OCIANA

Corpus of Oasis North Arabian Inscriptions (work in progress)

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Corpus of Oasis North Arabian Inscriptions (work in progress)

The Corpus of Oasis North Arabian Inscriptions is made up of the inscriptions in the Ancient North Arabian alphabets used in the oases of Dadan (modern al-ʿUlā), Taymāʾ, and Dūmah (modern al-Jawf). These differ in a number of ways from the alphabets used by the nomads of ancient North Arabia and southern Syria. A few ONA inscriptions have also been found in southern Iraq and on some seals of uncertain provenance.

The monumental Dadanitic inscriptions are at present being entered into DASI and the data from these will be shared with the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA) of the University of Oxford, which begins work on 1st October 2013. OCIANA will eventually contain all known Ancient North Arabian inscriptions, and it is collaborating with DASI so that the data from both the Ancient North and Ancient South Arabian corpora will eventually be searchable through DASI.
This is the corpus home page. You can begin the consultation of the whole corpus by using the indexes and tools menu on the left or you can consult only one of its sub-corpora, when present, by choosing from the list below.
 

CORPORA BY LANGUAGE

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Corpus of Dadanitic Inscriptions (work in progress)

There are considerable numbers of monumental inscriptions and graffiti in the Dadanitic script in and around the oasis of Dadan (modern al-ʾUlā), in north-west Arabia. Unfortunately, there are as yet no firm data on which to base a chronology of the Dadanitic inscriptions and all that can be said is that, at present, they are thought to date from the second half of the first millennium BC.