Instead of full-scale plaster casts and squeezes forgotten in the store rooms of individual museums, our initiative will provide digital files of individual stelae that can be viewed on screen or 3D printed at any scale. Instead of expensive and outdated volumes found only at certain exclusive institutions, our digital initiative will offer an open access resource accessible anywhere at anytime. Finally, our project will allow for reconstruction of the entire Regulus-Salammbô sector in the precinct dedicated to Tinnit and Ba‘l which, when combined with legacy archival data, can provide long–sought–after context for the vast majority of the Phoenician epigraphic corpus.This is a great project. CIS is a wonderful resource, but it needs updating badly.
This essay amounts to a brief history of Carthaginian Punic epigraphy.
For more on the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (HMANE), formerly the Harvard Semitic Museum, see here and links. For more on the early work of Wilhelm Gesenius on deciphering Phoenician and Punic, see here (cf. here and here).
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