Nabataean Kingdom

People with no houses

formationDrafted from Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983)

In 312 BC Antigonus One-Eye, holding Syria in the wars over Alexander's inheritance, sent an officer named Athenaeus against a people in the desert south of the Dead Sea. Diodorus describes what he found, and the description is the earliest anyone wrote about the Nabataeans.

They had no houses and built none. They planted no grain and drank no wine, and a law among them punished anyone who did. They kept their water in cisterns cut into rock, plastered, sealed and filled in at the mouth so that nobody who did not know the ground could find them. And they were rich, because they carried frankincense, myrrh and spices up from Arabia and sold them at the sea.

Petra, Jordan · Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Michael Gunther · CC BY-SA 3.0

Athenaeus surprised their gathering-place while the men were away at a fair, took hostages and a quantity of silver and incense, and was destroyed on the march home by the men returning. A second expedition under Demetrius found nothing to attack, was met by envoys who pointed out that a people with no fields and no cities cannot be compelled, and came away with gifts.

Petra, Jordan · Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Etan J. Tal · CC BY 3.0

Why that is a chapter and not a turning point

The kingdom proper begins about 168 BC with Aretas I, the first Nabataean anyone can name as a king, so 312 belongs to the prehistory rather than to the reign list. It earns the space anyway, because it establishes the thing the next four centuries consist of. A power on this ground could not be taken by an army. It could be paid, joined, married into or eventually inherited, and every empire that dealt with the Nabataeans arrived at one of those. Rome, four hundred and eighteen years later, took the kingdom by outliving its last king and issuing an administrative order.

It also explains why there is no Nabataean army to describe. This was a power that at its height held the Hawran, the Negev, the northern Hejaz and Damascus, and nothing in the sources corresponds to a Seleucid or a Roman one in the way there is a Seleucid or a Roman one. There are men who know where the water is.

Becoming a kingdom anyway

By the second century they had a king, a capital, a coinage and a script. The transition is not documented and can only be inferred from its results, and the results are considerable: Petra, a city in a sandstone gorge reached through a cleft two hundred metres deep, with monumental tombs cut into the cliffs in a façade architecture that borrows Hellenistic vocabulary and assembles it in ways no Greek would have.

Petra, Jordan · Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Jorge Láscar · CC BY 2.0

Petra, Jordan · Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

Diodorus's law against building houses is worth keeping in mind while looking at it. Either the law was a projection by an outsider, or the Nabataeans changed their minds about what they were, and the second is the more interesting possibility. A people whose defence had been the ability to disappear built the least portable city in the ancient world.

The road

expansionDrafted from Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983)

Frankincense and myrrh grow in the Hadramawt and in the highlands behind the Yemeni coast. Everything else in the ancient Mediterranean world burned them: temples, funerals, medicine, private houses. The distance between the two facts is about two thousand kilometres of desert, and the Nabataeans owned the top of it.

Wadi Dawkah, Oman · Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Mauro Raffaelli · CC BY-SA 3.0

The route ran up the western side of Arabia through Dedan and Hegra to Petra, and from Petra to Gaza and the sea. Strabo describes the traffic and describes the Nabataeans taxing goods in transit. What the archaeology adds is the infrastructure: cisterns, dams, wells, watchtowers, staging posts and caravan halts, and at Hegra a second Nabataean city of rock-cut tombs seven hundred kilometres south of the first.

Hegra, Saudi Arabia · Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Richard Mortel · CC BY 2.0

Hegra, Saudi Arabia · Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

A state made of a toll

There is a recognisable type of polity here and the Nabataeans are among its purest examples: a power with almost no agricultural base that lives entirely on charging for passage. Palmyra in the same desert, Characene at the head of the Gulf, Derbend at the Caspian gate, the Zurayids of Aden, Srivijaya on the Malacca strait. All of them sit on a place where goods have to go through, and all of them last exactly as long as the goods do.

They span six regions and sixteen centuries and have almost nothing else in common: different languages, empires, religions and continents. What they share is a structural position — a chokepoint on a route somebody else's goods had to travel, held by a polity too small to conquer the trade and well enough placed to charge for it. The Characene record has the chapter that sets the type out, and it was written when there were three of them.

Two things distinguish this one. It is the earliest: 168 BC, before Characene by a generation and before all the rest by centuries. And it is the only one of the eight that turned the position into a territorial kingdom with provinces, an agriculture and a script, rather than remaining a city with a customs house.

What is not coded

The Negev.

From the first century the Nabataeans built an agriculture there that is genuinely remarkable — runoff farming, in country receiving under a hundred millimetres of rain a year, with hillside channels feeding terraced fields and towns at Avdat, Shivta and Mampsis living off it. The Hawran in the north was grain country and they developed that too.

None of that is what the kingdom lived on, though, and the distinction is worth keeping. What the sources treat as its income is the route. The farming is what a caravan kingdom does with the surplus and with the water expertise it already has, and calling it a revenue base would be a claim about the treasury that nobody has made.

Negev, Israel · Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Andrew Shiva · CC BY-SA 4.0

A client that lasted

peakDrafted from Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983)

Aretas III took Damascus in 84 BC and was intervening in the dynastic quarrel between the two Hasmonean brothers in Judaea when Pompey arrived in Syria in 63. That ended in one season. Scaurus, Pompey's officer, was sent against Petra, came away with a payment rather than a city, and later struck a coin in Rome showing a Nabataean king kneeling beside a camel with an olive branch.

Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

The kingdom kept its king, its capital, its coinage, its script and its revenue, and stopped being independent. Every Nabataean king after 63 BC is a Roman ally, and the annexation in 106 is the completion of what happens here rather than a separate event.

A hundred and sixty-nine years of it

The remarkable part is the duration. Rome absorbed client kingdoms routinely and usually quickly — Pontus, Commagene, Judaea, Emesa, Cappadocia all went inside a century or two of contact, mostly for cause. The Nabataeans lasted from Pompey to Trajan without once giving Rome a reason.

Aretas IV, whose forty-nine years from 9 BC are the kingdom's high point, styled himself rahem ammeh — lover of his people — and his reign is when most of what is visible at Petra was built. He supplied troops for Roman operations. He married a daughter to Herod Antipas of Galilee and went to war with him when Antipas set her aside for Herodias, which is the war the Gospel of Mark's account of John the Baptist sits inside; Tiberius ordered the governor of Syria to intervene and then died before it happened. It is the only occasion in a century and a half when a Nabataean king did something Rome had to think about.

Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Starnutoditopo, private collection · CC BY-SA 4.0

What being a client meant here

What is striking about the Nabataean kings is the ground they claimed, and did not claim. The Arab client dynasties of late antiquity — the Jafnids on the Roman frontier, the Nasrids on the Persian one — held their position by imperial grant and said so publicly. The Nabataean kings never claimed Rome. The coins are in Nabataean Aramaic with Nabataean legends naming the king and the queen. The inscriptions invoke Dushara and Allat, not the emperor. Dead kings were divinised — Obodas I received a cult at Avdat — which is a claim about where kingship comes from that leaves no room for a Roman grant. Rome was the overlord in fact for a hundred and sixty-nine years and does not appear in this kingdom's account of itself.

That is a real difference from the two Arab clients five hundred years later at the other end of this region, and it is the sort of distinction the coded fields exist to hold. Al-Harith the Jafnid was a Roman patrician and said so. The Nasrid king wore a Persian diadem. Aretas IV was the beloved of his people.

Musée du Louvre, AO 4988 · Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Marie-Lan Nguyen · Public domain

The minister called Brother

peakDrafted from Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, Volume III (1857)

Strabo had a friend who had lived at Petra, and a source who had commanded the Roman army that failed to reach Arabia Felix. Between them they produce the fullest description of the Nabataean kingdom that survives, and the two halves of it disagree about what sort of people the Nabataeans were.

The friend was Athenodorus, a philosopher. What struck him about Petra was the foreigners. He found many Romans living there and many other strangers, and he used to relate with surprise that the strangers were frequently in litigation — with each other and with the natives — while the natives never had any dispute among themselves at all, and lived together in perfect harmony.

Petra, Jordan · Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, Volume III (1857) · Photograph: ChrisYunker · CC BY 2.0

Strabo's own account of the constitution is brief and unusual. The city is always governed by a king of the royal line. The king has a minister drawn from the Companions, and the title of that minister is Brother. And the place, he says, has excellent laws for the administration of public affairs.

Petra, Jordan · Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, Volume III (1857) · Photograph: Michael Gunther · CC BY-SA 3.0

Then the other half, which is the same kingdom seen from a Roman command tent.

Augustus sent Aelius Gallus to find out what Arabia was and, if possible, to take it, on the strength of a report that had been current from all time: that these people were very rich, that they exchanged aromatics and precious stones for silver and gold, and that they never spent any part of what they received on foreigners. He expected either wealthy friends or wealthy enemies. The Nabataeans promised to co-operate in everything, and the minister called Brother — Syllaeus — came along as guide.

Strabo, who had the story from Gallus, says Syllaeus wrecked the expedition on purpose. He guided the fleet along a harbourless coast full of submerged rocks and shallows, and the army by routes that were impassable or enormous detours through country with nothing in it. Gallus had begun by building eighty warships for a naval campaign that was never going to happen — the Arabians, Strabo observes, being traders and not a very warlike people even on land, much less at sea — and then had to build a hundred and thirty transports instead. He reached Leuke Kome in fifteen days having lost many ships and their crews, without ever meeting an enemy, and then had to winter there because the army had come down with two local diseases, one affecting the mouth and one paralysing the legs, which Strabo attributes to the water and the plants they had been eating.

And then the sentence that gives the whole affair away. Syllaeus had insisted there was no land road to Leuke Kome. In fact, Strabo says, the camel-traders went to and from Petra by that road easily and in safety, with so large a body of men and camels as to differ in no respect from an army.

Petra, Jordan · Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, Volume III (1857) · Photograph: Michael Gunther · CC BY-SA 3.0

Strabo's explanation is that Syllaeus meant to spy out the country, use the Romans to destroy rival cities and tribes, and then make himself master of everything once famine and disease had finished them. He adds that king Obodas paid little attention to public business — as, he says, is the custom with all Arabian kings — and had put everything into the minister's hands.

That may be true. It is also exactly what a Roman general who had lost most of an army without fighting anybody would want said about him, and Strabo had it from the general.

What is not in doubt is the last item in the account, and it is the kingdom's future. Goods came from Leuke Kome to Petra and from Petra to Rhinocolura on the Egyptian frontier and thence to everybody else — but at present, Strabo writes, the greater part goes up the Nile to Alexandria instead, landed at Myos Hormos and carried by camel to Coptos. The route had moved. Petra was still rich, still orderly, still the place where foreigners went to law and the locals did not; and the traffic it existed to tax was already going somewhere else.

The alphabet

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Healey, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 136 (2001)

The Nabataeans wrote Aramaic. Everyone in the Near East wrote Aramaic; it had been the administrative language of the Near East from the Achaemenids onward. What the Nabataeans did was develop their own cursive hand for it — letters that lean, join and simplify in ways the square Aramaic of the chancery does not.

Musée du Louvre, AO 4991 · Healey, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 136 (2001) · Photograph: Luistxo · CC BY-SA 4.0

That hand is the ancestor of the Arabic alphabet.

The chain can be followed. Nabataean inscriptions at Petra and Hegra; then a set of transitional texts running down through the Hejaz and up into Syria, in which the letterforms progressively become Arabic while the language shifts from Aramaic to Arabic underneath them; then the earliest inscriptions everyone agrees are Arabic. The Namara epitaph of 328, which names its subject king of all the Arabs, is in Nabataean script and Arabic language and sits in the middle of the sequence.

Hegra, Saudi Arabia · Healey, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 136 (2001) · Photograph: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

What kind of descent this is

There are two ways one script can come out of another. It can be adapted — taken over more or less as it stands and used to write a different language — or the letters themselves can change shape, generation by generation, until they are different letters. This is the second kind, and the strongest form of it: the intermediate stages survive on stone, and the shapes can be watched turning into each other.

Healey, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 136 (2001) · Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, 1902 · Public domain

The writing system of a quarter of the world's population comes out of the cursive bookkeeping hand of a caravan kingdom.

The rival claim

There is a competing tradition and it is not a fringe one.

Later Arabic writers derive the script from al-Hira and al-Anbar on the Euphrates, name the men who devised it, and name the man who carried it to Mecca. That account is old, circumstantial and internally consistent, and it was the standard view for a long time.

The epigraphic evidence does not support it. The transitional inscriptions are in the west, not in Iraq, and the letterforms come out of Nabataean.

So the credit belongs to a kingdom that had been extinct for two hundred years by the time the Namara stone was cut, rather than to the Arab court at al-Hira that the later Arabic writers name. It is an uncomfortable result — the tradition is old, circumstantial and specific, and it has to be set aside on the strength of letter shapes — but the letter shapes are what there is.

What the script did not carry with it

Nabataean Aramaic the language died. The kingdom's own inscriptions are in it, its coins are in it, and by the fourth century the people writing in the descendant script are writing Arabic.

That is the ordinary shape of these things and it is worth stating. A script outlives the language it was invented for, and goes on carrying whatever is spoken next. The Nabataeans left no state, no successor and no literature — and the hand their clerks used for receipts is now used for the Qur'an.

A centurion at the White Village

contractionDrafted from Anonymous, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century (1912)

A Greek merchant's sailing handbook of the mid-first century describes the Red Sea coast port by port, and its notice of the Nabataean kingdom is four sentences long. It is one of the most informative things anybody wrote about what had happened to Petra.

Two or three days east of Berenice, he says, there is a harbour and fortified place called White Village, from which there is a road to Petra, which is subject to Malichus king of the Nabataeans. It serves as a market-town for the small vessels sent there from Arabia.

Anonymous, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century (1912) · NASA / MODIS · Public domain

Then: and so a centurion is stationed there as a collector of one-fourth of the merchandise imported, with an armed force, as a garrison.

What that sentence contains

A Roman officer, with troops, inside the territory of an independent allied kingdom, taking a quarter of the value of everything landed.

The Nabataean state was a customs operation. Its whole existence — the water cisterns cut across the desert, the caravan stages, the carved city in the gorge — was financed by charging for the safe passage of other people's goods. Whoever collected the duty at the ports was the state.

And by the time this handbook was written, at one of those ports, the collector was a centurion.

There is no record of a war that produced this, no treaty anybody quotes, no moment when the kingdom lost anything. The king is still named as the king; the road to Petra is still his; Malichus is a real monarch with a real capital. He simply no longer collected the harbour dues at White Village, and the man who did had soldiers.

Anonymous, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century (1912) · W. H. Schoff, 1912 · Public domain

The other half of the problem

The same book explains why the loss mattered so much and why it was not recoverable.

The whole of the rest of the handbook is about ships. It describes the direct run from Egypt to India on the monsoon, the ports of the Malabar coast, what sold at each, and the sailing seasons — a trade route that had been in serious operation for perhaps two generations and which did not touch Nabataean territory at any point.

Anonymous, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century (1912) · From Schoff, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, 1912 · Public domain

Incense and pepper had once gone north overland from Arabia through the caravan stages, and every stage was somebody's revenue. Now the bulk of it went by sea to Egyptian ports, and what reached the Nabataeans was the residue: small vessels from Arabia, landing at a harbour where a Roman took a quarter.

Anonymous, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century (1912) · Photograph: K Hari Krishnan · CC BY-SA 3.0

A state that lived on a road was outlasted by a sea route, and then taxed on what was left of the road by the power that owned the sea route. The annexation in 106 removed a kingdom that had already stopped being able to pay for itself.

106

endDrafted from Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983)

Rabbel II died and Trajan made the kingdom into the province of Arabia. That is very nearly the whole of what can be said about it.

There is no account of a war. No Roman writer describes a campaign, no triumph was celebrated, and the emperor took no title from it. The provincial coinage carries the legend Arabia adquisita — Arabia acquired — where a conquered province would say capta. What is on the other side is that the Legio III Cyrenaica moved down from Egypt, a Roman garrison appears at Hegra seven hundred kilometres south, and a papyrus from the Judaean desert dates by the year the province was created without saying how.

Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Portable Antiquities Scheme · CC BY-SA 4.0

Bowersock's reading is that the annexation was essentially administrative: a client kingship of a hundred and sixty-nine years' standing was wound up when its last king died, by an empire that had been the effective overlord throughout. Calling it a conquest would assert a campaign nobody recorded.

Bostra

Trajan moved the centre north. Bostra in the Hawran became the provincial capital and the legionary base, the Via Nova Traiana was cut from Bostra to the Red Sea, and the province was administered from grain country rather than from a gorge.

Bosra, Syria · Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

Petra kept a ceremonial standing, received the title of metropolis, and stopped being the point of anything. It was still inhabited for centuries — there are Byzantine churches there, and a burnt archive of sixth-century papyri found in one of them — and it was no longer a place through which things had to pass.

Bosra, Syria · Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983) · Photograph: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

That is the ordinary fate of a state built on a chokepoint. It is only a state while the route matters and while nobody larger controls both ends. Rome took both ends.

What is left

Two things, and the disproportion between them is the whole summary.

The kingdom's political achievement was to survive a hundred and sixty-nine years inside the Roman system without being absorbed — longer than any comparable client in the east managed — and it ended in an administrative act that produced no narrative at all. Nobody put a figure on its territory or its population. Nobody wrote down how it ended.

Its other achievement is that a quarter of the world writes in a script descended from its bookkeeping hand.

Those are not commensurable, and there is no honest way to average them. A kingdom can be politically negligible and leave the alphabet.

Repeated victories

afterlifeDrafted from Marcellinus, The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus (1902)

Two and a half centuries after the kingdom ended, a Roman staff officer wrote a short description of the province that replaced it, and he says something about the annexation that is not what the modern account says.

Ammianus Marcellinus is describing the eastern provinces one after another. Arabia, he writes, is a land full of the most plenteous variety of merchandise, and studded with strong forts and castles which the watchful care of its ancient inhabitants erected in suitable defiles, in order to repress the inroads of neighbouring nations. Besides its many towns it has some mighty cities: Bostra, Gerasa, Philadelphia, fortified with very strong walls.

Jerash, Jordan · Marcellinus, The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus (1902) · Photograph: Azurfrog · CC BY-SA 3.0

Amman, Jordan · Marcellinus, The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus (1902) · Photograph: AliAbuRas · CC BY-SA 4.0

Then the sentence about how it was acquired. It was Trajan who first gave this country the name of a Roman province, appointed a governor over it, and compelled it to obey Roman law — after having by repeated victories crushed the arrogance of the inhabitants, when he was carrying his arms into Media and Parthia.

What is odd about that

The annexation of 106 is usually described as quiet. No source narrates a war; no triumph was celebrated for it; there is nothing that reads like a campaign. The Nabataean kingdom appears to have been absorbed at the death of its last king with something closer to administration than to conquest.

Ammianus, who was a serving officer with access to army tradition and who is generally careful about the eastern frontier, records repeated victories and crushed arrogance.

Both things cannot be flatly true, and the disagreement is worth leaving standing rather than resolving. A Roman officer of the fourth century believed that Arabia had been taken by fighting. Either something happened in 106 that left no trace in the surviving narrative sources, or the army's own memory had converted an administrative absorption into a conquest, because a province without a conquest is an anomaly and armies do not keep anomalies.

The forts

The rest of the passage is the more interesting survival, and it is not contested at all.

The strong forts and castles in the defiles were built, Ammianus says, by the ancient inhabitants — the Nabataeans — to keep raiders out. He is writing in the 380s and describing them as a present feature of the province: still standing, still positioned where they were needed, still doing the job they were built for.

Qasr Bshir, Jordan · Marcellinus, The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus (1902) · Photograph: Kariman Mango · CC BY-SA 4.0

That is what the kingdom actually left. Not a dynasty, not a claim, not a successor: a functioning security system for a caravan country, inherited intact by an empire that kept using it, along with the cities and the merchandise. Rome had annexed a going concern and went on running it in more or less the shape it was handed over in.

What is not in the passage

One absence is worth noting, because it is the kind of absence that tells you what a source is for.

Ammianus names the cities of the province — Bostra, Gerasa, Philadelphia — and does not name Petra. The carved capital in the gorge, the thing the kingdom is now known for, is simply not among the places a fourth-century officer thought worth listing when describing Arabia to a Roman readership.

It was still inhabited. It had a bishop. But the centre of the province had moved north to Bostra, where the governor and the legion were, and the caravan capital had become one town among several in a country whose importance was now its position on the frontier rather than its position on a road.