Nabateans

Nabateans, a people of northern Arabia, generally considered to have been of pure Arab blood, though some authorities, identifying them with the Ishmaelite tribe of Nebaioth, regard them as having been closely akin to the Edomites. They took possession of the country once occupied by the Edomites; and in the beginning of the 3d century B.C. they were one of the most powerful amongst the Arab tribes, warlike, with a force of 10,000 fighting men, nomadic, and busy carriers of merchandise between the East and the West. In 312 B.C. Antigonus, the general of Alexander, made an attack, unsuccessful, upon their desert fastness of Sela or Petra (q.v.). By the 1st century B.C. they had shaped their power into a kingdom; in the time of St Paul their king Aretas, who died in 40 A.D. after a reign of forty-eight years, was master of Damascus and Cele-Syria. They were in antagonism successively to the Syrian monarchs, the Maccabæan rulers of Judea, and the Romans, but eventually acknowledged the supremacy of these last. Nevertheless Trajan, in 105, captured their stronghold and put an end to their kingdom. They possessed a certain measure of culture, derived from the Syrians. The language of their coins and inscriptions is Aramaic. See Charles Doughty, Documents Épigraphiques recueillies dans le Nord de l'Arabie (1884), and books cited at EDM.