This initiative will provide the first comprehensive corpus of Phoenician, Punic and Neo-Punic inscriptions in more than half a century. Key sites (e.g. Cirta and Hadrumentum), genres (e.g. funerary) and most late inscriptions (e.g. Neo-Punic) had been excluded from the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, Pars prima: Inscriptiones phoenicias continens (CIS I, 1881-1962), and none of the inscriptions discovered and published site-by-site since, found in scattered journals, have ever been gathered into a single collection.
Our partners at the Corpus Inscriptionum Phoenicarum necnon Poenicum (CIP) have been striving for such a comprehensive database, but the ongoing CIP remains incomplete, a work-in-progress accessible only to those provided with login credentials. Our Digital Phoenician-Punic Corpus (DPPC) will help complete their work and bring nearly 10,200 inscriptions to the public as a searchable open-access database with critical apparatus, commentary, and sample translations.
The task of digitally transcribing inscriptions, both from the CIS and from later site-specific collections, is well underway. We have now begun to encode each epigraphic text with XML to mark its dimensions, findspot, provenance, iconography, etc. The user can choose how each will be displayed, e.g. in Phoenician, in Hebrew, or in annotated Latin script, or in multiple scripts. Each can be displayed without breaks (scriptio continua) or with word and line breaks, or with clause breaks, again as chosen by the user. The entire DPPC will be searchable and sortable, will be linked to lexical and prosopographical resources, and will be interoperable with other Northwest Semitic databases for Hebrew and Aramaic (DaNWSI) and for South Semitic (DASI).
The Phoenicians, who once spread alphabetic writing across the Mediterranean, will finally have their language well represented in the Digital Humanities alongside their contemporaries. The DPPC will make Phoencian-Punic language, culture, and civilization more accessible—not narrowly, to just a few dedicated scholars, but broadly, to the general public.
