Objective:

DiCoNab aims at recording in a database easily accessible online the Nabataean and Developing Arabic inscriptions from the various countries and regions where they have been discovered since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt.

Nabataean (or Nabataean Aramaic) is the name given to the language and script used by the Nabataeans, an Arab tribe the presence of which is attested in southern Jordan, in the region of Petra, from the late fourth century BCE onwards. The members of this tribe established a kingdom which, at its greatest extent, reached Damascus in the north and the Ḥijāz in the south. This kingdom remained independent until 106 CE, when the Romans annexed it and named it the Province of Arabia.

The Nabataeans produced thousands of inscriptions, the vast majority of which are carved on stone, but only a little more than twenty Nabataean papyri have survived. They also minted vast numbers of coins with legends in the Nabataean script.

“Developing Arabic” groups the following two script categories: “Nabataeo-Arabic” and “Palaeo-Arabic” (= pre-Islamic Arabic), found in some of the regions where the Nabataean script continued to be used after 106 CE. The Developing Arabic inscriptions are dated to the interval between the last quarter of the 3rd and the early 7th century CE. Their number does not, at present, exceed 250, and the majority have been found in what is now Saudi Arabia, with a few examples in Syria and Jordan.

“Nabataeo-Arabic” refers to a script which is clearly transitional between Nabataean and Arabic, the latter having developed from the former. It is the predecessor of “Palaeo-Arabic”, which is already recognisably Arabic. Nabataeo-Arabic inscriptions are usually not later than the mid-fifth century CE. The database offers the possibility to make a sub-distinction, within Developing Arabic, between “Nabataeo-Arabic” and “Palaeo-Arabic”.

Elaboration process:

The DiCoNab project was launched in 2022 and is based at the UMR 8167, the Orient & the Mediterranean laboratory of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, https://www.orient-mediterranee.com/). It is undertaken under the aegis of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, in the framework of the Corpus inscriptionum semiticarum (https://aibl.fr/travaux/le-cabinet-du-corpus-inscriptionum-semiticarum/). The academic director is Laïla Nehmé (CNRS), with the collaboration of Michael C.A. Macdonald (University of Oxford) and Jérôme Norris.

The initial development of the database was made thanks to the support of Benjamin Suchard’s research project on Nabataean as a spoken language (2019-2022, VI.Veni.191T.023, Dutch Research Council). It is hosted by Huma-Num (https://www.huma-num.fr/), an infrastructure which provides support to research projects in the field of digital humanities.

DiCoNab aims at offering the community of Nabataean and other epigraphists an intuitive, complete, and detailed recording system for the Nabataean and Developing Arabic inscriptions, thus helping to make the epigraphic material accessible more quickly than with a printed publication and allowing searches of the total data. This will also give academics, students, and interested laymen/laywomen access to the whole corpus of inscriptions, including new discoveries.

Specialists on Nabataean and Developing Arabic epigraphy may also use it to record inscriptions which are part of a corpus under preparation, for example for a Master/PhD thesis or for the publication of a group of texts. The inscriptions recorded by these specialists are treated as “private” within the database until the corpus is completed and considered ready for publication online. The specialists are considered as editors of the database and are given an editor’s login and password. Requests for an editor’s login should be sent to laila.nehme@cnrs.fr

DiCoNab is a relational database which contains four related tables: Sites, Inscriptions, Editions & commentaries, and References. Each inscription is linked to a specific site, and the inclusion of geographical coordinates will make it possible to produce distribution maps. More than 900 bibliographical references are already in the “References” table, thus providing the user with an up-to-date bibliography on Nabataean and Developing Arabic epigraphy. The table “Editions and commentaries” allows the user to connect a particular inscription to a particular publication and vice versa. Finally, indexes and lists of attestations of all the words in the texts are produced automatically. Provided tags corresponding to word categories (substantives, verbs, particles, personal names, etc.) have been assigned to the words in the text, the index and the list of attestations will show the word category of each tagged word and thus ultimately provide continuously updated versions of the Nabataean dictionaries, grammars, and corpora of personal names.

Short bibliography on Nabataean and Developing Arabic

For the complete bibliography, see the REFERENCES: https://diconab.huma-num.fr/references/)

Al-Jallad A. 2020. ‘Pre-Islamic Arabic’. In Arabic and Contact-Induced Change, edited by Christopher Lucas and Stefano Manfredi, 37–55. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Barkay R. 2019. Coinage of the Nabataeans. Qedem 58. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University.

Cantineau, J. 1930–1932. Le Nabatéen. 2 vols. Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux.

Healey J.F. 1993. The Nabataean Tomb Inscriptions of Mada’in Salih. Journal of Semitic Studies Supplement 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Healey J.F. 2009. Aramaic Inscriptions & Documents of the Roman Period. Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, IV. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Healey J.F. 2011. ‘Editorial: On Stone and Papyrus: Reflections on Nabataean Epigraphy’. Palestine Exploration Quaterly 143: 163–65.

Macdonald M.C.A. 2003. ‘Languages, Scripts, and the Uses of Writing among the Nabataeans’. In Petra Rediscovered. Lost City of the Nabataeans, edited by G. Markoe, 36–56. Cincinnati: Harry N. Abrams.

Macdonald M.C.A. 2009. ‘ARNA Nab 17 and the Transition from the Nabataean to the Arabic Script’. In Philologisches Und Historisches Zwischen Anatolien Und Sokotra. Analecta Semitica In Memoriam Alexander Sima, edited by W. Arnold, M. Jursa, W. Müller, and St. Procházka, 207–40. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Negev A. 1991. Personal Names in the Nabataean Realm. Qedem 32. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University.

Nehmé L. 2010. ‘A Glimpse of the Development of the Nabataean Script into Arabic Based on Old and New Epigraphic Material’. In The Development of Arabic as a Written Language, edited by éd. M.C.A. Macdonald, 47–88. Supplement to the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, 40. Oxford: Archaeopress.

Nehmé L. 2017. ‘Aramaic or Arabic? The Nabataeo-Arabic Script and the Language of the Inscriptions Written in This Script’. In Arabic in Context. Celebrating 400 Years of Arabic at Leiden University, edited by Ahmad Al-Jallad, 75–98. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 89. Leiden: Brill.

al-Theeb S. 2014. Al-muʿjam al-nabaṭī. Dirāsah muqārinah li-al-mufradāt wa al-ʾalfāẓ al-nabaṭiyyah. Al-Riyāḍ: STCA.