Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD) Squeeze Collection

The core of the Centre’s research archive is a collection of around 25,000 squeezes (paper impressions) of Greek inscriptions, over a half from the principal museums in Athens, but ranging across the Greek world from Ai Khanoum in Afghanistan to Upper Egypt. The archive includes important collections of squeezes from Bouthrotos (modern Butrint in Albania) documenting manumission practices; from the Commagene region of SE Turkey; from Chios, supporting work on the IG XII 6 corpus for the island; from Kos; from Priene; from Hellenistic Samos; from Samothrace, Cyrene, Rhodes and central Greece, made by P.M. Fraser, whose squeezes of inscriptions from Egypt and the Ptolemaic empire also underly the Centre’s Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions project; and from inland Anatolia (MAMA IX-XI). The oldest squeezes in the collection, of inscriptions from the island of Lesbos, go back to Charles Newton in the 1850s, but most were made between the 1930s and 1970s. The collection has been been substantially augmented in recent years by donations and by the field work of CSAD researchers.