DASI: Digital Archive for the Study of pre-islamic arabian Inscriptions: Project Home

OCIANA

Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia

The Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA) is a project of the Khalili Research Centre of the University of Oxford, directed by J. Johns and M.C.A. Macdonald. It aims to present an easily updatable, online edition of all known Ancient North Arabian inscriptions: Taymanitic, Dadanitic, Hasaitic, Safaitic, Hismaic and Thamudic.

The collaboration of the OCIANA and the DASI projects has led to availability of a numbr of Dadanitic inscriptions in the DASI archive.

This is the project 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

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.