20 maart 2025
A conversation with Ahmad Al-Jallad (The Ohio State University) about the languages and inscriptions of pre-Islamic Arabia, our main contemporary source for life, death, and worship before the time of the Prophet Muhammad. We talk about field surveys in search of inscriptions and what they tell us about Allah and other Arabian deities in the early centuries of the first millennium. You can find his work on academia.edu (here) and some of his lectures are posted online. The article on which this conversation is based has not yet been published (its provisional title is "Ancient Allah: An Epigraphic Reconstruction"). You can access the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA) here.
Anthony Kaldellis, Ahmad Al-Jallad
1 september 2024
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.
15 juni 2023
A conversation with Valentina Grasso (Bard College) on Arabia before Islam. This used to be known primarily from preserved Arabic poetry, but the picture is now filling in from inscriptions and contemporary texts. There were competing kingdoms, tribal coalitions, and foreign empires with a stake in trade routes. There were pagans, Jews, and Christians, as well as generic or "cautious" monotheists. The cultural background of the Koran has never been known in such richness and complexity. The conversation is based on Valentina's recent book, Pre-Islamic Arabia: Societies, Politics, Cults, and Identities during Late Antiquity (Cambridge 2023).
Anthony Kaldellis, Valentina Grasso
Michael C.A. Macdonald, Ahmad Al-Jallad, James D. Moore, Jérôme Norris, Alison Furlong