Civilization

The Nabataeans

The Arab caravan people of northwestern Arabia and the southern Levant who carved Petra and Hegra from the rock, mastered the incense road and the desert's rare water, worshiped Dushara in the standing stone, and wrote the cursive Aramaic that became the Arabic script.

The merchant who arrived at Puteoli, the great harbor of the bay of Naples, off a ship that had come up from the eastern Mediterranean, set up an altar so that his god might travel with him. The stone he raised on Italian soil names Dushara, and beside the name stands the form in which that god was carried wherever the trade went: not a statue, not a face, but a block. A people of the deep desert had learned to move frankincense and asphalt and pepper across two thousand miles of water and sand, and they moved their god the same way they moved everything else — compact, durable, unmistakable, cut to a clean edge. The Nabataeans were caravaneers before they were anything else, and the habit of the road is legible even in how they imagined the divine.

They were an Arab people of the northwestern Arabian and southern Levantine deserts — the Negev, the old land of Edom, the rim of the Hijaz — who rose into the historical record in the last centuries before the common era and held it until Rome took their kingdom in 106 CE. This entry follows the people themselves: where they came from, the gods they kept and the stone they kept them in, and what survived them. The polity they raised — its kings, its provincial afterlife, its waterworks reconstructed channel by channel — is treated under the Nabataean Kingdom, and its two carved cities under Petra and Hegra.

Genealogy: nomads of the incense road

The Nabataeans enter the written record abruptly and from the outside. In 312 BCE one of the generals contesting the empire of Alexander, Antigonus the One-Eyed, sent armies twice against a people of the steppe south and east of the Dead Sea, and twice the expeditions came to grief. The account survives in Diodorus Siculus, who drew on an eyewitness, the officer Hieronymus of Cardia. Diodorus describes them as nomads of some ten thousand fighting men who sowed no grain, planted no fruit tree, drank no wine, and built no house — and who held it a capital matter to do any of these things, lest a settled possession give an enemy a hold over them. What they had instead were cisterns hollowed and sealed in the rock of the steppe, hidden from any invader and known to themselves alone, and a lucrative traffic in frankincense, myrrh, and other fragrant goods carried up out of the south of Arabia. The two foundations of everything they became are already in this first notice: a mastery of hidden water, and a grip on the long road of aromatics.

Their origin behind that first notice is obscure, as the origins of desert peoples generally are. Their own everyday speech was a form of Arabic; the personal names in their inscriptions are overwhelmingly Arabian. The Edomite hill country they came to occupy had been emptied or absorbed, and the Nabataeans settled into it and onto the trade routes that crossed it, a people of the camel and the caravan who over a few generations turned the profits of the road into a kingdom. They did not, for the most part, grow the incense they sold or sail it across the sea. They moved it across the killing ground in the middle — the waterless stretches that a rival caravan could not cross without knowing where the cisterns lay — and they took their cut at every stage. The same advantage governed a second commodity that the classical writers found nearly as remarkable: the bitumen of the Dead Sea, the natural asphalt that rose in great floating masses from the depths of the lake, which the Nabataeans gathered from reed boats and sold across the Mediterranean to caulk ships and embalm the dead. Diodorus notes that their king drew no small revenue from it. A people that began with nothing but the knowledge of where water and asphalt and the incense road could be found made themselves indispensable to everyone who wanted what only they could deliver.

The kingdom in stone: Petra, Hegra, and the desert’s water

Out of the caravan trade the Nabataeans built a kingdom, and out of the kingdom they built the thing for which they are most remembered: a civilization carved into living rock. Its capital was Petra — Raqmu in their own Aramaic — set in the red sandstone mountains of Edom, where the southern trade was gathered, taxed, and forwarded north toward the Mediterranean ports. There they cut into the cliffs an entire monumental landscape: tomb after tomb fronted with carved facades that fuse a Hellenistic vocabulary of columns and pediments with elements that belong to no other place — the stepped crow’s-foot merlon, the horned capital — and, high on the ridges above the valley, the open-air sanctuaries where the city worshiped under the sky.

Some four hundred kilometers to the southeast, in the deserts of the Hijaz, they raised a second city at Hegra — al-Ḥijr, today’s Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ — the southern seat of the kingdom and the largest concentration of Nabataean funerary architecture outside the capital. More than a hundred monumental tombs were cut into the sandstone outcrops there, many of them inscribed with dated dedications that name the tomb’s owner, the artisan who carved it, and the year of a reigning king. These inscriptions are the richest single source for Nabataean law and religion, because so many of them end in a curse: the tomb belongs to its owner and named heirs in perpetuity, and whoever sells, leases, alters, or is wrongly buried in it shall owe a fine — payable, the texts specify, partly to the king and partly to the god — and shall answer to Dushara and to the goddess for the violation of the grave. The dead were kept under the gods’ protection and the violator under the gods’ curse, cut into the rock for as long as the rock should stand. In 2008 Hegra became the first site in Saudi Arabia inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, recognized for these decorated facades, the wells sunk to water the settlement, and the epigraphic record they hold.

A monumental rock-cut Nabataean tomb facade at Hegra in northwestern Arabia. Qasr al-Farid, an unfinished first-century-CE tomb cut from a single sandstone outcrop at Hegra (Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ), Saudi Arabia. Richard Mortel, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

What made any of it possible was water. The places the Nabataeans chose to settle receive only a few inches of rain a year, all of it in brief and violent storms, and the genius of the people lay in refusing to let a single inch of it escape. They cut cisterns in the hundreds, open basins to gather sheet runoff and deep chambers plastered watertight; they laid terracotta pipe along channels graded to a deliberate shallow slope that held the flow just below the speed at which it would scour the joints or drop its silt; they raised dams and diversion works to turn a flash flood aside from a city’s heart and send it harmlessly down a side wadi. The same techniques followed the caravan routes out into the Negev, where Nabataean runoff farming coaxed grain from valleys that should have grown nothing. Water was at once infrastructure, weapon, and the basis of a settled civilization improbably planted in stone and sand: the engineering underwrote the trade, and the trade paid for the carving of the rock.

Dushara in the stone, and the goddesses of the Arabs

The religion of the Nabataeans is the best-documented of the pre-Islamic Arabian cults of the north, and almost uniquely it is known from the inside — from the kingdom’s own dedications and tomb-curses, its sanctuaries, and its iconography, rather than chiefly from later outside report. At its head stood Dushara, Dhū al-Sharā, “He of the Shara,” named for the mountain range east of Petra: lord of the heights, protector of the dynasty and the people, the god in whose name the kingdom acted and to whom the violated tomb answered. Beside him the inscriptions name a circle of goddesses who are the great powers of the wider Arabian world. There is Allat, whose name is simply the Goddess, the most widely worshiped goddess across Arabia, whom the Nabataeans and their neighbors set beside the Greek Athena. There is al-Uzza, the Mightiest, identified with the planet Venus as the morning and evening star and assimilated in the cosmopolitan ports to Aphrodite and to Isis — a goddess of the same astral family as the Mesopotamian Ishtar and the Levantine Astarte, without being any of them. And there is Manat — Manōtu in the Nabataean texts — the oldest of the three and the apportioner of fate and death, who stands beside Dushara in the Hegra curses as guardian of the grave. Through the traffic of the caravan the Nabataeans took foreign gods into their cities too, worshiping Isis and a Dionysus-like deity at Petra alongside their own.

The oldest and most distinctive layer of this religion was aniconic. The god was present not in a human likeness but in the betyl — the worked standing stone, the squared block set up in a niche or carved in relief on a sanctuary wall. The word descends from the Northwest Semitic bēt-ʾēl, “house of god,” and the cult of the sacred standing stone reaches back into the older West Semitic world of the Levant, the same matrix from which the Phoenicians and Canaanites carried their high god El and his rites across the Mediterranean. Many Nabataean betyls are entirely plain; others reduce a face to rectangular or star-shaped eyes and a nose, with no mouth — a deliberate abstraction of the divine presence into geometry and stone. The god was the block, and the block was the god. Anthropomorphic statues of the Nabataean deities appear only in the later, Romanizing centuries, an overlay on a far older stratum in which the holy was figured by the unhewn or barely hewn stone. Worship was conducted at temples, at rock-cut high places, and before these god-blocks: a libation of water or wine poured out, frankincense burned — the very commodity the trade was built on — the smoke rising from the same stone the caravan would carry to the next station.

A Nabataean betyl, the squared standing stone in which the god was present without an image. A Nabataean betyl — the aniconic god-block in which a deity such as Dushara was held to be present without a carved likeness. Photo Bjorn Anderson, University of Iowa, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The reach of these gods can be measured by where their names turn up. The merchant’s altar at Puteoli is one marker; another is a single Nabataean inscription in which the name Hubal — the god later remembered as lord of the sanctuary at distant Mecca — appears in association with Dushara, one of the very few early epigraphic traces of that name and a measure of how the Nabataean record anchors the wider, thinner picture of Arabian religion before Islam. The northern goddesses Allat, al-Uzza, and Manat the Nabataeans shared with the Arabs of the Hijaz and beyond, and those three are the same powers named, generations later and from across the line of a new revelation, in the Qur’an. The Nabataeans stand, in this, at a junction: their gods join the Arabian world to the Aramean and the Hellenistic, and through their own inscriptions they let the Arabian sacred order speak in something close to its own voice, where elsewhere it survives mostly in the report of outsiders or of later authors writing after the shrines were gone.

For all that it is the richest northern Arabian corpus, the religion is not fully legible. The exact natures of the gods are debated — Dushara’s solar and dynastic aspects, the precise astral identity of the goddesses, the relation between the local block-god and the pan-Arabian names attached to him. The inscriptions are formulaic; they dedicate, they curse, they record a year and a name, but they do not narrate a myth or expound a theology. What the Nabataeans believed about their gods in any fuller sense has largely to be inferred from the stones they set up and the rites the stones imply.

The script that became Arabic

The Nabataeans’ most far-reaching bequest was not a building but a hand. The administrative and monumental language of their state was Aramaic — the chancery language inherited from the wider Near East, in which records had been kept from the Nile to the Indus since the days of the Persian empire whose ceremonial capital was Persepolis. The Nabataeans wrote it in a distinctive cursive, flowing and rich in ligatures, the letters running together in a way that the older square Aramaic hands had kept apart. Their everyday speech, meanwhile, was Arabic, which surfaces in the names and idioms threaded through the texts.

Out of that cursive Nabataean hand, in the centuries after the kingdom fell — by the conventional reckoning from about the fourth century CE — the Arabic alphabet developed. The connecting of letters into ligatures, the reduction of distinct forms, the running line: these are Nabataean habits that the Nabataean script carried forward into the alphabet that would be used, in time, to write the Qur’an and the literature of a civilization that stretched from Spain to India. A people who had used Aramaic as their prestige medium of writing and spoken Arabic at home produced, almost as a by-product, the vehicle in which Arabic itself would be written down. The caravan kingdom dissolved into the Roman province; the hand it had cut into the cliffs of two deserts went on to become one of the most widely used scripts on earth.

Reception: annexation, recovery, and the rock that stayed

The kingdom ended not in catastrophe but in absorption. Its later kings had ruled as Roman clients in all but name, and when the last of them, Rabbel II, died in 106 CE, the emperor Trajan moved to make the realm a province outright. The annexation, carried out under the governor of Syria, met little recorded resistance; the Nabataean lands were reorganized as the province of Arabia — Arabia Petraea, “Stony Arabia,” named for the rock-cut capital — with Bostra in the north as its administrative seat and a Roman legion stationed in it, while Petra kept the rank of a metropolis. Rome did not erase what it took. The incense still came up the road, now along the paved Via Nova Traiana; the cisterns and channels still ran; the temples of Dushara stood, and his name and the names of the goddesses went on being cut into stone for generations under Roman rule, the betyls still receiving their libations in the high places.

In time the trade shifted to the sea lanes, the desert cities thinned, and a new revelation reordered the sacred world of Arabia: one order gave way to another, and the gods of the caravan and the rock passed out of worship. The carved cities were never wholly lost — Bedouin lived among the tombs of both, and the southern site kept a name, Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ, that wove the ruins into a later sacred geography — but to the wider world they fell silent until the nineteenth century, when European travelers reached Petra and the inscriptions of Hegra began to be copied, read, and compared. The recovery of the Nabataeans has been, above all, a recovery through their stones: the tombs and the high places excavated and surveyed; the cursive script deciphered and traced forward to its Arabic descendant; the tomb-curses and dedications gathered into corpora such as the Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions; the waterworks reconstructed; Hegra raised in 2008 to the standing of a World Heritage site, the first so recognized within Saudi Arabia.

What the Nabataeans left is a particular kind of legacy. They wrote no scripture and bequeathed no school. They were a people who made a state out of the two things the desert seemed least willing to give — the rare rainwater they refused to let escape, and the long road of a commodity that grew a thousand miles to the south — and who cut the proof of it into the living rock of two deserts, set their god in a squared stone they could carry to the ends of the trade, and handed on, almost in passing, the hand in which Arabic would be written. The kingdom became a province and the gods gave way; the rock they shaped, and the script their cursive became, are still here.