For the past 50 years, the research on Ancient Arabia has been extremely dynamic and a considerable amount of data was made available. However, tools for their analysis are still lacking and syntheses have to be written. This observation is the prime mover behind the MAPARABIA project. The objective of the project is to model territorial and cultural dynamics of Ancient Arabia by crossing archaeology and textual sources, in order to enhance the production of a renewed regional history from the beginning of the first millennium BC to the 7th century AD. Many issues regarding the Pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula are to be addressed: the settlement and urbanization process in an arid environment; the nature and evolution of religious practices; the adoption of Judaism, Christianity and their impact on the origin of Islam; the languages and writings, for their intrinsic values as much as for their significance as markers of identity; the socio-political organization of Arabia and its evolution. The approach purports to be global and societal. By addressing these topics, the ambition is to highlight the origins of Pre-Islamic literate societies and their evolution until the major transition to Islam. This way, the project is addressing most of the challenges and themes from the ANR 2018 work programme (section B8 – Axis 5: Cultures, création, patrimoines). The project encompasses a variety of fields of research: history, archaeology, epigraphy, linguistics, palaeography, geomatics, and geography. Fifteen specialists of these disciplines form the consortium and come from four of the major laboratories dedicated to pre-Islamic Arabia: Orient & Méditerranée (UMR8167, Paris); Archéorient (UMR5133, Lyon); Dipartimento di Civiltà e Forme del Sapere (University of Pisa); and ISMA (CNR, Rome). The purpose is to create a close collaboration bewteen the French developers of several archaeological and epigraphic databases and the Italian team managing the DASI archives, a key project in the field of digital humanities and epigraphy. The method consists in gathering, extracting, homogenizing, mapping and analysing data through a semantic and spatial approach. A major interest of the method is to highlight the long-term variations of the spatial distribution of many cultural phenomena. This way, processes such as emergence, spread, acculturation, adoption, adaptation, shrinking, decline will be made visible and their analysis possible. The project is divided into four work packages, each ending up in a specific output: the development of a digital geobase and an on-line Geographic Information System devoted to the mapping of settlement and cultural features in Arabia (WP1); the development of an on-line Knowledge Organization System in the shape of a gazetteer of place names (WP2); the production of a Historical Atlas of Ancient Arabia (WP3); the development of a digital Thematic Dictionary of Ancient Arabia (WP4). The development of tools for the analysis and the synthesis of data collected in the frame of past projects shall provide support to illustrate and promote the recent radical shifts of paradigm in the historical knowledge of the region, and to arouse new ones. The project will benefit from the resources of the TGIR Huma-Num and will meet the requirements on open access concerning data and publications. Through the constitution of a perennial, interoperable archive structured in three repositories (geobase, gazetteer, dictionary) and a website as the main agent for the dissemination of this archive (webmapping module; Thematic Dictionary module), the project will impact both the specialists of our fields of research, and the wider academic community by providing ease of access to critical sources for the understanding of the Ancient World and the emergence of Islam.

ALMAS (the Arabic word for ‘diamond’), is an international and interdisciplinary consortium composed of excellent scientific partners based in different countries of Europe and America and aiming at renewing the study of the living and extinct languages of South Arabia (Oman, southwestern Saudi Arabia, Yemen). All these languages belong to the Semitic family and fall into three ‘fields’, which have up to now corresponded largely to separate academic traditions with few interconnections: a set of four ‘Ancient South Arabian’ languages (ASA), now extinct (Sabaic, Qatabanic, Minaic, Hadramitic); a group of six living ‘Modern South Arabian’ (MSA) languages with no written tradition, all endangered (Mehri, Harsusi, Bathari, Hobyot, Jibbali, Soqotri); a rich array of highly diversified and archaic Arabic vernaculars spoken throughout the region (‘South Arabian Arabic’: SAA). In order to disentangle the complex linguistic landscape of South Arabia, ALMAS has been designed around seven scientific tasks: three field-specific tasks concern the investigation of the individual languages (ASA, MSA, SAA); four transversal tasks are organized according to different lines of action: contact linguistics, phonetics and phonology, morphology and Semitic comparison. ALMAS will apply a threefold scientific methodology relying on (1) the already available original sources, (2) the collection of new data and (3) the IT treatment of both these groups of sources. First, a systematic re-examination of the literature and of the text critical editions will be undertaken, which is an essential pre-requisite to any research. Secondly, ALMAS will conduct regular fieldwork seasons in two of the modern countries of South Arabia, in order to collect new epigraphic and oral data. Finally, ALMAS will treat all relevant data through the most modern IT tools for digitization and exploitation of linguistic data. The novelty of ALMAS lies in the interdisciplinary synergy it creates in three ways: by cross-fertilizing synchronic and diachronic approaches to the abovementioned languages; by stimulating contacts between researchers of the three ‘fields’ of the project; by developing complementarity between linguists from different schools and approaches. ALMAS will set a landmark in the domain, by documenting the languages through fieldwork and creating a digitally-enhanced open-access database, thus contributing to the study and the protection of these languages; analyzing the data in order to reach an adequate understanding of the languages’ structures; reevaluating the relationships between the languages (phylogenetic relatedness and/or language contact). Moreover, as ALMAS focuses on endangered or understudied languages, it will have a vast socio-cultural impact In particular, ALMAS will help preserve linguistic heritage; foster cultural awareness among speakers of minority languages; influence educational policies and practices. In order to support the efforts of the consortium and all its manifold activities, the project includes dedicated structures for the scientific and administrative management of the network. A technical task intends to develop a web-based system to manage, analyze and share the study material and the scientific results of the project. Finally, ALMAS results will be disseminated through a diversified dissemination and exploitation plan addressed to different settings in the Western world and in the Arab countries (scientific milieu, governments, education, broad public).