September 1, 2024
Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia [OCIANA]
The Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia [OCIANA] aims to help transform our knowledge of the history, languages and cultures of ancient Arabia by creating a digital corpus of all known Ancient North Arabian inscriptions in North and Central Arabia, and elsewhere. For each inscription, it provides a reading the text in roman transliteration, together with a translation in English, references to earlier readings, commentary where necessary, bibliography, and all known information about the inscription (provenance, relationship to other texts or to rock drawings and/or symbols, structures, etc.). Photographs (when available) and/or facsimiles of each text also appear on each record and are downloadable free at publishable resolutions whenever the original is good enough. The Corpus is constantly updated as new discoveries are made and is fully searchable for names, words, grammatical features and subjects, as well as genealogies, narratives and prayers. OCIANA grew out of the ‘Safaitic Database’ which was created in 1994 by Michael C.A. Macdonald, Laïla Nehmé, and the late Geraldine King, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. It was then expanded into the first version of OCIANA from 2013 to 2017 by Daniel Burt, Michael C.A. Macdonald, Ali Al-Manaser, and María del Carmen Hidalgo-Chacón Díez, at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford, funded by a generous three-year grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain. The present version, launched in September 2024, has been completely revised with a new structure by The Ohio State University’s Digital Lab for Ancient Textual Objects (DLATO). We are extremely grateful to Alison Furlong, Ahmad Al-Jallad, James D. Moore, Dustin Perznowski, and Michael Hardesty who have achieved this and to all those who have worked on OCIANA and its predecessors over the last thirty years and the bodies which have funded it so generously.
Michael C.A. Macdonald, Ahmad Al-Jallad, James D. Moore, Jérôme Norris, Alison Furlong