The Seminar for Arabian Studies has come a long way since 1968 when it
was first convened, yet it remains the principal international academic
forum for research on the Arabian Peninsula. This is clearly reflected
in the ever-increasing number of researchers from all over the world who
come each year to the three-day Seminar to present and discuss their
latest research and fieldwork. Most of the papers published in this
volume were presented at a Special Session of the fifty-first Seminar
for Arabian Studies, held at the British Museum on 5 August 2017. Its
subject was 'Languages, scripts, and their uses in ancient North Arabia'
and it was held to celebrate the completion in the previous March of
Phase 2 of the 'Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North
Arabia' (OCIANA).