SunoikisisDC Summer 2021 Session 3

Sunoikisis Digital Classics, Summer 2021

Session 3. Digital Epigraphic Corpora: the example of the inscriptions from Israel and Palestine

Thursday April 29, 17:15-18:45 CEST

Convenors: Michael Satlow and Elli Mylonas (Brown University)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/3ntk9m4o6gc

Slides

Session outline

This session will introduce you to a digital corpus of inscriptions from the area of Israel/Palestine. The project is at http://www.brown.edu/iip. (It takes a little while for the Search page to load; wait until the circles appear on the map.) There are currently just shy of 4700 inscriptions in the corpus. All date from between the sixth century BCE to the seventh century CE. Almost all are in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic. These inscriptions are not limited (as many corpora of this area are) to a single religion. We will look at:

• The history of the project and how this has informed our goals and decisions about the shape of the project
• The Search interface
• Encoding
• Organization
• Collaborations
• Ongoing work and future vision

Seminar readings

• An article describing the project should be forthcoming in Jewish Studies Quarterly. In the interim, though, you can read a non-copyedited version here. Note that the figures are at the end.

Further Reading

• This presentation assumes that you attended the last session, available here, and are thus familiar with EpiDoc and the general issues of digital epigraphy.
• Our corpus collects rather than re-edits inscriptions. We get our data from print publications. If you have never read the publication of an inscription, see if you can find one that would fit the criteria for inclusion in our database. Here is one random example: Kloner, Amos, Alla Kushnir-Stein, and Hava Korzakova. "An Inscribed Palestinian Weight Mentioning the Emperor Claudius." Israel Exploration Journal 58, no. 2 (2008): 195-98. Available here.
• Nearly all published inscriptions use some version of the "Leiden Convention" for transcription. Familiarize yourself with these markings here: "Epigraphic Conventions". The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy. Edited by Christer Bruun and Jonathan Edmondson: DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195336467.005.036. Also available here.

Other resources

IIP Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine: https://library.brown.edu/iip/index/

Exercise

Use the IIP database to find:

• All Greek, Christian inscriptions from Jerusalem. How many did you find?
• All inscriptions from Jaffa that mention the name Simon. How many did you find?
• All Christian inscriptions that mention the term "one God". How many are there? Does capitalization matter?
• How many synagogue inscriptions in Aramaic can you find? For a nice example of one click into NARR0007, and look at the picture as well (double click on it to leave it).
• There are six Latin funerary inscriptions in the database. Click into the one commemorating Publius Oppius. You may want to print this page out or open another browser window and navigate to the same page. Now click "View XML." Compare the data you find in the XML file to the way that it is displayed. Pay special attention to the <div type="edition"...> element.
• Find any inscription in the database that interests you. Starting (but not ending with!) the bibliography, see if you can do a little research about it. What is, or could be, its significance? Look at the "Stories" section of the Website and read a story or two to get an idea of how to think like this.
• Look at the map, on the search page. Change your search criteria and see how they cluster. Can you find any interesting clusters?