An Index to Roscher’s Lexicon of Mythology

compiled by Jonathan Groß 
ORCID 0000-0002-2564-9530 
jgross85 [AT] gmail [DOT] com

1. Introduction

1.1. General Disclaimer

This index file was created as a private research project with the goal to make the wealth of information in Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher’s “Detailed Lexicon of Greek and Roman Mythology” (Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie) more accessible to everybody.

Roscher’s Lexicon, originally published by B. G. Teubner in Leipzig from 1884 to 1937, is the most complete resource on Greek and Roman mythological names to date and also encompasses mythological (and religious) subjects from Sumeran, Akkadian, Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian, Celtic, Germanic and other neighbouring cultures.

The Lexicon was reprinted three times in the latter half of the 20th century (by Georg Olms in Hildesheim), even after its pictorial content had been superseded by the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (1981–1999, 2009). Unfortunately, since the last reprint of 1992/1993, Roscher’s Lexicon has been out of stock at both publishers (Olms and De Gruyter Brill).

Since the late 2000s, Roscher’s Lexicon (the 6 main volumes and 4 supplements) was digitised by initiatives such as Google Books and the Internet Archive, and its contents can now be viewed there (with OCR text). One prominent use case of these scans is the German Wikipedia, where more than 2,500 pages use Roscher’s Lexicon as a reference with a link to a scanned page in the Internet Archive.

1.2. Licensing

This dataset is released under the CC0 1.0 Universal License (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en). I chose this license in order to maximise the usefulness of the data to everybody.

Use and reuse of this data is strongly encouraged, and one use case has already been initiated by the author:
-https://mythogram.wikibase.cloud/wiki/Project:Roscher%27s_Lexicon_of_Mythology (presentation of the information from the index file as Linked Open Data, finished on 28 May 2024 with emendations until 5 August 2024)

Although not technically required by the licensing agreement, the author would appreciate being informed about other uses of the data.

The contents of the Lexicon themselves are mostly in the Public Domain as of 2024. Additionally, many of the smaller entries do not reach the threshold of originality. This includes most of the cover addenda.

2. Description of Data

The index file is formatted as tabular data. This file was created with LibreOffice Calc (originally in 7.6.6.3, in LibreOffice Calc 24.2 as of version 1.1 of this file) and is stored in its native .ods format. For convenience, an .xlsx version is also provided. Both files are practically i