyn is not substituted for the Pyranthos attestation of Turpilius Dexter.
Next: version jurisdictions and seat validity by period, attach independently sourced ancient boundary geometries with temporal extents and accuracy, and add attestation findspots independently. Only a dated presence source may support a movement edge; office succession supports a career sequence, not a route.
Presentation methods researched online
| Published method / primary documentation | Adoption here | Further work |
|---|
| SNAP:DRGN Cookbook and project discussions | Keep persons, name attestations and attributed identity assertions separate; use source-local IDs until a supported authority link is available. | Stand-off identity assertions and external RDF alignment; no claim of current SNAP API integration. |
| PeriodO technical overview | Retain source labels and cited temporal bounds; declare the historical-year conversion boundary. | PeriodO alignment only for cited period definitions; no generic period silently dates an individual. |
| CIDOC CRM RDF temporal guidelines, P81/P82 | Distinguish certain inner evidence from possible outer extent; present window types visibly. | Implement and validate four boundaries when a source supplies them. Current JSON is an application model, not a claim of full CRM conformance. |
| nodegoat chronology statements and chronological visualisation | Make temporal selection inspectable and link each mark back to its underlying claim. | Quantify vague bounds only when the researcher supplies a justified interpretation; compare source distributions separately from office occupancy. |
| British Library Peripleo configuration; Pelagios methods and tools | Coordinate record, time and place views; keep selection in a shareable URL; support clustered inspection rather than a single dense display. | Scale map clustering and linked density views when coverage grows. The deprecated older Pelagios search API is not a new dependency. |
| Pleiades representative-point guidance | Separate place identity from coordinate precision; disclose representative points and their limitations. | Carry location-level accuracy and alternative geometries; a centroid cannot become a governor’s residence. |
| Salomies 1993, Consular Fasti and Consular Dating during the Empire | Keep ordinary and suffect roles, source name-order and dating practice separate. | Systematic collation of the published article and later corrections, especially imperial and late-antique source order. |
Reassessment and collection workbench
The 27 October source reassessment adds a hashed source inventory, an audit of the official and local PIR data, clause-level candidate review, all 51 undated Haensch context rows, and five typed conventus case studies. It corrects the Hispania citerior/Baetica extraction rule and isolates qualified negatives in the new jurisdiction projection. C. Iulius Severus, PIR² I 573, proconsul of Asia 152/153, is a source-checked pilot addition; the consulship date in his PIR career is not borrowed for his governorship.
The revised programme favours structured discovery and role-specific modern fasti, followed by documentary collation and targeted OCR. Its batch sizes, dependencies, acceptance criteria and source-access limits are given in the research plan. The supplied 1938-labelled scans are first-edition PIR material, and duplicate files do not constitute independent scholarly evidence.
Gaps and next batches
Priority 1: resolve the 13 CE role/identity problem and 23 BCE dispute through specialist discussion; admit 97–235 CE ordinary pairs from checked pages and later updates; obtain the priestly annual lists/biographies absent from the local extract. Priority 2: rectify Piso’s image-only Dacia scan; collate late-antique sources with East/West recognition and post-consular formulae; verify period-specific provincial geometry and seats.
The gap register and year review queue specify these work items. No recurring collection or external publication is claimed. The release is a locally reviewable implementation; full imperial coverage and independent specialist sign-off remain outstanding.