The Digital Atlas of Ancient Arabia is an open access, online platform designed for mapping monuments, inscriptions, languages, scripts, cults and social groups of the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. It provides support for studies on the distribution and evolution of features pertaining to the definition of political and cultural entities, their origin and evolution. It contains unprecedented geolocated archaeological and epigraphic content, made spatially accessible for the first time.
The whole technical platform —database, QGIS project, web mapping platform— was developed with the collaboration of the company Cartodia.
Data
The Atlas exposes a geolocated relational SQL database developed with PostgreSQL 11. It includes two types of entities: archaeological sites and epigraphic data.
The archaeological data is compiled from:
1/ The existing bibliography;
2/ Archaeological surveys by the French archaeological missions:
- in al-Badaʿ, KSA (dir. G. Charloux);
- in Dadān, KSA (dir. J. Rohmer);
- in Dumat al-Jandal, KSA (dir. G. Charloux & R. Loreto);
- in Farasān, KSA (dir. S. Marion de Procé);
- in Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ, KSA (dir. L. Nehmé);
- in Thāj, KSA (dir. J. Rohmer);
- in the Jawf-Hadramawt, Yemen (dir. S. Cleuziou; M. Mouton);
- in the kingdom of Qataban, Yemen (dir. Ch. Robin);
- in the oasis of al-Kharj, KSA (dir. J. Schiettecatte);
- in the province of Najran (dir. Ch. Robin; A. Prioletta).
3/ Databases of archaeological sites developed by researchers:
- Database of archaeological sites in Yemen (J. Schiettecatte): 826 imported records;
- Database of archaeological sites in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia reported in Atlal (L. Nehmé, I. Sachet, J. Schiettecatte): 615 imported records;
- Database of epigraphical and archaeological sites in Northwest Arabia (J. Norris): 673 imported records;
- Database of archaeological sites in the sultanate of Oman (K.-Y. Cotto): 15 imported records;
- Database of Iron Age archaeological sites in Southeast Arabia (P. Yule): 332 imported records.
Data pertaining to inscriptions, languages, scripts, tribes and deities are derived from the content of two major corpuses:
- DASI [http://dasi.cnr.it/]: about 7200 South Arabian inscriptions at the moment.
- OCIANA [http://krc2.orient.ox.ac.uk/ociana/] about 3500 North Arabian inscriptions.
The QGIS project
Data in the PostgreSQL database can be accessed using the open-source QGIS software via aGeoserver (GeoServer 2.16.2) and a postGIS connection. The data is displayed via WFS streams that allow for the creation / modification / deletion of entities on the different tables of the database. The PostgreSQL database is therefore operated, implemented, viewed and queried from QGIS software.
Any specialist wishing to carry out advanced queries or spatial analyses that fall beyond the scope of the web mapping platform may request access to the QGIS project and use the database on open-source GIS software for his/her own research. Any request for access to the QGIS project (read-only mode) should be addressed to j.schiettecatte(a)cnrs.fr.
The web mapping project: Digital Atlas of Ancient Arabia
The data in the geolocated PostgreSQL database is easily searchable and accessible on https://ancientarabia.huma-num.fr. The data on the map is retrieved from the WFS protocol in read-only mode.
The web mapping platform includes full web-GIS functionality: a map displayed in a browser, with a dynamic legend and timeline to display/hide/filter layers and data; simple queries are possible according to specific attributes (scripts, languages, type of remains, etc.). In addition, the distribution of cults and social groups can be mapped based on the content of ancient Arabian inscriptions (names of deities and tribes).