The PEACE Portal: Revisiting the Sea of Stone

The PEACE Portal: Revisiting the Sea of Stone

Ortal-Paz Saar

Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University

At the DH Benelux conference of 2017 I presented a poster titled “A Sea of Stone: Digitally Analyzing Jewish Funerary Inscriptions”. The poster described a new digital initiative: an international portal of Jewish funerary culture, part of which would be epigraphic—dealing with funerary inscriptions—and explore epitaphs from the sixth century BCE to the 20^th century.

The portal has recently been launched (https://peace.sites.uu.nl/). It consists of four sections, of which the epigraphic one, containing over 40,000 inscriptions, is fully functional. This paper will describe the PEACE portal focusing on its epigraphic section: content, aims, challenges and future goals. 

PEACE stands for Portal of Epigraphy, Archaeology, Conservation and Education on Jewish Funerary Culture. Funerary culture refers to the array of practices pertaining to the last point in every person’s life: burial methods, epitaphs, rituals, and iconography are some of these. While seemingly pertaining to the dead, funerary culture is very much a part of life. It is the living who choose how to separate from their loved ones, to commemorate them, to emphasize particular themes in their epitaphs and to record specific details, such as the date of birth or the date of death, to mention how they died or to express the hope that they will rest in peace.

Funerary culture differs across religions and cultural traditions, as well as across geographic and chronological axes. For example, the funerary traditions of Jews living in third-century Palestine differed from those of their co-religionaries in third-century Italy, and both differed from those of modern Jews. The PEACE portal aims to shed light on Jewish practices related to death and parting from the deceased, as well as provide information on the conservation of funerary heritage and education about it. In other words, it is meant to serve as a hub of Jewish funerary culture.

In its first stage the portal concentrates on epigraphic data, which will also be the focus of this paper. Currently, PEACE encompasses four epigraphical databases:

1. Epidat of the Steinheim Institute (Germany), ca. 40,000 inscriptions, dated to the 11^th – 20^st centuries, primarily from Germany http://www.steinheim-institut.de/cgi-bin/epidat,
2. IIP (Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine) of Brown University, ca. 3,000 inscriptions,[1] dated to the 6^th century BCE – 7^th century CE, http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/Inscriptions/,
3. FIJI (Funerary Inscriptions of Jews from Italy) of Utrecht University, ca. 800 inscriptions, dated to the 2^nd – 11^th centuries CE, https://fiji.sites.uu.nl/,
4. Jewish Medieval Inscriptions from Toledo, 38 inscriptions, http://www.steinheim-institut.de/cgi-bin/epidat?id=tol-1&lang=de.

Since the databases were built independently from each other, they differ in terms of interface, filters and information (the Spanish database is an exception, since it was built when the PEACE portal already existed). For instance, Epidat specifies which biblical quotations appear in the epitaphs, the IIP database mentions stone dimensions and letter heights, and FIJI has a rubric for the incipit (first line) of longer epitaphs. Yet the databases also have things in common. For example, all of them employ EpiDoc, which is a subset of TEI XML designed for epigraphic documents,[2] and all of them pay attention to matters of dating, explicit and implicit, of the texts.

The differences have now been bridged by the PEACE portal, built by the Digital Humanities Lab at Utrecht University (https://dig.hum.uu.nl/), which allows to search all databases simultaneously.[3] For scholars interested in epigraphy and funerary culture this is greatly advantageous: it allows them to detect patterns and developments across time and space. For example, the screenshot in the attached PowerPoint shows a visualization of the search for the Hebrew term “niftar”, meaning “passed away”. It is easy to see that the use of this term increases from 1700 onward, while in earlier centuries (based on the data currently found in the portal) it was hardly used.

Obviously, the accuracy of these patterns is restricted to the existing partner databases and their inscriptions: the more databases join the portal, the greater the exactitude of the resulting patterns and developments. Other challenges exist, related to the languages employed. These include Hebrew and Aramaic (RTL languages with no vocalization), Greek and Latin, alongside modern European languages. Some inscriptions include more than one language, raising questions about efficient ways to search the text. In the near future, we aim to increase the data-pool by forging new partnerships with epigraphic databases, and to refine the search method.

Future work on the portal relates to its other three sections, namely archaeology, conservation and education. The DH aspect is particularly strong in the first one, archaeology, where we would like to connect and make searchable data from excavations of ancient Jewish cemeteries. This data is different from the epigraphic one, and would contain parameters such as body orientation, presence or absence of a coffin or a shroud, presence of burial goods or personal effects, cemetery division according to age or sex (for instance, were all the children buried in one section of the cemetery?), and so forth. Ultimately, the archaeology section will enable a comparison between Jewish burial data from different geographical and chronological contexts.

For now, we are still focusing on the Epigraphy section. Despite the challenges in building this section of the PEACE portal, the results it yields are highly encouraging. Naming patterns and commemoration norms emerge beautifully from the simultaneous search, along with more intricate aspects, such as age at death.

The poster abstract I presented in 2017 expressed the hope that “it will become possible to navigate this sea of stone in ways that researchers have not embarked on before”. Four years later, revisiting the sea of stone shows the significant progress made. Now we need to improve the quality of the journey.

Further reading:

Itai, Alon, and Shuly Wintner. 2007. “Language Resources for Hebrew.” Language Resources and Evaluation 42:75–98.

Kollatz, Thomas. 2017. “Epidat. Research Platform for Jewish Epigraphy.” In: Crossing Experiences in Digital Epigraphy. From Practice to Discipline, edited by Annamaria de Santis and Irene Rossi, 231–239. Berlin: De Gruyter. 

Reif, Stefan C., Andreas Lehnardt, and Avriel Bar-Levav (eds.) 2014. Death in Jewish Life. Burial and Mourning Customs among Jews of Europe and Nearby Communities. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Elliott, Tom, Gabriel Bodard, Hugh Cayless et al. 2006-2016. EpiDoc: Epigraphic Documents in TEI XML. Online material: <http://epidoc.sf.net>.

Notes

[1] The IIP database contains both funerary and non-funerary inscriptions, Jewish and non-Jewish. While the PEACE portal currently contains only those clearly identified as Jewish (over 800), it would be useful to revise the selection and manually check the inscriptions that seem to bear no identifiable religious affiliation.

[2] https://sourceforge.net/p/epidoc/wiki/Home/

[3] At the moment the search is performed using Elasticsearch (https://www.elastic.co/): https://peace.sites.uu.nl/epigraphy/manual/