Nabataeans
The Nabataeans, also spelled Nabateans were an ancient Arab people who inhabited northern Arabia and the southern Levant. Their settlements—most prominently the assumed capital city of Raqmu —gave the name Nabatene to the Arabian borderland that stretched from the Euphrates to the Red Sea. The Nabateans emerged as a distinct civilization and political entity between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC, with their kingdom centered around a loosely controlled trading network that brought considerable wealth and influence across the ancient world.
Described as fiercely independent by contemporary Greco-Roman accounts, the Nabataeans were annexed into the Roman Empire by Emperor Trajan in 106 AD. Nabataeans' individual culture, easily identified by their characteristic finely potted painted ceramics, was adopted into the larger Greco-Roman culture. They converted to Christianity during the Byzantine period. They have been described as one of the most gifted peoples of the ancient world and one of the "most unjustly forgotten".
Name
The name of the Nabataeans may be derived from the same root as Akkadian nabatu, to shine brightly. Proper names on their inscriptions suggest that they were ethnically Arabs who had come under Aramaic influence, and the Nabataeans had already some trace of Aramaic culture when they first appear in history.It is debated whether the Nabataeans identified with an Arab ethnicity or called themselves Arabs. Nabataeans, in their own inscriptions, only call themselves nbṭw, and see themselves as a distinct socio-political entity distinct from that of other groups. External sources contradict each other, sometimes describing Nabataeans as Arabs, sometimes distinguishing them from Arabs. For example, Josephus calls them Arabs, but his source of information, 1 Maccabees, makes the Nabataeans and Arabs as two separate groups, and inferring the original self-identity of the Nabataeans from the sources is considered a challenging problem.
Language
Nabataeans spoke Arabic as their native language.Nabataeans were diglossic, with the main spoken language being Nabataean Arabic, a form of Old Arabic, which did not originally have its own written alphabet. For writing, they used a form of the Aramaic alphabet, that developed over time into Nabataean Aramaic, and was heavily influenced by Arabic forms and words.
As traders, they were also multilingual, with some degree of proficiency in Aramaic, Greek, other local Ancient Arabic languages and perhaps Latin. Some of the authors of Safaitic inscriptions identify themselves as Nabataeans. When communicating with other Middle Eastern peoples, they, like their neighbors, used Aramaic, the region's lingua franca. Therefore, Aramaic was used for commercial and official purposes across the Nabataean political sphere.
Standard and Classical Arabic grew out of the Old Arabic of the Nabateans.
Script
The Nabataean alphabet developed out of Imperial Aramaic, developing a distinctive cursive variant out of Aramaic square script from which the Arabic alphabet eventually emerged. There are different opinions concerning the development of the Arabic script. J. Starcky considers the Lakhmids' Syriac form script as a probable candidate. However, John F. Healey states "The Nabataean origin of the Arabic script is now almost universally accepted". In surviving Nabataean documents, Aramaic legal terms are followed by their equivalents in Arabic. That could suggest that the Nabataeans used Arabic in their legal proceedings but recorded them in Aramaic.History
Hellenistic period
The Nabataeans were an Arab tribe who had come under significant Babylonian-Aramaean influence. The first mention of the Nabataeans dates from 312/311 BC, when they were attacked at Sela or perhaps at Petra without success by the Hellene-Greek Antigonus I's officer Athenaeus in the course of the Third War of the Diadochi; at that time Hieronymus of Cardia, a Seleucid officer, mentions the Nabataeans in a battle report. Greek historian Diodorus Siculus includes an excerpt of Hieronymus' report in his circa 50 BCE work, The Library of World Historyand adds the following: "Just as the Seleucids had tried to subdue them, so the Romans made several attempts to get their hands on that lucrative trade.". The architecture has Hellenic influence.They wrote a letter to Antigonus in Syriac letters, and Aramaic continued as the language of their coins and inscriptions when the tribe grew into a kingdom and profited by the decay of the Seleucids to extend its borders northward over the more fertile country east of the Jordan River. They occupied Hauran, and in about 85 BC their king Aretas III became lord of Damascus and Coele-Syria.
The Abgarids and Osroene in Mesopotamia
The kingdom of Osroene in Upper Mesopotamia, with its capital at Edessa, was founded in 134 BCE in the aftermath of the collapse of the Seleucid Empire by a Nabataean tribe, with the ruling dynasty, the Abgarids, coming from their numbers. It shifted between semi-autonomy and independence, then being a client state of the Parthian Empire and the Roman Empire, to being fully incorporated into the latter as a province in 214 CE.Nabataean Kingdom
Petra was rapidly built in the 1st century BC and developed a population estimated at 20,000. The Nabataeans were allies of the first Hasmoneans in their struggles against the Seleucid monarchs. They then became rivals of the Judaean dynasty and a chief element in the disorders that invited Pompey's intervention in Judaea. Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus, after putting down a local rebellion, invaded and occupied the Nabataean towns of Moab and Gilead and imposed a tribute. Obodas I knew that Alexander would attack, so was able to ambush Alexander's forces near Gaulane destroying the Judaean army in 90 BC.The Roman military was not very successful in their campaigns against the Nabataeans. In 62 BC, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus accepted a bribe of 300 talents to lift the siege of Petra, partly because of the difficult terrain and the fact that he had run out of supplies. Hyrcanus II, who was a friend of King Aretas, was despatched by Scaurus to the king to buy peace. In so obtaining peace, Aretas retained all his possessions, including Damascus, and became a Roman vassal.
In 32 BC, during King Malichus I's reign, Herod the Great, with the support of Cleopatra, started a war against Nabataea. The war began with Herod plundering Nabataea with a large cavalry force and occupying Dium. After this defeat, the Nabataean forces regrouped near Canatha in Syria but were attacked and routed. Cleopatra's general Athenion sent Canathans to the aid of the Nabataeans, and this force crushed Herod's army, which then fled to Ormiza. One year later, Herod's army overran Nabataea.
After an earthquake in Judaea, the Nabateans rebelled and invaded Judaea, but Herod at once crossed the Jordan River to Philadelphia, and both sides set up camp. The Nabataeans under Elthemus refused to give battle, so Herod forced the issue when he attacked their camp. A confused mass of Nabataeans gave battle but were defeated. Once they had retreated to their defences, Herod laid siege to the camp, and over time some of the defenders surrendered. The remaining Nabataean forces offered 500 talents for peace, but this was rejected. Lacking water, the Nabataeans were forced out of their camp and battled but were defeated. King Aretas IV defeated Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, in a battle after he intended to divorce his daughter Phasaelis
Roman period
An ally of the Roman Empire, the Nabataean kingdom flourished throughout the 1st century. Its power extended far into Arabia along the Red Sea to Yemen, and Petra was a cosmopolitan marketplace, though its commerce was diminished by the rise of the Eastern trade route from Myos Hormos to Coptos on the Nile. Under the Pax Romana, the Nabataeans lost their warlike and nomadic habits and became a sober, acquisitive, orderly people, wholly intent on trade and agriculture. The kingdom was a bulwark between Rome and the wild hordes of the desert except in the time of Trajan, who reduced Petra and converted the Nabataean client state into the Roman province of Arabia Petraea in 105. There was a Nabataean community in Puteoli, in southern Italy, that reached its end around the establishment of the province.Five Greek-Nabataean bilingual inscriptions, known as the Ruwafa inscriptions, date to AD 165–169. Ascribed to an auxiliary military unit drawn from the Roman-allied Thamud tribe, they describe the temple in which they were placed and recognize the authority of the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus.
By the 3rd century the Nabataeans had stopped writing in Aramaic and begun writing in Greek. By the 5th century they had converted to Christianity. Their lands were divided between the new Qahtanite Arab tribal kingdoms of the Byzantine vassals, the Ghassanid Arabs, and the Himyarite vassals, the Kingdom of Kinda in North Arabia.
Culture
Many examples of graffiti and inscriptions—largely of names and greetings—document the area of Nabataean culture, which extended as far north as the north end of the Dead Sea, and testify to widespread literacy; but except for a few letters no Nabataean literature has survived, nor was any noted in antiquity. Onomastic analysis has suggested that Nabataean culture may have had multiple influences. Classical references to the Nabataeans begin with Diodorus Siculus. They suggest that the Nabataeans' trade routes and the origins of their goods were regarded as trade secrets, and disguised in tales that should have strained outsiders' credulity.Diodorus Siculus describes them as a strong tribe of some 10,000 warriors, preeminent among the nomads of Arabia, eschewing agriculture, fixed houses, and the use of wine, but adding to pastoral pursuits a profitable trade with the seaports in frankincense, myrrh and spices from Arabia Felix, as well as a trade with Egypt in bitumen from the Dead Sea. Their arid country was their best safeguard, for the bottle-shaped cisterns for rain-water which they excavated in the rocky or clay-rich soil were carefully concealed from invaders.
Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq's Kitab al-Tabikh, the earliest known Arabic cookbook, contains a recipe for fermented Nabatean water bread. The yeast-leavened bread is made with a high quality wheat flour called samidh that is finely milled and free of bran and is baked in a tandoor.