Kleine Schriften / Abhandlungen und Beiträge zur griechischen Inschriftenkunde

One of the greatest epigraphists of this century was Adolf Wilhelm, who died on August 10, 1950. His highly reputed creative power was not reflected in extensive corpus works or large books but rather in hundreds of rather smaller articles, indeed in part very short individual contributions distributed over a wide range of publication locations.

Adolf Wilhelm’s investigations, readings and commentaries are testimony to a highly significant academic capacity, the like of which has rarely seen since. But precisely this manner of short publication in at times extremely remote places represents a major handicap to any epigraphic, ancient history and antiquity research. In this way, a large amount of material is thoroughly insufficiently known to the intentional academic community.

The reprint of these “Short Writings” by Adolf Wilhelm thus represents a major need for the present. Since as early as 1953, for instance, Hermann Bengtson, one of the leading German ancient historians, has been saying (most recently in “Einführung in die Alte Geschichte”, Munich, Beck 1969, p. 161): “It would be very welcome from the point of view of research if a publisher could now be found for the scattered works of Ulrich Wilckens, Adolf Wilhelm, Anton von Premerstein and others.”