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Thursday, March 28, 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 Note that this website is no longer updated, but all of the project outputs are available here and at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Photograph of a gravestone inscribed in Hasaitic
Photograph of a gravestone inscribed in Hasaitic

Hasaitic is the name given to the inscriptions — mostly gravestones — which have been found in the huge oasis of al-Ḥasā in north-eastern Saudi Arabia at sites like Thāj and Qatīf, with a few from more distant locations. They are carved in what may be an ANA dialect but expressed in a slightly adapted form of another member of the South Semitic script family, the Ancient South Arabian alphabet. Many of the personal names in these texts are etymologically ANA but there are other names, as well as features of the language of the texts, which are more difficult to explain as ANA. So far, just over 40 Hasaitic inscriptions are known and many of these are badly damaged. It will not be possible to make a more sophisticated linguistic analysis until more texts are discovered. They are thought to date from the first two centuries AD.

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.