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The goal of the Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project is to create and make available on the internet an electronic corpus of inscriptions from the Land of Israel that date from the Persian through Roman periods (ca. 500 B.C.E. - 640 C.E.). These inscriptions - defined as texts written on durable materials (e.g., carved in stone or laid into a mosaic), but excluding coins - were written by Jews, Christians, and pagans, in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Aramaic. Although these inscriptions are vital for a balanced reconstruction of early Jewish and Christian history, they have never been assembled into a corpus, whether print or electronic.
The Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project has been long overdue. Approximately 10,000 inscriptions that fit the criteria of the project have been previously published, but they remain virtually inaccessible. Occasionally collected in small, specialized print corpora (e.g., Hebrew synagogue inscriptions), most have been published ad hoc, in an enormous variety of scattered journal articles in different languages. Inscriptions are vital for the balanced reconstruction of ancient history and culture; without them, scholars see history only through the eyes of the highly literate, who left a large but biased legacy. Inscriptions provide a different voice. There are occasional monumental, commemorative, and legal inscriptions, but the bulk are more modest, consisting of common epitaphs and records of small votive offerings. They thus provide a critical window into the lives of people (e.g., women) underrepresented by the literary texts, yet remain inaccessible to students and all but the most dedicated of researchers.
The need for a corpus of these inscriptions is well recognized. There is currently underway in Jerusalem a large-scale project that will gather, reassess, and publish (in print form) all such inscriptions, whether or not they have been published previously. This project has a more modest scholarly goal. Our first goal is simply to gather, tag, and make accessible and searchable the inscriptions - in the original language and Hebrew translation - that have been published previously. We will make some attempt to reassess these inscriptions, but will for the most part rely on the published versions. Ultimately, the goal is to build on this base by addition and revision, as better readings are produced.
The heart of the project is the tagging of individual inscriptions. Each inscription will be entered into an XML file that describes both the object that contains the inscription and information about it (i.e., the metadata) as well as the text and translation of the inscription. XML is a powerful and flexible tagging scheme that has developed from the Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI); its conventions are widely accepted and most web browsers and software tools support it. The texts of the inscriptions will be tagged not only for textual issues (e.g., where a text is damaged or a reading is conjectured) but also for content. This kind of tagging will greatly enhance its searching and indexing capabilities. So, for example, the database can be searched for all Christian inscriptions that mention a woman together with her husband, criteria that often fall outside of easy keyword searches.
As the project expands, it will also include imagines and geographic data. Interested users should have easy access to high quality photographs of the inscriptions, which, if they exist, are expensive to disseminate in print form. It is also our belief that a fuller, visual awareness of the context of an inscription (where it is possible to determine) greatly aids in understanding its significance. The incorporation of geographic information systems might allow for sophisticated searches, browses, and manipulation of the data (e.g., the plotting of inscriptions by language).
While the content alone will make this a valuable scholarly contribution, it will also serve as a model for epigraphic publication. There are several active projects that make inscriptions available over the web, but the standards are still emerging. The few textual databases of which we are aware either present just images (or perhaps with a transcription) or original Latin texts with rudimentary searching. The supposed standard for an epigraphical Document Type Definition (DTD), Epidoc, still needs much work. This project could well help set the standards for future epigraphical publication on the web.
This project is as much an educational tool as it is a scholarly one. It should not only be a place where scholars can conduct complex searches in ancient languages, but also where students at all levels can meander and learn. We will try to design our interfaces with sensitivity to these very different audiences, as well as producing educational materials that will help non-scholars understand the contexts and importance of what they might find.
Michael Satlow began this project in 1995 as a faculty member at the University of Virginia, at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. The fruit of that labor was a demonstration project that centered on a single site in Israel/Palestine. The technology at the time allowed only for use of Latin characters, which from a scholarly standpoint crippled its utility. In 1999, Satlow moved to Indiana University in Bloomington. At IU, the DTD was converted from SGML to XML. We also developed some basing searching tools and mock-ups, and began incorporating GIS into the architecture. The project migrated to Brown University in 2002.
At Brown, the Scholarly Technology Group has supported the technical aspects of the project. In 2002-3, the group has helped to refine the DTD and tools for data entry and has developed a web-based bibliographical tool. The project is now advanced and stable enough to begin data entry and serious work on the web interfaces.
The project has four international editors, sharing responsibility for certain areas of data entry and project design. It will also commission and take submissions of scholarly works related to these inscriptions.
The three main goals of the project for 2003-4 are: