[First posted in AWOL 31 January 2013. Updated when the site relaunched 30 May 2022]
DASI: Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions
DASI seeks to gather all known pre-Islamic
Arabian epigraphic material into a comprehensive online database, with
the aim to make available to specialists and to the broader public a
wide array of documents often underestimated because of their difficulty
of access.
By means of a digitization process through a hybrid data entry/xml system, DASI gives access at present to more than 8,400 Ancient South Arabian inscriptions and 600 more anepigraphic objects, for the most part recorded by the University of Pisa team under the direction of Alessandra Avanzini. Thanks
to the collaboration with other major European centres for the study of
the Arabian Peninsula, also parts of the corpora of the Ancient North
Arabian inscriptions (supervision by Mr. M.C.A. Macdonald, University of
Oxford), Nabataean inscriptions (supervision by Dr. Laila Nehmé, UMR
8167, CNRS-Paris) and other Aramaic inscriptions (soon available, under
the supervision by Dr. Maria Gorea, Université de Paris VIII) have been
digitized.
DASI project was funded by the European Community
within the Seventh Framework Programme “Ideas”, through an ERC –
Advanced Grant awarded to Prof. Alessandra Avanzini at the University of
Pisa (2011-2016). The Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, additional
participant of the project, was responsible for the technical
development of the archive, which is now maintained at the Consiglio
Nazionale delle Ricerche, Rome.
Project details »