Publications: Kites in 'Arabia' (iBook)

Apple iBooks has just published (1 September) a new book by Prof. David Kennedy with Rebecca Banks and Emergent Form's Paul Houghton on Kites in 'Arabia'.

Kites in 'Arabia'
David Kennedy with Rebecca Banks and Paul Houghton
September 1, 2014
iBooks for iPad or Mac OS X 10.9 or later
Emergent Form
225 pages
US$4.99/ AU$5.99/ £2.99
Edit 25/20/2016 - the iBook is free to Download.

The book offers an approachable survey and analysis of the stone built structures known as Kites  found throughout Arabia - the huge arid region extending from south-eastern Turkey through Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to Yemen.  The volume examines Kites from their first discovery by the RAF pilots who were the 'Pioneers' of aerial photography in the inter-war period in Transjordan to recent research and interpretation conducted by various professionals in the field. Distribution, form and function of the Kites is discussed and extensively illustrated with references provided throughout. The volume benefits from David Kennedy's long established interest and passion for aerial photography and archaeology in the Middle East, and draws on the extensive reconnaissance performed by the Aerial Archaeology in Jordan Project and historical imagery research of the APAAME Project. The book also includes extensive appendices illustrating types and locations of Kites across 'Arabia', and historical accounts of Kites by early explorers in the Middle East.

The medium of iBook was chosen for two primary reasons: accessibility and inclusion of illustrations. We have made the iBook available for just US$4.99/ AU$5.99/ £2.99 to make the publication affordable. Images have been profusely included to illustrate the features described, something that would have astronomically increased publication costs in a printed edition. Moreover the electronic format allows for interactive features which enhance the illustrative elements and for video interviews and footage taken from the helicopter.

Heavy on content, the iBook does come out at roughly 1GB to download, but fortunately will only ever be as heavy as carrying around your laptop or iPad.

Conferences: ICAANE IX - round-up

This is a regular International Conference on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, held in Warsaw in 2011, due to be in Vienna next time, but this year in Basel, Switzerland.

After Registration at Universität Basel on afternoon of Sunday 8th June, we were off to a fast start the next day with plenary lectures followed by four and half days of several simultaneous lectures on various parts and periods of the ANE. Sometimes hard to get from one place to another in time.

As the name implies, ICAANE is mainly devoted to pre-Classical archaeology, though there were several interesting lectures on Petra and the Nabataeans. Also of interest was a (disturbing) 3-hour session on Syria. Don Boyer gave a very informative and superbly professional (as you would expect) talk on his research on the water supply of Roman Gerasa which got a good reception and useful questions and comments.

I would not normally have gone to ICAANE which seldom gives much attention to the Roman Near East. This year, however, Dr. Ueli Brunner (Department of Geography, University of Zurich) – who gave a lecture in UWA about 18 months ago on his work in Yemen, had organised a Workshop on Kites. So I gave a lecture on Kites in the Harret Khaybar of west-central Saudi Arabia. The plan is to publish all these Kites papers as a book – a quick and high-profile publication will stimulate new research.

As always, a good reason for attending is for those conversations and contacts that grease the academic research engine. People you seldom see are right there for days and there is the opportunity to talk at length.

The University and Half-Canton of Basel each laid on a very pleasant reception and Dr Brunner took the Kites group for dinner in a delightful restaurant-pub in the back streets of Kleinbasel.

The weather was HOT – c. 35 every day. But Basel is delightful – 200 years of peace and neutrality is obviously a Good Thing. A little sight-seeing took us all at times to the Rhine where a recreation was to get into the river stream with clothes in an inflated backpack and let the current drift you downstream.

The Boyers and Kennedys joined up one afternoon to take the (free) public transport 12 km east to visit the superb ruins of the Roman city of Augusta Raurica, just outside modern August. You may remember a lecture to the Roman Archaeology Group of Perth on this town by Martina Müller a few years ago. More on this site later.

-DLK

Another conference attendee's blog can be found here: http://ragwa.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/basel-switzerland-heat-wave-in-june/

The Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia

Inscription in the vicinity of the Cairn of Hani, Jordan. Photograph: David L. Kennedy, APAAMEG_20091014_DLK-0017.

This week APAAME has made over 200 ground photographs available to the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (formerly the Safaitic Database Online) for inclusion in their database. The photographs were originally taken during follow up ground visits to sites after they had been photographed from the air. The majority of the photographs were taken in the 'Black Desert' or Harret al-Shaam in Jordan and many of the inscriptions were associated with features we were interested in, such as Wheels, Pendants and Cairns. As the APAAME team are not experts in Safaitic or Hismaic, let alone Dadanitic or Taymanitic, we are enthusiastic that these photographs will be made available in a database designed for their study.

For more information on the inscription database please see the passage below made available to us from the project, or visit the project website HERE.

If you wish to see some of the many photographs of inscriptions we have taken, please visit our Flickr site where we have tagged the majority with 'inscription': http://www.flickr.com/photos/apaame/tags/inscription/.

OCIANA (Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia)

From the early first millennium BC to around the fourth century AD, literacy was extremely widespread among both the settled and nomadic populations of the Arabian Peninsula and they have left us tens of thousands of inscriptions and graffiti. Since the late nineteenth century, approximately 48,000 of these have been recorded by travellers and scholars and have appeared in hundreds of articles, books, and unpublished dissertations in a number of different languages. This makes it extremely difficult for all but a handful of specialists to keep track of and use the rich material they contain. Moreover, any visit to the deserts of southern Syria, eastern and southern Jordan and the western two-thirds of Saudi Arabia reveals that there are thousands more inscriptions waiting to be recorded.

The OCIANA project, is based at the Khalili Research Centre, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, and directed by Professor Jeremy Johns and Michael Macdonald. It will create an online Corpus of all the pre-Islamic inscriptions of north and central Arabia, both those in the various Ancient North Arabian dialects and scripts, and those in Old (i.e. pre-Islamic) Arabic. A project at the University of Pisa (the Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions, DASI) is producing an online corpus of the inscriptions of pre-Islamic South Arabia, and the two projects are working closely together so that it will be possible to search the information in both corpora through the same portal.

In 2012, the first phase of OCIANA, funded by a grant from the John Fell Fund at the University of Oxford, launched a demonstration site in which a corpus of 3420 previously unpublished Safaitic inscriptions was made available online with readings, translations, commentaries, ancillary information, tracings, and photographs (see http://www.ociana.org.uk). In January 2013, the project received a large grant from the AHRC for Phase II which will last three and a half years from 1st October 2013. In this phase, the Dadanitic, Taymanitic, the rest of the Safaitic, Hismaic, and Old Arabic inscriptions will be entered and tagged, with all available ancillary information and with photographs whenever these are available. Phase III will see the entry of all the approximately 13,000 Thamudic inscriptions.

Publications: Kites–new discoveries and a new type

The discovery of an unusual specimen of kite with a limited distribution between Palmyra and Damascus in Syria led to the formulation of this journal article by David L. Kennedy.




David L. Kennedy (2012) 'Kites–new discoveries and a new type', Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 23.2:145-155. You can find it at Wiley Online Library.




The 'sock' kite, fondly at first referred to as a 'Hockey Stick' kite, then (as we were feeling seasonal) a 'Christmas stocking' kite, with its narrow elongated 'shaft' and 'head' off to one side, forms the basis of this article. The discussion encompasses the form, distribution and geography of the new Kite type.

We also cover the extent of our current research on Kites in Arabia, and the article is generously accompanied by useful maps and distribution diagrams of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and diagrams of the new Kite type.

The Renewal of Arabian Fauna

Captive breeding programs have seen some species come back from the brink of extinction. The Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi has recently announced they are ready to release the Arabian Oryx, known locally as the 'Al Maha', back into the wild (link to ABC Environment Feature Article), and local nature reserves such as the Ajloun Forest Reserve have been acting to reintroduce other species such as Roe Deer which had become locally extinct in Jordan (see The Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, Jordan, Website).

The stone structures known as Kites are believed to have been traditionally used for hunting these local ungulates (hoofed mammals) of Arabia, including gazelle, deer, oryx and onager, as well as ostrich. We know the wild population dwindled rapidly in the early 20th century due to human and environmental factors, such as hunting and reduction of natural habitat. Accessing the impact on the population caused by hunting using Kites is more difficult to access as no sites have been found directly linking Kites with the slaughter of these animals, but an excavation of a fourth millenium BC deposit of bones found in North-eastern Syria published in an article in PNAS may provide some insight into how hunting using Kites may have impacted the Persian Gazelle population in antiquity.