College:
Lady Margaret Hall
Course:
DPhil in Oriental Studies
Thesis Title:
Human-animal interactions in the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula
Contact:
josef.bloomfield@lmh.ox.ac.uk
Twitter: @Joe_Bloomfield
Educational Background:
Royal Holloway, University of London
- BA (Hons) in Classical Studies (First Class)
University of Oxford
- MPhil in Greek and/or Roman History (Distinction)
My MPhil dissertation was titled 'The camel as a central point of interaction between nomadic and sedentary groups in Roman Arabia and Syria'.
I am currently undertaking my DPhil in Oriental Studies as a Clarendon Fund and Lady Margaret Hall Buckee Scholar.
My supervisors are Michael Macdonald and Christian Sahner.
I am an editor for the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA).
Research Interests:
In my thesis, I focus upon aspects of religious/ritualistic animal iconography in pre-Islamic Arabia, particularly South Arabia. My chronological focus spans from around the late-8th century BC to the 3rd century AD, nevertheless I discuss much later material as comparanda. I make use of a wide range of evidence, including but not limited to pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphy, rock drawings, zooarchaeology, accounts of Greek and Roman authors, early-Islamic literature & the Qurʾān, and more modern ethnological comparative studies.
- Human-animal interactions
- Arabian animal iconography
- North Arabian epigraphy, particularly Safaitic
- Arabian nomadism
- Pre-Islamic rock drawings in the Arabian Peninsula
- Graeco-Roman understandings of Arabia
Recent Publications and/or Conferences:
Conference papers:
2020:
Animal History Group Summer Conference 2020: Borders and Boundaries, Online
- Camel-centric relationships between nomadic and sedentary peoples in Roman Syria and Arabia
2019:
Meaning, Memory, and Movement: Ancient and Medieval Spaces, University of Birmingham
- Arabian Nomads at the Theatre: Understanding the Safaitic inscriptions from Pompeii
Oxford-Tel Aviv Programme for the Study of the Ancient World, Tel Aviv University
- Soukhos of Krokodilopolis: Greek dedications to crocodile gods at Fayūm
2018:
London Postgraduate Conference for the Ancient Near East, The British Museum
- The Silence of the Nomads: Rock art and the written word in the ḥarrah
Oxford Epigraphy Forum, University of Oxford
- Greek inscriptions by literate Arabian nomads in the ḥarrah
