Text Size
Friday, March 29, 2024

 

 

OCIANA

Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia

KRC Research Archive

The OCIANA Project was an AHRC-funded research project that was based at The Khalili Research Centre and was active from October 2013 to June 2017. Note that this website is no longer updated, but all of the project outputs are available here and at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Dumaitic [formerly called 'Jawfian'] is the alphabet which seems to have been used by the inhabitants of the oasis known in antiquity as Dūma and later as Dūmat al-Jandal and al-Jawf. It lies in northern Saudi Arabia at the south-eastern end of the Wādī Sirḥān which leads up to the oasis of Azraq in north-eastern Jordan. According to the Assyrian annals Dūma was the seat of successive queens of the Arabs, some of whom were also priestesses, in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. The Assyrian king Sennacherib carried off images of six of its deities, three of whom (ʿAtar-Samain, Ruḍay, and Nuhay) are mentioned in the ANA inscriptions, including the Dumaitic. At present, only three graffiti are known in the Dumaitic script which has features which clearly distinguish it from the other ANA alphabets.

Photograph showing a graffito written in Dumaitic
Photograph showing a graffito written in Dumaitic

OCIANA Preliminary Editions

The following pdf files contain preliminary editions of the corpora that are contained within OCIANA, and are available here as free downloads for use by researchers. Each pdf contains details of all of the inscriptions within that script family, along with their textual content and translations, commentaries, and provenance information.

Dadanitic Corpus
(858 pages, 8.3MB)

Hismaic Corpus
(1,316 pages, 9.1MB)

Safaitic Corpus
(10,105 pages, 79.8MB)

Taymanitic Corpus
(224 pages, 2.1MB)

Smaller Collections
(104 pages, 1.4MB)

Right-click on the pdf title and choose 'Save as' to download each file.