The Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project seeks to collect and make accessible over the Web all of the previously published inscriptions (and their English translations) of Israel/Palestine from the Persian period through the Islamic conquest (ca. 500 BCE - 640 CE). There are about 15,000 of these inscriptions, written primarily in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin, by Jews, Christians, and pagans. They range from imperial declarations on monumental architecture to notices of donations in synagogues to humble names scratched on ossuaries, and include everything in between.

These inscriptions are an invaluable resource for historical investigation, for they provide information that is frequently not available in the extant literary texts. Recently, for example, scholars have used these inscriptions to:

• Reconstruct the ancient Roman road system throughout Israel/Palestine, thus revising our understanding of trade routes and the economy;
• Investigate the involvement of the Roman government in municipal building projects;
• Revise our understanding of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt, suggesting that the revolt was far more serious than we previously thought;
• Recover the role (and perhaps even voices) of women in Jewish and Christian communities - voices that otherwise are silent in the literary record.

Yet despite their importance, these inscriptions have never been collected; they have been published individually or in small collections, in different languages, frequently in obscure journals. To compound the problem, many of the actual stones and mosaics upon which the older publications were made are no longer extant, and some inscriptions that can be checked have been shown to have been misread.

In spite of these issues, the goal of this project is to gather together these inscriptions in a single place in order to create a revisable scholarly and educational resource. Each published inscription will be converted into a richly "tagged" XML text that will allow for powerful and flexible searching. The inscriptions will also, ultimately, be linked to photographs and geographical data. We will also develop research and teaching tools related to the use of these inscriptions.

This project is presently intended to serve as a research and educational tool, not as a set of "definitive" editions of inscriptions. Hence, while we do our best to correct blatant errors, we for the most part attempt to reproduce the best scholarly renditions of these texts. We urge all users to consult the appropriate printed editions of these texts, the sources of which are clearly indicated in the display.

Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine is a collaborative project that is run out of Brown University. It is still in its beginning stages, and we welcome your feedback. It has, to date, received financial support from the Scholarly Technology Group and Office of the Vice President of Research at Brown University, the Library Electronic Text Resource Service at Indiana University, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, and the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies at Bar-Ilan University.