Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS)

The aim of the project is to use new technology to present and analyse the tradition of wisdom literatures in Greek and Arabic. Throughout antiquity and the middle ages collections of wise or useful sayings were created and circulated, as a practical response to the cost and inaccessibility of full texts in a manuscript age; the project will focus on those which collected moral and social advice. The compilation of these collections formed a crucial route by which ideas of reasonable behaviour and good conduct were disseminated over a huge area, and over many centuries. The aim is to publish several collections online, using technology to express and display their relationships - with the ancient texts on which they drew, with later texts which drew on them, and also with one another, since such collections were frequently translated.