“Medical Performs and Magic in the North Arabian Communities as Attested in North Arabian Resources (Inscriptions and Rock Drawings) until the End of the Fifth Century AD”
James A. Sauer Memorial Fellowship, 2021–2022
Cairo University, Cairo (Egypt)
Archaeology
Cariman Omar Soblaban is enrolled in the doctoral program of Cairo University’s Department of Antiquities. At the Hashemite University she earned her master’s degree in ancient Arabic civilizations, for which she wrote a thesis titled “Symbolic Significance Study of Natural Environment Vocabularies in Safaitic Inscriptions.” Besides participating in an archaeological survey undertaken by Dr. Sultan Maani to document new Safaitic inscriptions, she has excavated at Ahsaya with the Hashemite University and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and has taught Arabic and the Riyadh International School and al-Sharif School.
She is working on her dissertation, “Medical Performs and Magic in the North Arabian Communities as Attested in North Arabian Resources (Inscriptions and Rock Drawings) until the End of the Fifth Century AD.” Supervised by Prof. Nasser Malkawi and Prof. Hussein Al Qudra, this will be the first examination of medical practices and healing magic and ritual among the North Arabian societies of this period. Soblaban will seek to determine what maladies are mentioned in Thamudic, Safawiya, and Leihiyaniya inscriptions and how these were treated. Terms will be analyzed and, where possible, compared to counterparts in other Semitic languages. This will extend to the names of plants, which might have medicinal properties, and how the practices of neighboring cultures might have influenced those of the ancient North Arabian communities.
