Archaeology and Material Culture of Nabataea and the Nabataeans

The Nabataeans were an Arab people who inhabited northwest Arabia over two thousand years ago. Their center was the city of Petra, located in what today is the southern part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. They appear in Greek accounts around 312/311 BCE when the armies of Antigonus Monophthalmos attempted to raid the small, but well-defended kingdom of traders in their capital of Petra. They were reportedly a small, but extremely wealthy, Arab people who transported aromatics, frankincense, and myrrh from the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean coast and Egypt. They were skilled stone cutters, a craft developed in the Hellenistic period when they hewed and plastered large cisterns for their exclusive use along desert tracks in the Negev. The Nabataeans became an important element in the geopolitical deposition of the southern Levant at a time when Rome was becoming increasingly involved in the region. They controlled trade routes in the desert regions of the Negev and Sinai Peninsula and extended their rule northward into Syria and southward to the Red Sea coast of Arabia. Their control of the Negev led to the establishment of towns along the main route between Petra and Gaza, called the Incense Road, as well as along other major tracks. By the Roman era they were also master potters, producing exquisite, thin-walled vessels that took the place of glass. In the increasingly competitive markets of the Augustan era, they responded by producing perfumed oils packaged in ceramic unguentaria produced at Petra that they marketed abroad. The increased revenues that they received in an era of high international demand allowed the Nabataeans to indulge in the monumental architecture that can still be viewed with awe today. Nabataea was a client state during the reign of Augustus, and it was ruled by a series of native kings until its annexation by Rome in 106 CE, upon which its territory became the Roman province of Arabia. Loss of self-rule does not seem to have affected the prosperity of the Nabataeans or the production of pottery and aromatics at Petra, and their role in international trade continued until Roman collapse in the region in the 3rd century CE. Nabataean language, culture, and religion continued under Roman rule well into the Late Roman and Early Byzantine periods. In those periods, their written language—Aramaic—was transformational, leading to the development of written Arabic as known today.