DASI - Digital Archive for the study of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions

DASI archive was built during a five-year project directed by Alessandra Avanzini of the University of Pisa, which has been funded by the European Community within the Seventh Framework Programme "Ideas", Specific Programme "ERC - Advanced Grant". 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 developed by the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa according to international encoding standards, DASI gives access at present to more than 8,000 Ancient South Arabian inscriptions recorded by the University of Pisa and Scuola Normale Superiore teams under the direction of Alessandra Avanzini, plus a number of inscriptions of the Ancient North Arabian and Nabataean corpora.