Introduction

At this stage corpora the first key 80 inscriptions dating from I to IX AD: The inscription of Vespasian from Mtskheta, Armazi Bilingual, The Bolnisi Inscriptions, The Ateni Inscriptions, The Ukangori Inscriptions, The Tskise Incriptions. None of these have been published online according to the EpiDoc guidelines. We prepared XML files of the inscriptions, tagged all metadata and texts of the inscriptions according to the digital analogue of Leiden Conventions - EpiDoc. we also linked metadata with EAGLE controlled vocabularies.

The project is long term and it aims to adopt and promote up-to-date standards and methods of applied linguistics and Digital Humanities generally, both in research and teaching process. Besides the Georgian, it also prepares the digital publication of the corpora of the Urartian cuneiform, Aramaic, Greek, Jewish, Arabic, Persian and Armenian inscriptions.

A desired outcome of digital publishing of Inscriptions of Georgia is to preserve one the one hand, inscriptions of Georgia and on the other – the editions of these inscriptions that have been made by Georgian scientists since 1930ies, but only few of them were published in international scientific journals because of Soviet occupation. The high-resolution photo documentation has been made for the edition and can be observed with the diplomatic and critical editions of the listed inscriptions. Photos were taken in the lapidary repository of The National Museum of Georgia and on archeological sites. Text encoding, enrichment with linked data and interactive maps allows to present inscriptions in corpus both, as text and as an archaeological site.

From 2016 we have been preparing the new project on documenting and digital publishing of the cuneiform inscriptions of Georgia, published by Giorgi Melikishvili, who is also author of a grammar of Urartian (1963, in Russian) appearing in German translation in 1971. Georgian collection has been inherited from The Caucasus Museum founded in Tbilisi in 1867 by Gustav Radde. we plan to seek international funding for the regional project on standard digital publishing of the cuneiform inscriptions found in Black Sea region. Such projects of the digital humanities is a necessary precondition for reconstructing the layers of social and cultural life documented in early inscriptions from the Caucasian region, especially from Georgia.