The Ancients - Petra: Rise of the Nabataeans

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

The assumption had once been that they were nomads until the Romans came. But more recent archaeological work in modern day Jordan is dispelling this myth about the ancient Nabataeans. In this first episode in another two part podcast, Tristan was joined by Professor David Graf from the University of Miami to talk about the early history of the Nabataeans and their close links to the extraordinary ancient city of Petra. A leading expert on the history and archaeology of Petra and its people, David was excavating at the Rose City when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was being filmed at the ancient site 30 years ago. David, who has a particular fascination with the early history of the Nabataeans, explained how he has attempted to piece together information about the Nabataeans from various archaeological sources. From papyri fragments to inscriptions to ostraca to rare coinage. Part 2, focused around Petra's later ancient history, will be released soon!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast we are continuing our series on ancient cities. It has been brilliant to see how well received our previous episodes on ancient Rome, on ancient Palmyra have been. They were absolutely fantastic. So we're continuing the

strand now. In this podcast we are focusing on another incredible ancient Near Eastern city, the Rose City, situated in modern day Jordan, Petra. Now to talk through this amazing topic including what we know about the people who lived in and around Petra, the Nabataeans. I was delighted to be joined by an ancient history legend, Professor David Graff from the University of Miami. David is a leading expert on Petra. He has been excavating there for decades. He was there at Petra when they were filming Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Absolutely incredible. So because this is a very special podcast, we're going to be dividing it into two. And in this first part, we're going to be focusing on the archaeology that tells us a bit more about Petra's early history, and in particular, about the rise of the Nabataeans, particularly in the Hellenistic period. So we even get a little bit of the successors in there too. My favourite. Without further ado, here's David. David, thank you so much for coming on the show. Hi, good to be here, Tristan. Joe. Hi. Good to be here, Tristan. Now, Petra, this is one of the most astonishing ancient archaeological sites in the whole world. That's correct. It's now a World Heritage Site,

and it's been selected as one of the top handful of sites across the world to see. of sites across the world to see. And a few years ago, Obama, the president then, came to Petra and he was stunned. He walked through the Sikh and into the heart of Petra. Absolutely fantastic was his words. And I think his reaction is what everybody says. If they don't know much and they come in, they're a little surprised. The trip from Amman to Petra is pretty boring. It's desert highway. But that's what makes Petra so spectacular. All of a sudden, jutting out of the landscape is this beautiful mountain and area. This catches you by surprise as you descend into it. And I've been going back and forth, as I said, for 40 years, and it's still not boring. I always see something new, something I forgot or something I didn't see

before. So it continues to unravel itself. And that's what makes it so special, I think. Absolutely. It does sound absolutely amazing in that landscape, too, that you just mentioned. So no such thing as a silly question, especially for someone as ignorant as myself. Whereabouts is Petra? Petra is by car about three hours south of Oman, which is the capital in Jordan. So it's in southern Jordan. And Jordan has a diverse topography, A lot of desert that's very boring, a lot of desert that's very interesting

where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed in southern Jordan. Spectacular landscape, beautiful mountains and essentially unpopulated. I'm just better when living there in villages and small little towns, not anything large. But Petra is just before you descend into that desert, and not very far from the border with Israel. And before the peace, the Israelis used to have songs about, one day I'm going to Petra before I die. So it was something very memorable. And almost in the first year of the peace,

every Israeli who was interested went. So it drew a lot of attention by tourists and still does. It's amazing that lifespan, how it still continues to attract lots and lots of people to this day. But let's go back to the ancient period and talk about the local population. Who were the locals of ancient Petra? Who were the Nabataeans? It's a good question. It's a problem because no inscription indicates by the Nabataeans that they are a Nabataean. They don't identify themselves as Nabataeans. And I wrote an article years ago on Nabataean identity and ethnicity, and I indicated the Nabataean kingdom was huge. It was large, from Damascus all the way into Saudi Arabia, and from the't possibly have a new population. It's an old population, and I think it was assimilated into a kingdom. So what I've said is that there were diverse peoples and diverse scripts and languages with different gods, and it all came together. So that I look at Nabataean as a political umbrella

that covered over this landscape. Now, how the dynasty did this, how they achieved this unity and cohesiveness is unknown. And one of the reasons that the Nabataeans are so attractive is the unknowns. If you know something, it gets pretty boring after a while, hearing the same thing over and over again. So there's a lot of speculation. But my argument is that they probably go back to an Arab confederacy called the Qaytarites, which was in North Arabia, and the Assyrians warred against them, and I think pushed them to the west. And we know from various records that they were in southern Judea, Egypt, and North Arabia, and so forth. So my assumption is that the Nabataeans

were probably part of that group. And what's interesting is when the Caterite Confederacy disappears, when we don't have any records of it being mentioned, the Nabataeans emerge. So I think that there might have been a reorganization of that kingdom under a different dynasty, and that it centered itself in southern Jordan. But that's only hypothesis. As you know, there's a lot that you don't know, and early Nabataean history is very obscure, very difficult. When they emerge is really in the Hellenistic period. That's the first signals that we have of these people, and it comes to us from Greek sources. Some of the successors of Alexander the Great conducted campaigns against the Nabataeans, and these are

recorded. Antigonus the One-Eyed and his sons, Demetrius and so forth. And the Nabataeans defeated them. So the mystique of the Nabataeans was that during all of this turmoil in the Middle East, after Alexander the Great, they maintained their independency. I argue that they attached themselves to the Hellenistic kingdom we call the Ptolemies in Egypt, in Alexandria. And the reason for that is, and this was a recent discovery in 2001 published, a new papyrus was found. This was what's called cartonnage, the wrapping of a mummy. And somebody cut the mummy wrapping to open up to see the mummy. And they saw that there was writing on the cartonnage. And the writing then went to the antiquities market and a bank in Italy, in Milan, bought it.

And so it's called the Milan Papyrus. And it is the epigrams, the poetry of an individual called Pasadipus of Pella. And Pasadipus had written maybe half a dozen epigrams that we knew. They had been cited and they were in sources, but now there were 112 of them. And they were very well organized, and it's very astute, and we know his dates from 272 to 252 BC. And the first segment of those epigrams is called the lithica, which means the stones. And each epigram is about a stone. And there's a huge stone that rolls down into the valley, and it is discovered, or a princess has a stone wrapped around her necklace. And there is one epigram that mentions the Nabataeans. And it doesn't just mention the Nabataeans, it mentions the Nabataean king.

And then there's a gap. There are about 12 lines to the epigram, and about 10 of them have disappeared. We don't have them. We just have a couple of lines, but it says the Nabataean king's mighty horseman. So my guess is that there was maybe a stone engraved on it with the horseman of the king, and a princess in Alexandria was wearing it, and Pasidippus wrote this epigram about her. So it preserves for us the fact that there's a Nabataean king. The earliest Nabataean king mentioned before that was not until the second century, a hundred years later. That means that there are a number of Nabataean kings that we don't know. This king's name is missing. We have an inscription in Damascus that is undated, but it appears to be very early, maybe the third century too, and the king's name is missing in

that one as well. But it means that there were probably a string of kings who are anonymous to us. We don't know their names. We don't know how long they ruled. We don't know the succession. It's all guesswork. But it indicates that there's a lost history that we don't know about the Nabataeans. And now that we know that there was a dynasty, the assumption is that this dynasty somehow attached itself to the Ptolemies, and they were helping the Ptolemies fight against their enemies. And so the horsemen were a cavalry unit that was functioning within the Ptolemaic army. This is all deductions on the basis of two lines out of 12, 10 missing lines in an epigram. So it's a lot of guesswork, but it seems that it's logical and makes sense.

And then just recently, Raquel Barque has written a book called On Nabataean Coins in 2019. She's an excellent scholar, has been working on this for years. And there were some coins called anonymous Nabataean coins because they've been found in Nabataean settlements. And these imitation Athenian coins just have the head of a ruler on one side. The ruler is an Athenian, but on the back was Nike making a sacrifice. But they had been found only at Nabataean sites, so it was pretty conclusive that they were Nabataean, but there's no inscription of no king. but an excellent new ismatist helped Raquel Barquet look at some of these early coins, and they were able to set up four different types. They had only been dated to the first century BC, but now they are dating them to the third century BC, so that these Nabataean kings may have been producing or issuing coins in the third century. How can we say that? Because they were overstruck on Ptolemaic coins of the third century,

and they took the coins and impressed on them this new imagery or iconography, and this means that they probably date to the third century. And the second type, she dates to about the middle of the second century, and then a third type at the end of that century, and a fourth type in the first century. When I was excavating at Petra, we found a whole series of them. Others had been found but not published very well. So we found them in a context that was 3rd and 2nd century BC with Greek pottery that we could date so that we now know that this probably is coins that were issued in that area of Nabatea and then spread out elsewhere to other regions. So we have coinage now from this period. We have inscriptions from this period. We have papyri from this period. So the material culture, the settlement, the French have been excavating in

Petra at a temple called Casa Alb-Bent. They found Hellenistic material there dating back, I think, our pottery maybe earlier, maybe 5th century, because some of it comes from an Athenian workshop and has been imported here. So there's good reason to believe that the Nabataeans were not just nomads. The assumption is they were nomads until the Romans came. Then the Romans settled them, and they became sedentary. But now we know that they were sedentary earlier, that there were nomads at that period. Yeah, there are nomads all the time. There are nomads in any period. But that the society was completely nomadic and that there were no settlements or villages or towns, I think, is now disputable. And we have other evidence now.

In Israel, at a site called Kirbit El Kom, 2,000 astrika have been found. Ostraca are pieces of pottery that have been written on, and on these pottery are names, mostly. They're tax receipts or receipts, and they give the names of the various people, and a high percentage of these names are Arabic in Judea, and they date to probably the 4th century to 3rd century, because some of them are dated to Persian kings, Alexander the Great, Philip, his brother, so forth, so that we know that they date to this Hellenistic period that we have the earliest literary evidence for when the campaigns were being held. So that this population was pretty diverse in Judea. There were Arabs, Babylonians, Egyptians, Judeans, all kinds of people living in the south. And in the Bible, in the Hebrew Bible, there is reference to Geshem the Arab in this region, and he was the Keterite king. And so many of the names are Nabataean names. The Nabataeans had a tendency to put a

U or a W at the end of their name, so that you had the letters of the name and then this wow ending. It goes back to the script of Aramaic in the Mesopotamian Babylonian period. It's an old retention of a spelling, but the Nabataeans retained it. And that means that these names are both Arabic and have spelling or orthography that agrees with the Nabataeans, so that we believe that this Arab community in the south of the Cato-Rite kingdom was probably Nabataean. And that gives even more evidence now for this early period of the Nabataeans. And these were settlers. They had land, they were farmers, so that they were involved in sedentary occupation, and they were paying taxes or being recorded for various reasons. So that we have a lot of evidence that indicates the Nabataean

kingdom was much more diverse than just nomads. There were villagers and settlers and so forth. villagers and settlers and so forth. That's the evidence. And besides that, I found at Petra the earliest coin that's ever been found there. When I found it, it was unique. It was in a stratified area. So when I was in Amman, I went to the National Numismatic Collection and I asked, do you have any coins like this? They said, yeah, we have a couple dozen. The French were excavating in Saudi Arabia at Madan Sali, a hegra, another Nabataean site, and they found hundreds. And then another archaeologist at Tema found one in a Hellenistic period settlement at that site. And then at Duma, another Nabataean site and settlement, another was found. So my guess is that the Cato-Rite dynasty was circulating these coins in the 5th, 4th, 3rd century. And I was in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia in an ancient house that they were using as a museum. It was where Lawrence of Arabia had stopped when he was in Jeddah. And I was just looking on the wall and there was a coin just like mine. I'm publishing an article this year.

It should be out by the end of the year on these coins, because I think that it lends credence. Why do you have coins? Usually to pay troops or military people. So you have a very organized society. David, all those things that you've just said now, it seems to be affirming this early history of the Nabataeans and the archaeology as well. Do you think that this confirms or suggests that Petra was an important Nabataean site and it emerges as an important site in the early Hellenistic period? I don't think there's any doubt now. I think it's pretty well substantiated by excavations that have been taking place. One of the problems with early excavations is they focused on

existing architecture, and they cleared it and dated it and so forth. But nobody ever asked, when did things begin at Petra? To me, that's the driving force for my work, is when did this culture begin? And I argue that there probably were a number of histories. I mean, it's usually said the Nabataeans didn't produce any history, any writings. That's true. We don't have any writings from the Nabataeans. But that writings once existed, I argue, probably is true. And that is because we have references to a whole string of historians who've disappeared who wrote Arabicas. Arabica is about Arabs.

And these Arabicas were in the Hellenistic period. One of them is Tuker of Kisikos, and Tuker probably wrote, I think, five books on the Arabs. I can't believe five books. He wrote six books on the Jews. Well, Jewish history goes back to the second millennium. If you have six books on the Jews and five books on the Arabs, that indicates that the Arabs must have had a long history as well. And that has disappeared. We don't have a fragment of it. We don't even have one citation, just a reference to it. And there are other writers, a Glaucus, an Arab writer who wrote in Arabica. He's preserved in a dozen or so fragments. That

is, fragments are citations. He doesn't mention Nabataeans, but he mentions a number of the sites around Petra, including Gaia, which is the name of the settlement outside of Petra. And his material was just pulled because he mentioned various names of towns. A Byzantine writer pulled from his writing those references. If we had the complete writing, we would know maybe some history, some of the connections of all these towns and so forth, and references to the Nabataeans. And I could go on. So my point is not all the literature from antiquity survives. It's estimated that maybe only 2% of the literature in Greek survives. So we're operating with 98% of it missing. The obvious conclusion is there must

have been more writing, and some of it could have been the conclusion is there must have been more writing and some of it could have been the product of the Nabataeans. The hidden history of the Nabataeans, that's absolutely astonishing and annoying once again that we don't have those histories surviving. Thank you.