The Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project seeks to collect and make accessible all of the previously published inscriptions (and their English translations) from the Persian period through the Islamic conquest (ca. 500 BCE – 640 CE). There are about 15,000 of these inscriptions, written primarily in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin, by Jews, Christians, and pagans. They range from imperial declarations on monumental architecture to notices of donations in synagogues to humble names scratched on ossuaries, and include everything in between. These inscriptions are an invaluable resource for historical investigation, as they provide information that is frequently not available in the extant literary texts.

The project has four primary goals. The first is simply to encode these inscriptions and make them, and their images, accessible to scholars and the general public. The second is to create an interface, enhanced by our data encoding, which allows for powerful and complex searching. Our third goal is to develop a corpus of texts that can be used for machine analysis, and thus spark new research not only in ancient history but also machine learning. Finally, by writing short and accessible treatments, we seek to use these inscriptions to bring ancient history to life.

We recently updated our interface and changed our web address. Please visit and let us know what you think!

See the following publications for more about this project:

Tagami, Daiki, and Michael Satlow. “Machine Learning Techniques For Analyzing Inscriptions From Israel.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 2023 17.2

Satlow, Michael L. "Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine." Jewish Studies Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 4, 2022, pp. 349-369, https://doi.org/10.1628/jsq-2022-0021.

Support has been provided by The Office of the Vice President for Research; the Center for Digital Scholarship; and the Goldhirsh-Yellin Foundaton.

Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine is a project of Center of Digital Epigraphy

Contributors to this project include Michael Satlow (Faculty lead), Christopher Zeichmann (Project Manager); and Christine Roughan (Technical Director), Cody Carvel (CDS), Ashley Champagne (CDS),  Birkin Diana (CDS), Patrick Rashleigh (CDS).