Is still Arabia at the margins of digital Epigraphy? Challenges in the digitization of the pre-Islamic inscriptions in the project DASI

The ERC-Advanced Grant project DASI has contributed to define and foster best practices in the digitization of pre-Islamic inscriptions Arabian inscriptions. As one of the early attempts at digitizing the epigraphic heritage related to Semitic languages, it has been facing specific challenges in support description and text encoding. This contribute describes the solutions chosen to encode and represent different kinds of phenomena, such as phonemes typical of the Semitic languages, onomastics, textual portions, symbols and grammatical phenomena. Moreover a digital lexicon tool for under-resources languages, such as those attested in the epigraphic documentation of pre-Islamic Arabia, is illustrated.