Join us for the OCIANA 2.0 Launch Workshop to explore the Online Corpus of Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia. Discover the latest updates and advancements in ancient inscription research focused on Arabia. On September 12th and 13th (2:00pm to 5:00pm each day) this two-day workshop will delve into OCIANA 2.0 in Pomerene Hall 320. Register at go.osu.edu/digital-arabia
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 on what was considered the "Age of Ignorance". Excavations and epigraphic 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. Scholars and travellers have been recording Ancient North Arabian inscriptions in what is now Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Arabian Gulf countries since the 1858, and by now some 70,000 are known, with more being discovered every year. However, their finds have been published in hundreds of books and articles in numerous languages and many are extremely difficult to track down, even for the specialist.
The Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia [OCIANA], released in 2015 at Oxford University, aims to transform our knowledge of the history, languages and cultures of ancient Arabia. It does this by creating a digital corpus of all known pre-Islamic inscriptions in North and Central Arabia. It provides a reading of each text, together with a translation in English, references to earlier readings, commentary where necessary, bibliography, and all known information about the inscription (provenance, carving technique, relationship to other texts or to rock drawings, structures, etc.). When available, photographs and facsimiles of each text will also be shown on each record and will eventually be downloadable free at publishable resolutions.
This two-day workshop will inaugurate the redesigned version 2.0 of OCIANA, hosted at The Ohio State University under the direction of Michael Macdonald, Ahmad Al-Jallad and James D. Moore. The rebuild will boast new functionalities and thousands of additional ancient inscriptions, empowering researchers and the general public to access Arabia’s pre-Islamic past ways unimaginable only a few years ago. The conference will bring together leading specialists of digital humanities projects covering Arabia to workshop ideas and future horizons regarding the application of digital tools to the study of Arabia’s ancient heritage and its dissemination to the public.
The confirmed program of speakers include:
Michael C.A. Macdonald (Keynote), Oxford University
Laïla Nehmé, CNRS
Alessia Prioletta, CNRS
Ali al-Manaser, Hashemite University, Jordan
Fokelien Kootstra, University of Ghent
Jerome Norris, University of Ghent
Along with Ohio State's Ahmad Al-Jallad and James D. Moore.
Project and event sponsors include:
- Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures
- Middle Eastern Studies Center
- Digital Laboratory for the Study of Ancient Textual Documents
- Start-up funding from OSU Arts and Humanities Larger Grants Program
Space is limited. Please register here.
