Scope
The digital Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia (GAA) is a digital reference tool designed to support the description, discovery, understanding, and processing of data concerning ancient Arabia on the web.
It mainly consists of a thesaurus of “places”, including elements of the natural and anthropic landscape, entire settlements as well as individual remains, political, social and cultural entities related to the territory, ”whether or not they can be exactly located, whether or not their actual relation with the real world can be ascertained” (Pleiades conceptual model).
In other words, it focuses on geographic entities of pre-Islamic Arabia endowed with at least a name, attested in primary or in secondary sources. It identifies, disambiguates and describes them, represents their environmental and semantic relations, as well as changes over time.
It is released in linked data format and under open licence (LOD), in order to enhance interoperability with other repositories. It is thus possible to link its content to archaeological, textual and geographic data, pertaining to different spatial and chronological contexts.
Structure
The Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia is organized round three main entities: Place, Location and Name.
Each Place is related at least to one Location, that is its geographical expression, or one Name, that is its onomastic occurrence in an ancient written source. This relation is the condition of existence of a Place. Moreover, a Place may have a physical or cultural-historical relation with another Place, that can be also chronologically qualified. All these relations - Place to Location, Place to Name and Place to Place - are qualified by a degree of confidence. Locations may be provided with a Bibliography. Names have a link with at least one Source which witnesses its existence in time.
Places can be archaeological sites corresponding to ancient settlements, modern sites that are not identifiable with places mentioned in ancient sources, monuments of major importance related to archaeological sites and territorial entities mentioned in epigraphs.
Content
Archaeological and epigraphic research on pre-Islamic Arabia has made considerable progress in the past decades, materialized in the form of a number of databases, among others. The gazetteer has been designed as a tool exploiting information about ancient places embedded in digitized epigraphic sources, and integrating existing geographic and archaeological datasets.
The Gazetteer is a work in progress and aims to keep pace with the advancements of our knowledge on ancient Arabia. It is being compiled starting from the major sites in Arabia that are provided with at least one name in Ancient Arabian epigraphic records and/or classical literature works, but is open to the inclusion of further typologies of onomastic sources.
Presently, the database of the Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia imports from DASI – Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions the names of the geographic entities pertaining to Southern Arabia, which have been encoded in the digitised texts of the inscriptions, and the records related to archaeological sites and monuments. This means that not only new places but also new names and new sources of a name can be added into the Gazetteer as new useful epigraphic material becomes available in DASI. Relevant names attested in other sources, such as classical literature works, are inserted manually.
References
A. De Santis, M. Gallo, I. Rossi & J. Schiettecatte. 2021. The digital Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia: An example of reuse and exploitation of annotated textual corpora. Umanistica Digitale 11: 125–43. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/13681.
Credits
Giulia Buono – CNR-ISPC, Università di Venezia (data entry)
Annamaria De Santis – Università di Pisa (concept; digital humanities supervision; webpages editing)
Alessandra Lombardi – CNRS-UMR8167 (data entry)
Irene Rossi – CNR-ISPC, scientific coordinator (concept; data entry supervision; webpages editing)
Jérémie Schiettecatte – CNRS-UMR8167, Maparabia project's PI
Matteo Gallo (database and API development; technical supervision)
Impulsion (website development)
The Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia database and API service are maintained and implemented at the CNR-Istituto di Scienze del Patrimonio Culturale of the CNR-Dipartimento Scienze Umane e Sociali, Patrimonio Culturale, with the technical support of the CNR-Unità Reti e Sistemi.
As part of the MAPARABIA project, the Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia is openly accessible for consultation at https://ancientarabia.huma-num.fr/gazetteer/.
Terms of use
The Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia data are intellectual property of the CNR and CNRS.
They are released under open license (CC BY 4.0).
Contacts
Irene Rossi – CNR-ISPC
© Under license CC BY 4.0