About

Claims and their evidence, at every step.

What the text claims, and what the evidence says.

Codexarium publishes composition dates and manuscript attestation for 120 texts of the ancient eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Each date is attributed to the scholar who argues it and traced to a citation; where the major frameworks date a text differently, each reading is recorded with an indication of how widely it is held. The dataset is published under CC BY-SA 4.0, downloadable in full and citable; the printed charts and the software are what we sell.

Underneath the charts is a shared collection of research: many contributors deposit original data, and each contribution interoperates with everyone else’s.

A record that remembers who found what

Think of a research collection where anyone can deposit what they’ve gathered, it is kept safe forever, labeled to a shared standard, and — importantly — its label always carries the name of the person who contributed it, no matter how many times it is studied later.

That is what Codexarium is for ancient texts. Researchers contribute what they’ve gathered — careful readings of old manuscripts, estimates of when a text was written, comparisons between different versions — and each contribution is preserved, organized so it fits alongside everyone else’s, and stamped permanently with the name of the person who gave it.

What it does

• Keeps the original safe. Whatever a researcher contributes is stored exactly as given and never changed. A tidy, organized copy is added alongside it — the original itself is never edited, only added to.
• Lets findings be compared. Software, with people checking its work, normalizes everyone’s contributions into shared schemas, so material from many researchers can finally be searched and compared side by side.
• Gives lasting credit. Every time someone builds on a contribution, the person who originally collected it is credited automatically — and that credit travels with the work for good.
• Publishes the dataset openly. The dataset is published under CC BY-SA 4.0 — downloadable in full, citable, and free to redistribute and build on, provided the attribution travels with it and derivatives carry the same licence. The printed charts and the software are what we sell.

Why it’s needed

Today the information behind this field is scattered across many separate collections that don’t connect, and some key reference works sit locked behind expensive software. Credit for painstaking work often disappears the moment it is reused. And when scholars genuinely disagree — about when a text was written, or who wrote it — that disagreement is usually flattened into one tidy answer that hides the real debate. Codexarium is built the opposite way: openly licensed, data-native, reproducible, and computable.

Whose scholarship, and whose truth

Codexarium represents scholarship — including confessional scholarship — as attributed data. It records who argued what, and how widely a position is held; it does not adjudicate theological truth, and it does not present any dating or authorship as settled fact. Positions are shown as positions, tiered by consensus, and the preserved disagreement is the point.

What’s here now

Available now: a set of data-derived wall charts — archival-paper posters drawn straight from the project’s datasets. The charts and the software are what we sell; the dataset behind them stays open.

In development: the open dataset itself, and an early interactive 3D visualization of the composition-dates dataset — a preview rather than a public release, with access by key while it is built out.