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48,000 of these have been recorded by travellers and scholars and have appeared in hundreds of articles, books, and unpublished dissertations in a number of different languages.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.

Roadtripping to Mesa Country

We awoke in the very small hours of Sunday morning to set out to a special area of Jordan - Mesa Country.

East of Azraq on the edge of the Harrat ash-Sham lie a series of Basalt mesas (flat topped hills). On and around these mesas are an assortment of stone built structures - Wheels, Kites, Cairns, Tower Tombs and Pendants, which in this region were first described in the 1920s by pilots of the Royal Air Force on the Cairo-Baghdad airmail route. It was this landscape that we set out to investigate.

We broke from the main road at dawn and watched the sun rise over the desert as we rattled our way slowly down a questionable track - often no more than a pair of wheel ruts over the pebbly desert floor. Our first stopping point was a couple of Wheels surrounded by Cairn Rings. These were almost unrecognisable from the road, but as we got closer the walls began to be apparent. One was nestled in the slope of the hill while the other lay prominently on top of a rise of basalt boulders. Between these Wheels was a Bullseye Cairn - unfortunately illicitly excavated - but still associated with some Safaitic inscriptions and flint artefacts.

Rajil Wheel with Cairn Ring in the early morning sun. Photographed by Rebecca Banks.

We then returned to our trusty 4WDs (the tyres were unfortunately not so trusty) and continued on our way east. We knew we were getting close when the landscape changed to this:

Mesas in the Qattafi area. Photographed by Rebecca Banks

On the agenda was climbing four of this group of Mesas - Qattafi Mesa 2 (named 'Tell A' by Rees, an RAF pilot), Mesa 3, 'Maitland's Fort' (Mesa 4, again named by an RAF pilot) and Mesa 7 or 'Boyer's Butte' as we have come to know it. It sounds easy, but when you have one of these sitting infront of you, you begin to doubt your fearless leader. After a bit of courage and some concentration not to put your weight on the wrong boulder, you reach the top and the view is absolutely breathtaking. Not a living soul in sight, and the only noise is the wind.

The most prominent features of these mesas are Tower Tomb Cairns, visible as small 'pimples' on their surfaces, easily visible from surprisingly far away. The size of the rounded basalt boulders on these mesas provide the perfect building material to construct these large burial mounds and other features. On two of the mesas, these Tower Tombs were incorporated into Pendants - a tail of smaller cairns connected to the larger burial cairn at the head. Other cairns also littered the surface of the mesas, but it was predominantly the Tower Tombs that had associated inscriptions, varying from ancient to modern.

Tower Tomb on Qattafi Mesa 7. Photographed by Rebecca Banks

Inscription associated with Qattafi Pendant 3 on Mesa 2. Photographed by Rebecca Banks

Unfortunately many of the cairns we came across had been illicitly excavated, with the interiors hollowed out by those looking for burials and assosciated grave goods. As a result it will be very difficult to verify how many of these cairns were indeed used for burials, or whether they served another purpose.

An illictly excavated cairn (Qattafi Pendant 4) on 'Maitland's Fort'. Photographed by Rebecca Banks

Driving out into this country has its rewards, but the journey is not to be taken lightly. The rough terrain means that a punctured tyre is more than likely, and the lack of mobile phone reception makes a satellite telephone a must! Thankfully this time we suffered from only one punctured tyre...

Our Pajero after running afoul of a wayward stone. Photographed by Rebecca Banks.

Desert inscriptions

Safaitic, Greek and Arabic inscriptions are found all through the basalt deserts of Jordan and beyond, sometimes in proximity to ancient Cairns and other structures - but not all of them are ancient. Here are some we came across yesterday on the top of the basalt Mesas east of Azraq that we suspect are a little more modern. What could have made us so suspicious?

An Arabic inscription on Qattafi Mesa 7. Photo: Bob Bewley.

An Arabic inscription on a tower tomb atop Qattafi Mesa 3. Photo: Rebecca Banks.