Data Bank Taps Minds of Ancient Greeks

Theodore F. Brunner, a UC Irvine classics professor and self-admitted innocent when it came to computer technology 13 years ago, has completed what many classicists said couldn’t be done.

He has compiled a massive computerized data bank of everything in the ancient Greek language available in the world, from a word or two by Sophocles on a fragment of papyrus to full texts by the physician and writer Galen of 2 1/2 million words. The compilation begins with the epic poet Homer in 750 BC and ends roughly at AD 600, when the history of the dogmatic structure of the Christian church was being made.

Brunner’s work, named the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, is the first and only thesaurus that contains the 60 million words written by the ancient Greeks, making it a gold mine of information to scholars worldwide.

Without the computer it is highly unlikely this thesaurus would ever have been created, much less essentially completed in a scant 13 years. A thesaurus in the Latin language was begun in 1894 in Munich, using slips of paper, one for each of 9 million words. Today, there are stacks and stacks of shoe boxes filled with slips, the words defined. The task is not completed. Today, the letter “P” has been reached.

Brunner regards writing, printing and the computer as the three greatest achievements that changed the history of man. Writing began with the ability to keep records.

“The natural development was to keep more and more records,” he says.

Today, only the computer can handle in orderly fashion this proliferation.

When the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, or TLG as Brunner fondly calls it, was first proposed in 1971 and a $1 million grant to start it was offered, Brunner freely admitted he’d never seen a computer before in his life.

A year later, I hadn’t either, at least not until I’d visited Brunner at UCI then and he was beginning his massive project on the university’s main frame computer. In 1980, David W. Packard, a classicist and computer expert, came to Brunner’s aid by basically programming the TLG for a new computer with two massive disc drives. It is now known as the IBYCUS system, named after a mythological character who was a jack of all trades.

“It’s not something you can buy off the shelf,” Brunner points out. “Where else can you type in ancient Greek and get responses in both Greek and English”--along with a sophisticated system of cross-referencing?

Snippets of Papyrus

For instance, Brunner showed me a photograph of several snippets of papyrus, found together by an Egyptologist. They appeared to have been written by the dramatist Sophocles, but a couple of the snippets contained only a word or two in ancient Greek. The question was, what was their context?

In seconds, Brunner had an answer after he had entered a Greek word into the computer. It searched through Sophocles and there flashed on the screen a complete quotation of Sophocles containing that very word.

That is only a small example of TLG’s usefulness. Scholars from throughout the world, one from as far away as central Siberia who wanted to know about ancient Gypsies, are using TLG at the rate of about a half dozen a day. Their problems are solved in a few hours, compared to months, perhaps even years, of conventional research in the libraries of world.

In fact, it is the cooperation of the libraries and universities of the world that has helped create TLG by providing their ancient Greek sources. Now, TLG, which resides in UCI’s humanities department, has become the center of the world for classical scholarship.

So far TLG has been produced at a cost of $5.5 million, largely donated by individuals, private foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding is needed, and the question has been raised of TLG’s value by those who do not understand the importance of our past.

Our roots are there in ancient Greece, says Brunner in reply. Traces and echoes of Homer from about 3,000 years ago still shape our culture today.

“Yes, our roots are in that dead language. Without those roots, our tree will die.”

TLG is not for the moment, but for all times. Who knows what will be discovered from the past by scholars unlocking and collating TLG’s infinite combinations?