Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine
In addition to providing DTD-building and markup strategy advice for this extensive, richly XML-encoded database of ancient inscriptions in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, STG also pioneered the use of heretofore under-utilized open source XML tools to provide a powerful, flexible web searching interface to the inscriptions and to metadata about the inscriptions. In so doing, we also developed strategies for dealing with storage, searching, and browser rendering of complex Unicode data. We also developed a MySQL bibliography database and a browsing and editing interface to the database that collaborators around the world can access. This revisable scholarly and educational resource can also serve as a valuable model for similar epigraphical projects in the future.
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) from the Land of Israel 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.
| Principal Investigator(s) or Parent Project Lead(s): |
Michael Satlow
Judaic Studies, Brown University
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| Research domains: |
document architecture and markup systems; full-text retrieval; humanities computing; metadata |
| STG involvement initiated: |
October 2002 |
| Status: | hosting |
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Funding support: |
STG Faculty Grant |
Record last modified: 06-Mar-2007
