Friedrich August Wolf Names a Science of Antiquity

Philology studies a text's language, transmission and historical context together, treating grammar, textual criticism and historical interpretation as one combined discipline rather than as separate specialties applied to the same material by different scholars. The German classicist Friedrich August Wolf gave the discipline its founding statement in 1807 with Darstellung der Alterthums Wissenschaft, proposing Altertumswissenschaft, the science of antiquity, as a unified field that would bring together every kind of evidence, linguistic, textual, historical and archaeological, needed to understand an ancient civilization as a whole rather than treating each kind of evidence in isolation.

Philology in Wolf's unified sense is the working method behind most source criticism in this collection, reading a scripture or inscription's language, its manuscript transmission and its historical setting together rather than treating any one of the three alone as sufficient. The atlas relies on philological method wherever an ancient religious text's meaning depends on reading its language, its textual history and its historical context as one combined body of evidence, which is most of the time a scripture's meaning is in real dispute.