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.
The ASA (Ancient South Arabian) corpus is one of the most
interesting collections of epigraphic documents of the Semitic world,
first and foremost for its vastness. With its over 15,000 inscriptions,
it is the first-hand, written documentation of the culture that
flourished in South Arabia from the late second millennium BC to the
sixth century AD. At present, CSAI contains a collection of some 8,400
texts, for the most part digitized by the team of the University of Pisa
under the direction of A. Avanzini.
The Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia
(OCIANA) is a project of the Khalili Research Centre of the University
of Oxford, directed by J. Johns and M.C.A. Macdonald. It aims to present
an easily updatable, online edition of all known Ancient North Arabian
inscriptions: Taymanitic, Dadanitic, Hasaitic, Safaitic, Hismaic and
Thamudic.
The Corpus of Aramaic inscriptions on DASI is composed of
inscriptions found in Taymāʾ and its region and in the Gulf in the
Achaemenid and post-Achaemenid periods. The corpus of Aramaic
inscriptions is under the supervision of Maria Gorea (Université Paris
VIII).
The Corpus of Nabataean inscriptions on DASI has been accomplished
thanks to the agreement with the CNRS laboratory UMR 8167 – Mondes
Sémitiques, under the scientific supervision of L. Nehmé.
The
collection of the Austrian scholar and explorer Eduard Glaser
(1855-1908) was acquired in 1910 by the Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
The epigrapher and specialist in the South-Arabian language brought back
a huge amount of medieval Arabic manuscripts, and stone inscriptions,
nowadays spread over Europe, as well as squeezes of the
non-transportable ones, photographs, glass-negatives, diaries, and notes
of historical importance. The Academy owns the latter precious
documents of the 1880s and 1890s and within this project they are going
to be digitally preserved and partly scientifically analyzed. Moreover,
the international scholarly community – most of the researchers in this
field are abroad – could participate and benefit from the digital items,
either to download in high quality or to contribute their results of
research. They will mark one further step towards the integration of the
History and Culture of South Arabia within the field of ancient Near
Eastern studies and will help to give a fuller historical background
from the early first millennium BCE till the rise of Islam. This
applies, above all, to the glass negatives and photographs with
historical significance and the five unexplored diaries with their
ethnological, historical and linguistic documentation. Another part will
be the development of a linguistic text analyzing tool KALAM reloaded
for the inscriptions written in closely related Semitic languages like
Sabaic, Qatabānic, Minaic/Madhābian, and Ḥaḍramitic language that could
help to better resolve illegible passages/letters, while giving the
full grammatical information with translation. All these items,
catalogued and searchable in a web-application, are going to be
visualized in a geographical map-search.
scannerThe Scanning Process (by Moises Hernandez-Cordero)
The Structured from Motion method (SfM) has been selected for
the scans of both sides of the 2155 squeezes left from the first project
“Pilot-3D-Digitizing of Rare Ancient South Arabian Squeezes, 19th
Century Glaser Collection”. This technique has been chosen after
evaluating other possibilities (pulse based laser scanner, structured
light scanner, arm based 3D scanners and Reflectance Transformation
Imaging (RTI)). Time, accuracy and project resources are among the
important elements that make this technique the best for the two-year
period of the project. SfM is well known for the accuracy and good
quality of the textures that can be achieved.
The workflow will use a photo tent for capturing of the data
together with the markers for an accurate geometry. These elements will
enhance accuracy, colour management and light parameters during the
processing of the images. The Canon EOS5D Mark III with the Canon 50 mm
lens is the camera used to capture the images. Agisoft Photoscan Pro
1.3.4 is the software selected to process the data and to create the 3D
models with texture (obj format). Then, these will be exported on the 3D
open source Meshlab 2016 to create an additional file (analyse
file.png) with a filter (radiance scaling). At the end of the process,
the files will have three important qualities of the squeezes
collection, geometry, texture and an image file highlighting the most
important features of the squeeze itself.
The ASA (Ancient South Arabian) corpus is one of the most
interesting collections of epigraphic documents of the Semitic world,
first and foremost for its vastness. With its over 15,000 inscriptions,
it is the first-hand, written documentation of the culture that
flourished in South Arabia from the late second millennium BC to the
sixth century AD. At present, CSAI contains a collection of some 8,150
texts digitized by the team of the University of Pisa under the
direction of A. Avanzini.
The collection includes about 900 inscriptions which date from
between the 7th century BC and the end of the 3rd century AD. After an
early period of formation characterised by a strong Sabaean cultural and
linguistic influence, around the 5th-4th century Ḥaḍramawt became a
kingdom with its own political importance. Its main activity was trading
in incense, which grew in various regions of the country.
The corpus of the Minaic inscriptions is composed by almost 1,400
texts, gathering all the epigraphic texts left in Minaic (elsewhere
called Madhabaic) language. These come from the Jawf valley in northern
Yemen (Corpus of Central Minaic inscriptions), but also from outside
South Arabia, as the Minaean traders visited and settled in other
regions and sites of the Arabian Peninsula and the Near East (Corpus of
Marginal Minaic inscriptions).
The Corpus of Qatabanic inscriptions comprises in total more than
1,800 texts. It has been divided into three linguistic varieties: beside
the inscriptions of the Central Qatabanic, the two small corpora of
Marginal Qatabanic and Awsanite inscriptions has been created, because
these documentations show several linguistic and cultural features that
distinguish them from the Qatabanic language of the mainland.
The Corpus of Sabaic inscriptions is the largest linguistic corpus
of South Arabian texts. To date, of the approximately 5,000 Sabaic
inscriptions, more than two thirds have been published in DASI. This
corpus is divided into three major historical linguistic periods: early,
middle and late. We have also identified a number of regional varieties
such as the Corpus of Early Sabaic inscriptions from Ethiopia (that is
being compiled) and - in the Middle phase - the Central, Northern and
Southern Sabaic.
This corpus collects all the South Arabian texts which cannot be
assigned to any specific language, because they convey no information
about their linguistic provenance, nor on their geographic or
chronological setting. The majority of them are fragmentary or simply
onomastic texts.
This is a small corpus, comprising some 40 texts, written in a new
script and on a different support than the inscriptions in monumental
writing engraved on stone, bronze or rocks.
The first two wooden sticks texts were discovered at the beginning of
the 1970's, during clandestine excavations in as-Sawdāʾ. The scholar
Mahmoud al-Ghul was the first to partially decipher these new documents.
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the political
presence and scientific expeditions of Europeans in the Arabian
Peninsula inaugurated the establishment of European private and public
collections of ancient South Arabian material, which constantly
increased during the following decades.
The digital cataloguing of the South Arabian inscriptions and
artefacts housed in the Yemeni museums is one of the activities of the
project CASIS, funded by the Italian Ministry for the University and
Research for the years 2007-2010.
Copies of several hundred open access South-Arabian stone inscriptions have been made available in Europeana Collections via Kulturpool by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
A squeeze copy of a stone inscription
Guest blog by Petra Aigner, leader of a project titled 'Pilot-3D-Digitizing of Rare Ancient South Arabian Squeezes, 19th Century Glaser Collection'. The collection of the Austrian scholar and explorer Eduard Glaser (1855-1908) was acquired for a large sum of money in 1910 by the Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The epigrapher and specialist in the South-Arabian languages collected a huge amount of medieval Arabic manuscripts and stone inscriptions that are now spread all over Europe. He also collected ‘squeezes’ (a kind of copy on paper) of the non-transportable ones, as well as photographs, glass-negatives, diaries, and notes of historical importance. The Academy owns the latter precious documents of the 1880s and 1890s and through two projects is digitally preserving and scientifically analysing them. This is another step towards the integration of the history and culture of South Arabia within the field of ancient Near Eastern studies and will help to give a fuller historical background of the early first millennium BCE till the rise of Islam. Eduard Glaser collected these inscriptions during four expeditions (1882-1884, 1885-1886, 1887-1888, 1892-1894) to South Arabia - now largely the Republic of Yemen. Most of the squeezes are currently in a very poor state, while the original inscriptions are in many cases damaged and are (given Yemen’s political instability) inaccessible anyway. The preservation of this valuable epigraphic corpus will amount to the preservation of a significant part of ancient Yemen’s history and culture and, more broadly speaking, the preservation of an often overlooked part of the Semitic-speaking Near East.
The inscriptions are written in Ḥaḍramitic, Quatabānic, Minaic, and Sabaic languages of Ancient South Arabia. The time range is from 800 BCE-600 CE. Almost 500 items from the Glaser Collection were transferred to Europeana Collections by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Library, Archive & Collections (BAS:IS). The scans are available for use under an open licence.
George Hatke (Austrian Academy of Sciences, University of Vienna) is responsible for all transcriptions of the texts preserved in the squeezes, together with the translations and commentary. These remain intellectual property of the author. Please contact George.hatke@univie.ac.at
Arabian Humanities s’inscrit dans la continuité des Chroniques yéménites,
revue de valorisation des travaux menés au Centre Français
d’Archéologie et de Sciences sociales de Sanaa (CEFAS) entre 1993 et
2013. Tout en garantissant l’accès aux numéros des Chroniques yéménites, elle en élargit le champ de compétence à l’ensemble de la péninsule Arabique, et se tourne résolument vers l’international.
Arabian Humanities est une revue à comité de
lecture, multilingue (articles édités et publiés en français, anglais et
arabe), qui couvre, à un rythme biannuel, l’ensemble des domaines des
sciences humaines allant de la préhistoire jusqu’aux sociétés actuelles.
Construit autour d’un dossier thématique, chaque numéro
comprend également des varia et des comptes rendus de lecture sur les
publications les plus récentes portant sur la péninsule Arabique et
paraissant en langues européennes et arabe.
Arabian Humanities is the continuation of the earlier Chroniques yéménites
journal, published by the French Center for Archaeology and Social
Sciences in Sanaa (CEFAS) from 1993. It broadens its scope to the entire
Arabian Peninsula, and is now resolutely oriented towards international
research networks.
Arabian Humanities is a peer-reviewed journal. It is
multilingual (articles published in French, English or Arabic, with
abstracts in the two other languages), and freely available on internet.
Arabian Humanities intends, through biennial issues, to cover
all areas of the humanities from prehistory to contemporary societies in
the Arabian Peninsula. Constructed around a specific theme, each issue
will also include independent articles and book reviews on the latest
publications on the Arabian Peninsula appearing in European languages
and Arabic.
Art rupestre et peuplements historiques au Yémen fait le point sur l'état actuel des connaissances en ce domaine. À l'inventaire iconographique de l'art rupestre
préhistorique des régions de Saada et de Radā‘, établi par Madiha
Rachad, s'est établie une nouvelle découverte dans la région d'al-Dalī‘,
relevée par une équipe dirigée par Frank Braemer. Ainsi cet ouvrage
révèle-t-il un remarquable ensemble gravé et peint de représentations
d'animaux, ainsi que des figurations humaines et de... Lire la suite
The AWOL Index: The bibliographic data presented herein has been programmatically extracted from the content of AWOL - The Ancient World Online (ISSN 2156-2253) and formatted in accordance with a structured data model.
AWOL is a project of Charles E. Jones, Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities at the Pattee Library, Penn State University
AWOL began with a series of entries under the heading AWOL on the Ancient World Bloggers Group Blog. I moved it to its own space here beginning in 2009.
The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.
The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.
AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.
Published:2026-09-10
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