Tayma

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The water comes up at Bir Haddaj, in a wide stone mouth at the center of the town, and around it the palms stand in their gardens as they have stood for some twenty-five centuries. The well is among the oldest in the peninsula, and the town it feeds is older still. North and east of it the Nafud begins, the red sand-sea that travelers crossed only by the wells, and Tayma was the great well on that road — the place where the caravans halted, where water was given to the thirsty, and where, in the desert at the edge of the empires, gods and kings came to dwell.

The oasis and its wall

Tayma lies in the Tabuk region of northwestern Saudi Arabia, on the western margin of the Nafud desert, near the latitude 27.63° north and the longitude 38.55° east. It is an oasis in the strict sense: a place where ground water rises within reach in a country that has almost none, and where that water turns a patch of sand into a garden of palms and grain. The Saudi-German excavation that has worked the site since 2004, under the German Archaeological Institute, has traced permanent settlement here to the middle of the third millennium before the common era, and the painted pottery known as Qurayyah ware ties the oasis into the trade of the Late Bronze Age, when its wares reached the southern Levant and Sinai.

What sets Tayma apart from a hundred lesser watering-places is its wall. The excavators have followed an outer fortification that runs some eighteen kilometers and encloses on the order of a thousand hectares — not a citadel but a whole agricultural territory, gardens and wells and town together, ringed against the desert and against whoever might come out of it. The dating is debated, as old walls in shifting sand always are; luminescence dates from the dunes banked against it and radiocarbon dates from organic matter in its mudbrick have been read as early as the third or second millennium BCE, with a major perimeter raised on three sides of the old city in the sixth century BCE. However the phases sort out, the meaning is plain: Tayma was wealthy enough, early enough, to be worth walling on a scale unusual for inland Arabia. Its wealth was water and the road. Set where the track between the Hijaz and Mesopotamia begins to cross the Nafud, the oasis sat astride the long caravan route that carried the frankincense and myrrh of the south north toward Babylon and the Levant — the incense road, on which Tayma was one of the indispensable stations.

The trade itself was the lifeblood. Down the western flank of Arabia ran the great road of the aromatics, the route by which the South Arabian kingdoms sent their frankincense and myrrh — the resins burned in every temple of the ancient world — north to the markets of the empires. The caravans moved oasis to oasis, well to well, and Tayma sat at the head of the Nafud crossing, where the road from the Hijaz turned toward Dumah and the Mesopotamian plain. The merchant-states of the south, the Minaeans above all, planted trading colonies the length of that road; the oases that fed it grew rich on the passage of goods that neither began nor ended in them. Tayma was such an oasis. Its gardens fed the caravans and its wells watered them, and the tolls and the trade made it, for an inland desert town, conspicuously wealthy.

That importance shows in the records of others long before any local king left his name. The Assyrian archives know the place. A governor of Suhu and Mari on the middle Euphrates boasts of falling upon a caravan of Tayma and its neighbors and seizing its goods; the gate-inscriptions of Sennacherib at Nineveh list “the gifts of the people of Sumuʾil and Tema” among the tribute that entered the city. The oasis appears, too, in the Hebrew scriptures, under the name Tema. It is reckoned among the sons of Ishmael, the desert peoples of the trade. The prophet pictures its inhabitants carrying water out to the fugitive: “Bring water for the thirsty, O inhabitants of the land of Tema,” reads the oracle of Isaiah 21:14. And Job, in his bitterness, names “the caravans of Tema” that look for water and are disappointed — the very image of the desert merchant who reaches the well and finds it dry. The town was old enough, and rich enough on the road, to be a fixed point in the imagination of its neighbors: the oasis where one drank.

A surviving stretch of the great perimeter wall of Tayma, which once enclosed roughly a thousand hectares of town and garden. Heritage Commission of Saudi Arabia, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The god of Tayma and the king of Babylon

Within the wall, the oasis kept its own gods, and one above the others. The lord of Tayma was Salm, a deity whose cult is fixed for us by a single extraordinary monument: the stone that the French traveler Charles Huber saw in the oasis in the 1880s and that came afterward to the Louvre, where it is held in the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities as AO 1505. The Tayma stone is a slab a little over a meter high, carved with a relief and inscribed with twenty-three lines in Aramaic, the chancery language that the empires of the north had spread across the whole crescent of the desert. It is a foundation document. The inscription tells how a priest, Salm-shezeb son of Pet-osiri — the second name Egyptian, a sign of how far the threads of this trading world reached — introduced into Tayma the god Salm of Hagam; how the existing gods of the oasis, Salm of Mahram and Shingala and Ashira, received the newcomer among them; how the new god’s temple was endowed with land and revenue; and how the priest secured the priesthood for his own descendants in perpetuity. It is, in a few lines, the constitution of a cult: a god installed, a sanctuary funded, a hereditary office established. The relief shows a figure beneath a winged disk and, below, a priest standing at an altar before the emblem of a bull — the god worshiped not as a man-shaped statue alone but through the symbols, the disk and the horned beast, that the religions of the whole Near East used for their powers of sky and storm.

Salm is one of those Arabian powers whose nature the modern reader can only approach from the outside, through the stones. The name itself has been read as meaning “image” or the carved likeness of a god, and the deity is attested at Tayma and at a few other northern oases, sometimes in more than one local form — Salm of Mahram, Salm of Hagam — as though the one god were honored under the titles of the several sanctuaries that held him. Whether Salm was a solar god, a moon-god, or a power of another kind is not fixed by the inscriptions; the bull and the winged disk on the stone point to the great symbolic vocabulary of the region without settling the question. What the stone does fix, beyond argument, is the shape of the worship: a temple within the oasis, a god received among the older gods, offerings and revenues assigned, and a family set apart to serve at the altar in their generations. The cult of Salm is the religion of Tayma rendered in its own act, the moment a god was given a house in the desert.

Here, then, was a working cult in a working oasis, the god Salm receiving his offerings at the edge of the great sand. And into that settled world, in the sixth century before the common era, came a stranger of the highest rank. Nabonidus, Nabu-naʾid, the last king of Babylon, reigned from 556 to 539 BCE, and for roughly a third of that reign he was not in Babylon at all. He was at Tayma. The Babylonian sources — the Nabonidus Chronicle, and the hostile pamphlet that scholars call the Verse Account — record that the king left his capital and his throne in the care of his son Belshazzar and withdrew into Arabia, establishing himself at the oasis. The chronology is read from those texts: a departure around 553 BCE, settlement at Tayma by 552, and a return only about a decade later, in 543 or 542. For ten years a Mesopotamian king held court in an Arabian oasis, and the desert station that fed the caravans fed a royal household and, it seems, a garrison; the great perimeter wall’s sixth-century phase is often connected to his presence.

Why a king abandoned the center of the world for its margin is among the standing questions of the period, and the answers offered are several rather than one. Nabonidus was a devotee of the moon-god Sin, whose great temples stood at Ur and at Harran, and whose promotion above the city’s other powers had set the king at odds with the priesthood of Babylon; some read the withdrawal as the act of a man more at home with his god than with his capital, drawn perhaps to a region where the moon was honored. Others read it as cold strategy — the seizing of the incense road and its oases, a commercial empire in the desert, or a base from which to hold the northwest against the rising power of Cyrus and the Persians. The motives are contested; the fact is not. The cuneiform record is exact, and inscriptions from the region name him king of Babylon. For a decade the person of an emperor lay in the sand of Arabia.

That strangeness did not pass out of memory. Centuries later, among the scrolls hidden in the caves above the Dead Sea, a fragmentary Aramaic text was found that scholars call the Prayer of Nabonidus, cataloged as 4Q242. In it the king tells, in the first person, how he was stricken with a grievous affliction “for seven years” while he was at Teima, until a Jewish exile bade him give honor to the Most High God, and he was healed. The text is legend, not chronicle — it has plainly grown in the retelling, and it stands close to the story told of Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel, where a Babylonian king is driven from men for seven years and restored. But its kernel is the historical memory that the last king of Babylon had once gone away to the Arabian oasis and stayed there long. The withdrawal to Tayma was odd enough, even at the time, that it became a story the exiles told and retold, a king in the wilderness, healed at the edge of the desert.

The Tayma (Teima) stone, Louvre AO 1505: a foundation inscription in Aramaic establishing the cult of Salm of Hagam, with a relief of the god beneath a winged disk and a priest at the altar. Photograph by Jastrow, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

What the oasis became

After Nabonidus the oasis did not fade. Under the Achaemenid peace and after it, Tayma passed for a time into the orbit of the nearby kingdom of Dedan and its Lihyanite dynasts, and statues found in one of the temples here match the carved figures known from Dedan — the oasis drawn into the sphere of the north-Arabian kingdoms that flourished along the same caravan road. Later still, when the Nabataeans of Petra extended their control over the trade routes and built their carved city of Hegra to the south, Tayma lay within the reach of that hold, a station on the route the Nabataeans worked. Through all of it the wells kept running and the wall kept its line in the sand, and the inscriptions accumulated — Aramaic, Taymanitic, Dadanitic, Thamudic, Nabataean — until the rocks around the oasis carried the writing of half a dozen scripts and as many centuries. That density of writing is itself a kind of monument. Few places in inland Arabia preserve so long and so layered a record of the languages that crossed it, the imperial Aramaic of the chancelleries beside the local desert alphabets in which the people of the oasis and the herders around it cut their own names and prayers into the sandstone. To read the rocks of Tayma is to read, in succession, the scripts of everyone who watered there.

The recovery of Tayma for the modern eye began with the travelers. Charles Doughty crossed to it in 1877 and mapped it; Charles Huber and the German Julius Euting reached the stone of Salm in the 1880s, and it was carried off to Paris. For a long while that great stele, sitting in a European gallery, was nearly the whole of what the oasis meant to scholarship — a single famous object, cut loose from the place that made it. Only with the long Saudi-German campaign begun in 2004 has the oasis itself been read: the perimeter wall surveyed and dated, the deep history of settlement pushed back into the third millennium, the temples and the wells and the changing climate of the desert reconstructed season by season, and published in the volumes of the excavation. The town that the Assyrians taxed and the prophets named and a Babylonian king lived in has become, slowly, a site one can describe rather than merely invoke.

It takes its place now among the great pre-Islamic sites of the Arabian northwest, but its face is its own. It is not a rock-cut necropolis and not a capital guarded by a dam; it is the oasis itself, the well in the desert that made everything else possible. Here the script of Aramaic, the gods of the north Arabian sands, and the history of the Mesopotamian empires all left their mark within one walled garden. The god Salm is silent now, his temple traced only in foundations and his image gone to Paris on its stone. But the water still comes up at Bir Haddaj, and the palms still stand, and the line of the great wall still runs out into the Nafud — the oasis keeping, in stone and water, the memory of the road that made it and the king who came to its quiet.

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