Several internet portals offer access to epigraphic and archaeological data from ancient Arabia, to atlases and gazetteers of the ancient world, and to archival collections. Some links are provided. Any useful links not found on this page can be added on suggestion.
CORPUS
DASI — Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions
DASI seeks to assemble all known pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphic material into a comprehensive online database, in order to make a wide array of documents available to specialists and the broader public.
OCIANA — Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia
The Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia [OCIANA] aims to transform our knowledge of the history, languages and cultures of ancient Arabia. It is doing this by creating a digital corpus of all known pre-Islamic inscriptions in North and Central Arabia.
DICTIONARY
Sabäisches Wörterbuch — Sabaic Dictionary
The online Sabaean dictionary consists of about 6000 inscriptions from the 8th century BCE to the 6th century CE. Sabaic is native to the territory of present-day Yemen; it is the best attested dialect in the ancient South Arabian linguistic community. In addition to extensive corpora of building, dedication and commemorative inscriptions, legal texts, as well as several hundred letters and economic texts written on wooden sticks are represented.
Encyclopædia Iranica
The Encyclopædia Iranica is a comprehensive research tool dedicated to the study of Iranian civilization in the Middle East, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent.
Encyclopaedia of Islam Online
The Encyclopaedia of Islam Online is a reference tool for understanding the world of Islam. It is a large-scale collective reference work touching on all aspects of Islam from the time of the Prophet to the present day.
Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān Online
The Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān Online is an encyclopaedic dictionary of qur’ānic terms, concepts, personalities, place names, cultural history and exegesis, in addition to essays on the most important themes and subjects in qur’ānic studies.
GAZETTEER
GeoNames
The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eleven million placenames, all available for download free of charge.
Pleiades
Pleiades is a community-built gazetteer and graph of ancient places. It publishes authoritative information about ancient places and spaces, providing services for finding, displaying, and reusing that information under open licence. It does not merely publish for individual human users, but also for search engines and for the widening range of computational research and visualization tools that support humanities teaching and research.
iDAI.gazetteer
The iDAI.gazetteer connects toponyms with coordinates and is designed to work in two directions. Internally it serves as the authority file for all geo-related information and information-systems of the German Archaeological Institute. It also connects this data with other worldwide gazetteer-systems.
ATLAS AND MAPS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Ancient World Mapping Center – À-la-carte Map
The AWMC À-la-carte application is an interactive digital atlas of the Ancient Mediterranean World produced by the Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Landscape data is produced by the AWMC following the Barrington Atlas. All site content, map data, and maps created by the application are released under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC 3.0 licence and are completely free for non-commercial use.
Mapping past societies — Formerly, the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations
The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations offers freely accessible materials for a Geographic Information Systems approach to mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds. It incorporates spatial and temporal analyses of all aspects of the civilizations of western Eurasia for the first 1500 years of our era, as well as the generation of original maps illustrating differing aspects of ancient and medieval civilization.
The Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land
The Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land (DAAHL) is an on-line digital atlas of the sacred region of the three great monotheistic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Using the power of spatial information systems, the tens of thousands of recorded archaeological sites in the region are being entered into a comprehensive database along with site maps, photographs and artefacts.
PHOTO ARCHIVES
Aramco photo archive
Search more than 50,000 images in an image archive specializing in historic and current images of the Middle East and the Islamic world. Most of the images are from AramcoWorld collection from 1964 to the present.
British Museum’s collection
Online collection enabling access to almost four and a half million objects and photographs in more than two million records, and over 7,000 objects from Arabia. High-definition images can be enlarged and examined in detail.
heidICON – The object and multimedia database of Heidelberg University
heidICON is the digital and interdisciplinary object and multimedia repository of Heidelberg University. It provides access to images, video and audio files and their indexing data. Among the represented projects are the archaeological missions led by Paul Yule at the site of Ẓafār (Yemen) and Iron Age sites in Oman.
OTHER FIELD AND INSTITUTIONAL PROJECTS
EAMENA - Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa
Supported by the Arcadia Fund and the Cultural Protection Fund and based at the Universities of Oxford, Leicester, and Durham, EAMENA was established in January 2015 to respond to the increasing threats to archaeological sites in the Middle East and North Africa. This project uses satellite imagery to rapidly record archaeological sites and landscapes under threat and make this information available.
IASA — International Association for the Study of Arabia
The IASA is a charitable organization created to advance public knowledge through the promotion of research relating to the cultural and natural heritage of the Arabian Peninsula.
MarEA - Maritime Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa
MarEA aims to rapidly and comprehensively document and assess threats to the maritime and coastal archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa. The team studied satellite imagery, published data and archival information from coastal and nearshore zones across the MENA region. The collected data and the condition assessments for all the analysed sites have been added to the open access database platform of the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project, hosted by the University of Oxford.
MHAS — Middle Hadramawt Archaeological Survey Database
Online database of the Middle Hadramawt Archaeological Survey (MHAS). The primary purpose of this site is to provide easy access to the project data for scholars collaborating on different aspects of the survey. A secondary goal of this website is to showcase a database front end that can be easily adapted to other archaeological work.
Heritage of the Middle East / Patrimoine du proche Orient Orient
Created in 2016 by the French Ministry of Culture, the Heritage of the Middle East website aims to disseminate knowledge about the sites of the Near East and Mesopotamia in order to facilitate further research and to shed light on these universal civilizations and sites.
The Arabian Rock Art Heritage Project
This website is designed to give scientists and the public an opportunity to explore rock art in the remote landscape of Saudi Arabia.
The Desert Team / Farīq al-Ṣaḥrāʾ
The Desert Team website is developed by a team of amateur Saudi travellers and researchers who are interested in the Arabian desert, its history, geography and archaeology. Since 2004, they have been publishing travel tales, research, photographs and videos.