By Rula Samain
Anovia- I was reading a fascinating book, Our Forgotten History by Haidar Halasah, when two pages stopped me completely.
They took me back to a question I had once heard at a conference: Where did the Nabataeans go?
At the time, the question was left hanging in the room, unanswered. It stayed with me. How could a civilisation capable of building Petra, mastering water in one of the harshest landscapes on earth, and creating a trading network that connected distant parts of the ancient world simply disappear?
The pages I came across offered a perspective I felt was worth sharing.
Perhaps the more accurate question is not where the Nabataeans vanished, but what happened to them as history moved forward. Great civilisations rarely disappear overnight. People remain, societies change, political powers rise and fall, identities evolve, and traces survive in places, traditions, architecture and historical records.
Petra therefore should not be viewed only as the magnificent remains of a civilisation that ended. It is also evidence of continuity—a place that still carries clues to the people who built it and to the transformations that followed them.
In this article, I want to follow some of those historical tracks and share evidence that is rarely discussed outside specialised circles. Not to romanticise the past, but to understand it more clearly.
“The Nabataean Kingdom emerged from the third century BC, around 259 BC, when they had prosperous trade. At the beginning of the Christian era, the influence of the Nabataeans extended from Damascus in the north to northern Hijaz, while in the east their influence included the Syrian Desert as far as the Euphrates.
Georgi Zaidan, a historian, considers the Nabataeans to have been Arabs, and Spens Trimmingham (a British scholar of Islamic history, Arab societies, and religion) agrees with him.
He believed that they used Aramaic in their writings only because it was the written language of their era, but that they spoke Arabic in their daily domestic life.
In the opinion of Jawad Ali (Iraqi historian and scholar), their names indicate their Arab identity, and he believed that they originally migrated from the Arabian Peninsula to northern Hijaz.
Philip Hitti (Lebanese-American historian and scholar of Arab and Middle Eastern history) considered Nabataean civilization to have been a composite civilization: it was Arab in its language, Aramaic in its writing, Semitic in its religion, and Greco-Roman in its art and architecture.
Nevertheless, the Nabataeans preserved the characteristics of the Arab element and maintained their Arabic names alongside their Greek translations. For example, their king Aretas IV (9 BC–40 AD) had the equivalent name Philopatres, with the honorary title “Rahem Ammu” (RahemAmmu), meaning “His people’s merciful one.”
In their internal circles, they used the Arabic language, but this Arabic language was influenced by its contact with Aramaic and by the northern Arabic dialects. Jawad Ali considers the Nabataeans closer to Quraysh and the Arabs of Hijaz than to the Arabs of the south.
Their kingdom extended across the Mountains of Edom in the west, the Hisma Plateau in the southwest, and Wadi al-Sirhan to the northeast, with Petra as their capital.
However, their state continued to expand until, at the height of its prosperity, it included Damascus and the Beqaa Valley in the north, Hauran and the southern parts of Palestine, and the land of Midian on the shores of the Red Sea.
To such an extent, some Nabataeans settled on the eastern bank of the Nile Delta, where they left some inscriptions. Gaza was the Nabataeans’ preferred port on the Mediterranean Sea.
Their Kings Were:
- Aretas I, 169 BC (Second Book of Maccabees 8:5).
- Zaidel, 146 BC.
- Aretas, known as “Airotemes,” 96–110 BC.
- Obodas I, 90 BC.
- Rabel I, son of Obodas, 87 BC.
- Aretas III, known as “Philhellene,” 62–87 BC.
- Obodas II, 47–62 BC.
- Malichus I, 30–47 BC.
- Obodas III, 9–30 BC.
- Aretas IV, known as “Philometor,” 9 BC–40 AD.
- Malichus II, 75–40 AD. He was the one who assisted the Roman commander Vespasian in his war against the Jews in 67 AD.
- Rabel II, 101–65 AD, known as “Soter,” and he was the son of Malichus II.
- Malichus III, 106–101 AD. He was the last king of the Nabataeans, and his country came under direct Roman rule in 106 AD.
The Nabataeans and Christianity
Christianity was not the religion of the state. The Nabataean state was established two centuries before Christ, and its people and kings were pagans. However, Christianity entered the land of the Nabataeans from the first century AD through Matthias, who was chosen among the disciples to take the place of Judas among the Twelve.
Matthias went to the land of Arabia and the Nabataeans and taught there. Christianity was also found in the land of the Nabataeans, and the author of Al-Kharida Al-Nafisa states that it “was a refuge for it from persecution during the early Christian centuries.”
The author of Al-Kharida Al-Nafisa also states that Judas the Apostle, the brother of James the Just, known as Thaddeus and Lebbaeus, and different from Thaddeus who was one of the Seventy and who preached to Abgar, King of Edessa, was the Thaddeus among the Twelve. He preached in Judea, Samaria, Galilee, Edom, and Arabia. It is known that Edom in the first century AD constituted the principal part of the Nabataean Kingdom. The flight of the Christian community from Palestine to the villages of Hauran also occurred during the Nabataeans’ rule over Hauran.
From a careful reading of the event of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus in 36 AD, and the existence of believers in Damascus, including Ananias and others, whom Paul intended to persecute, followed by Paul’s departure to Arabia, we find that the only explanation for the existence of believers in Damascus and Arabia is that Jesus himself, while moving through the regions of Hauran and Transjordan, had won those souls to the faith. Indeed, the spread of Christianity in the Arabian deserts was faster than its spread in the region of Antioch.
The Romans suppressed Christians in the East. When Trajan invaded the Nabataean Kingdom in 106 AD, he treated the Christians harshly and, in 112 AD, issued an order to kill every Christian who would not remain loyal to Caesar.
Petra, the capital of the Nabataeans, became one of the important Christian centers. Despite the end of the Nabataean state in 106 AD, Christianity continued to spread throughout the Nabataean region. Arab Muslims even referred to Arab Christians as Nabataeans. Ibn al-Kalbi says regarding people from Banu La’i ibn Udhrah, who were from Bali and those of whom were in Egypt, that they were Nabataeans.
Nelson Glueck was able to identify three hundred Christian Nabataean sites in the Negev. This indicates the increasing spread of Christianity among the Nabataean farmers.”
