North Arabian Epigraphy

Located 90 km inland from the Gulf coast, west of modern al-Jubayl, Thāj is the largest ancient site known in eastern Arabia. It was a major hub of long-distance trade in the ‘Hellenistic’ period and in the first centuries AD. It has been known to Western scholarship since the beginning of the twentieth century, but only limited surveys and excavations have been carried out at the site so far. In 2016, an international archaeological project led by the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTH), the CNRS (France), and Leiden University (Netherlands) was launched in order to conduct a comprehensive archaeological exploration of the site, including large-scale excavations and a wide array of specialized studies. This paper presents the results of the first field season of this project, which took place in October–November 2016. These first results already shed new light on the ancient environment, layout, chronology, and material culture of Thāj.

The Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (DASI) is a five-year ERC project of the University of Pisa, directed by Prof. A. Avanzini. Started in May 2011, the project seeks to collect in an open-access archive the whole corpus of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions, with the aim of fostering studies and scientific publications on the epigraphic heritage of Arabia.
The paper describes the main activities carried out in the first two years of the project: the IT research on the cataloguing methodologies of the epigraphic material, the actual work of digitization of thousands of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions and the setting up of the archive website for the fruition of the catalogued material, which opened in October 2013. Moreover, the project encourages the involvement of international partners and promotes the interest in pre-Islamic Arabia through a series of related activities and projects, like the Medina digital library and the IMTO archaeological database, which are promoted in the Arabia Antica portal of the University of Pisa.