María del Carmen Hidalgo-Chacón Díez, PhD

Arabian epigraphist

Belgium

About

I am a Semitic philologist focused on my interest in pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphy and history of Arabia Peninsula. Around the Arabian Peninsula thousands of inscriptions and graffiti were carved in the rock faces and stones and some were incised in palm-leaf stalks and wooden sticks. Dating from the late second millennium BC to the sixth century AD, they were written in various Semitic scripts and languages, including Ancient North Arabian, Old Arabic, Nabataean, Aramaic, Hebrew and Ancient South Arabian. My experience in Digital Epigraphy allowed me to work on to important projects: - The Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA) based at the University of Oxford, UK (new version at The Ohio State University, USA). This Online Corpus comprises the pre-Islamic inscriptions of North and Central Arabia, both those in the Ancient North Arabian dialects and scripts (Dadanitic, Safaitic, Thamudic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Hasaitic), and those in Old (i.e. pre-Islamic) Arabic. -Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (DASI) based at the University of Pisa, Italy. This project comprises inscriptions in the Ancient South Arabian languages (Sabaic, Minaic, Qatabanic, Hadramitic), as well as in Nabataean, Aramaic and Dadanitic. I have studied the Ancient North Arabian inscriptions in depth, particularly the Dadanitic texts from AlUla in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, I am also interested in the Spanish language and its literature, having taught both in Universities (Jordan and Germany) and in Secondary School.

Experience

  • Researcher at Ghent University
    May 2026 - Present · 3 mos

    AICAP. AlUla inscriptions corpus analysis project The AICAP project aims to annotate and analyse the Alula inscriptions (Saudi Arabia) in a database.

  • Spanish Teacher at Friedensburg-Oberschule. European High School (Bilingual Spanish/German)
    Nov 2021 - Jul 2025 · 3 yrs 9 mos

  • Scientific Researcher at Preventive & Digital Archaeology-Museums
    Jan 2024 - Aug 2024 · 8 mos

    Deciphering and analysing pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions.

  • Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Oxford
    Oct 2013 - Apr 2017 · 3 yrs 7 mos

    Deciphering, analysing and inserting pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions into the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA) database.

  • Postdoctoral Researcher at Università di Pisa
    2013 - 2013 · Less than a year

    Analysing and inserting Dadanitic inscriptions from Alula and the surrounding area into the Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (DASI) database.