DĀMOS (Database of Mycenaean at Oslo). Annotating a Fragmentarily Attested Language

This article describes DĀMOS (Database of Mycenaean at Oslo), the first annotated corpus of all published documents in Mycenaean Greek, the oldest attestation (ca. 1450-1150 BCE) of a Greek dialect and the second oldest of an Indo-European language. Mycenaean is fragmentarily attested through ca. 5900 administrative documents written in an own syllabic script. The particular characteristics of the documentation pose important technical and methodological questions regarding acquisition, structuring, storing and annotation of the data. Both problems and solutions presented here can hopefully be of interest for future work with other similarly fragmentary documentation, be it Greek, Latin, or other ancient languages.