The Arabian Peninsula

The Arabian Peninsula lies at the heart of the Middle East. Today, it is of enormous strategic and commercial importance, and this was also the case in antiquity. Yet, most of what we know about its ancient history, languages and cultures comes from contemporaries looking at it from outside, such as the Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans, or from much later reports by Islamic writers on what was considered the ‘Age of Ignorance’. Excavations and surveys have been undertaken in the rest of the Middle East for more than a century and a half, but the archaeological exploration of Arabia is still in a pioneering stage. For a brief history of Ancient Arabia and a timeline click here.

The western two-thirds of the Arabian Peninsula were home to numerous literate societies. Indeed, one of the two branches of the alphabet — the South Semitic script family — was used exclusively in ancient Arabia with a northern extension in the deserts or Jordan and southern Syria, and still exists in the vocalized scripts used in Ethiopia. Throughout the Peninsula, literacy was widespread, not only among the settled peoples but — exceptionally — also among the nomads, who covered the rocks of the deserts from southern Syria to Yemen with hundreds of thousands of graffiti, many of which give us a vivid picture of their daily life, their rituals and religious rites, their emotions, and their relations with the settled states.

Scholars and travellers have been recording Ancient North Arabian inscriptions in what is now Syria, Jordan and Arabia since the 1858, and by now some 100,000 are known, with more being discovered each year. However, these discoveries have been published in hundreds of books, articles, Masters and Doctoral theses, in numerous languages, and many are extremely difficult to track down, even for the specialist. OCIANA therefore seeks to be the primary portal through which those interested in the textual heritage of Ancient Arabia may access these artifacts.

It should be noted that at the launch of the new OCIANA it had the following numbers of inscriptions:

Dadanitic:

1995

Dispersed Oasis North Arabian:

25

Dumaitic:

10

Hasaitic:

44

Hismaic:

3726

Mixed Safaitic/Hismaic:

54

Safaitic:

36,318

Taymanitic:

479

Thamudic B:

43

Thamudic C:

11

Thamudic D:

9

These numbers are being rapidly increased through the employment of a number of experts to enter the more than 50,000 ANA inscriptions which have been recorded since the Oxford project (2013–2017) ended. The dataset as it currently stands betrays a northern bias, focused on the inscriptions from the Syro-Arabian Ḥarrah (Black Desert), the northern part of the Ḥismà, Central Jordan, and the oases of northern Arabia. On-going work on the database will see the inclusion of inscriptions from the desert regions across the Arabian Peninsula, drastically increasing the number of Thamudic texts in the Database. We also in time seek to add all currently known Ḥimaitic inscriptions, from the region of Najrān.