The Ancients - Petra: The Rose City

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

A city of caves, temples and tombs, Petra gains its nickname from the pink sandstone from which it was carved. In this second part of his conversation with Tristan, Professor David Graf, who directed excavations in the ancient Nabataean city, describes the finer details of the architecture and artefacts found there. David and Tristan discuss Petra’s position on trade routes, its leadership and culture and whether, after becoming a client kingdom of Rome in the 1st century BC, and being annexed in 106 AD, much changed for the city. Did the Nabataeans maintain any autonomy or individuality? And what was to lead to Petra’s slow demise?

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 the story of the Rose City, of ancient Petra. Now, in the last part of this podcast, it was brilliant to see how well-received it's been. David Graff, this brilliant professor from the University of Miami and Petra expert, talked through the early history of Petra and the rise of the Nabataeans particularly focusing on the early Hellenistic period and today we're going to be continuing the story we're going to be talking about Petra during the Roman period

and how new archaeology from the site is transforming our idea about the history of this ancient city. So without further ado here's David to continue the story of Petra. Now regarding Petra we talked about the early history and its emergence in the early Hellenistic period. As the Hellenistic period goes on, does Petra become this centre for trade? The Nabataeans were engaged in trade in the 4th century, in their first reference that we have to them. In the 2nd century AD, during the Roman period, when the Nabataean kingdom was annexed and was no longer in existence, there's a reference in Apuleius in a book he called Florida, which I

didn't write. Honest, he gave the name to it. But in that book, he makes reference to the Nabataeans as merchants. So already in that period, in the 2nd century AD, they areans as merchants. So already in that period, in the second century AD, they are known as merchants. And at a site called Darb al-Bakra in Saudi Arabia that was just discovered not too long ago, over 900 Nabataean inscriptions were found on a trade route coming from Yemen to that area. They mentioned guards and caravaneers and protectors and various people, some Moabites, some Jews, so forth. And seven of the inscriptions are dated. One of them is dated before the Nabataean kingdom was annexed in the first century AD, but the other six afterwards. So the assumption has been that the Nabataeans went out of existence as traders once the Romans took over the east in Augustus, that he set up ports at Berenice

and elsewhere in Egypt, and all the trade flowed through those ports, and that the Nabataeans essentially then had to settle down and become farmers and live in villages. My point is they were living in villages before this. They had money from their trade. They were wealthy, so they weren't creating it. And that trade seems to now have gone on into the second century. That the Romans took it over? No doubt. In the Farasan Islands in the Red Sea to the south, in the second century, they had a port where they taxed all the incoming ships from India and from South Arabia into Egypt and the north to the Mediterranean.

So we know the Romans were engaged. There was an officer there, there was commanders, there were military, so that the Romans were organizing trade to a great extent after they took over the Nabataean kingdom. But who were the best traders? The Nabataeans. They knew the routes, they knew how to function, so they continued to function into the Roman period as traders. And what trade routes, David, are we talking here? What trade routes went through Petra? Difficult. I've written a long article on the Silk Road, and it may be that silk made its way into Petra, but there's no evidence of that. It's all hypothetical. Palmyra in Syria, there's good evidence for silk making it from China to Palmyra. So I don't know that the Silk Route went through Petra, is my point.

That there was a route coming from the Persian Gulf to Petra, I think is pretty evident because we have some references, not often cited, but in plenty, a writer in the first century, of a trade route that went into the Persian Gulf. And we know the trade route to Yemen existed. And the assumption had always been that people from Yemen brought the trade and the Nabataeans received it and then distributed it. But now we have a bilingual South Arabian Nabataean inscription from Yemen, dated to the ninth or eighth year of Arathas, the king in 9 BC. So there had to be Nabataeans in place in Yemen who were funneling the route. I excavated in South Arabia near Yemen in southwestern part of the Assyrian mountains. We found a couple pieces of Nabataean pottery. A Nabataean inscription had been found not far away.

So there's obstacles in trying to track the trade route from Yemen all the way to Petra. There are two places that are on the route that we have difficulty doing anything with archaeologically. They're called Mecca and Medina. There's no archaeology in Mecca and Medina. So the point is there's always going to be some unknowns. And a lot of that evidence may have been lost or taken away or eroded, whatever. But the trade route from Yemen north probably existed. And then there's the sea route. There is a site just south of Petra that is mentioned where the trade came in, and then they brought it by camel to Petra. And that's called Luke Kome, White Village. It has been excavated.

The evidence is basically for the Hellenistic period and the Roman period. There's a big gap, but there's evidence of that route functioning during the Nabataean period. And then there's a route to Egypt, to Alexandria, across the Negev, to Gaza, to a number of the port cities, and to Egypt. And of course, north to Damascus and elsewhere. So it was a magnet for trade, and it was a nucleus for a number of trade routes that ran in different directions. So knowing exactly every little stop and every little point along the trade route is impossible. Plenty mentions that there were something like 60 caravan stops between Yemen and Petra. I don't know of six. He knew of 60. So there's a lot of evidence that we just don't know. But that the trade routes existed and that the trade functioned from the 4th century into the

2nd century AD is now quite evident. And you mentioned there, David, one of the Nabataean kings, Eratus. And these local Nabataean kings, what do we know of them? I'm guessing with all this trade coming into Petra, they are quite wealthy individuals. And very cultured, I would add. Not only wealthy, but very cultured, very cosmopolitan is the way I would put it. They emerge to us in a consecutive way in the middle of the first century BC, till the end of the kingdom in 106, when the Romans annexed it. And by the coinage, Raquel Barquet has demonstrated that we have a consecutive line of Nabataean kings that we can date by inscriptions, by coinage for that period of time. And they are alluded to in historical sources. So we can put together a very good chronology from around 50 BC to 106. Before that, as I indicated, there

were a number of kings as well, and we have references to some of them, but it's hard to know the sequence. Does this king come before that king? So we play games. People make proposals about the sequence of the kings, and there has been a number of inscriptions that have been found that have caused us to rethink that sequence. So it's a constant process that goes on. Every time there's a piece of evidence emerging, it causes us to re-examine that question, the sequence in the earlier period. What's more interesting to me is that when the Romans annex a kingdom, the kings are usually given status. They become senators. They are integrated into the Roman Empire. What's interesting about the Nabataean kingdom is that when the kingdom is annexed and Rabel II, the last king, dies

in 106, and the Romans take over the kingdom, the dynasty and the royal family disappears. We don't know of a single Nabataean king or prince or anyone that exists afterwards. They just disappear off the face of the earth. So it's interesting. At the beginning of their history, it's very difficult to know very much. At the end of their history, it's very difficult to know very much. They're very interesting in this regard. So the periods that I become interested in are the periods that are full of unknowns, where you have to ask questions and where you are forced to do archaeology and to look at every inscription and every piece of evidence, coinage and so forth, to try to put together what you can of this earlier period and later period. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and

violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the World Wars we're on the front line of military history. We've got the landmark moments. Understandably when we see it from hindsight the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying yeah tell me something I don't know. The unexpected events. And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never-ending conflicts. So arguably every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities.

Subscribe to The World Wars from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Let's put the world back into the world wars one of the things which i feel i must talk about is the monumental architecture that survives. And for anyone who's seen Indiana Jones, that amazing temple in the rock, I mean, that's astonishing, beautiful. Is this monumental architecture related? Do you think that it's associated with these Nabataean kings? I do, but you're only asking me. I mean, you might ask someone else and they would have a different opinion. It's a real problem. When the first recording of the tombs and temples at Petra was made by Bruno and Domaszewski at the end of the 19th century, published in the beginning of the 20th century, 1904 to 1909, three big volumes, De Provincia Arabia. They categorized all of the tombs. And Domaszewski was a very good architectural historian, and they recorded over 500 different tombs. And he organized them on the basis of the simple to the complex. The idea is the Nabataeans began with little simple tombs, and then they became more sophisticated, and then you have the

larger tombs. And the larger tombs, the more ornate ones, like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Cosne, they dated to the second century after the annexation, because it was the most sophisticated of any of the tombs. And so the simple to the complex was the way in which the tombs were organized. Then Hegra in Saudi Arabia was excavated. And there, there are tombs of the simple nature, maybe three or four different types, but they were produced by the same architect, living at the same time. So that this suggested that it was not an evolutionary simple to the complex idea. It was rather a much more difficult one to determine. And we don't have but two inscriptions at Petra from the tombs, 500 tombs with two inscriptions. So there's a lot of guesswork going in. So architectural

historians began to do something else. They began to compare the tombs at Petra with tombs and architecture elsewhere to try to determine the date. And that shifted everything earlier. The more sophisticated tombs were found at Pompeii, at Alexandria, and elsewhere. So they began to shift from the 2nd century AD to the 1st century BC and Hellenistic. So it shifted the whole paradigm of dating the tombs from the late period to the early period. Then in 2000, a couple of Jordanian archaeologists began excavating underneath the Qazne, and they found some tombs. And the tombs, they opened up and could date, and they date to the first century BC, which means that the Cosne was built over it afterwards. And now the assumption is the Cosne was built maybe the middle of the first century AD, in between the two. So this question is constantly shifting because of archaeology, because of methodology, different perspectives has altered our way of thinking about the development of the

tombs. Unfortunately, none of those sophisticated tombs are dated, so that we don't know the date of them. There's maybe half a dozen. Edir, up the monastery up above, the Urn tomb, the Cosne, so forth. We have a whole series of different tombs that are very ornate and very nice. We call it Baroque architecture. Very ornate, very detailed, like the Palace of Versailles, like Bernini's architecture, so forth. So, the comparisons are with Alexandria, usually. Judith McKenzie wrote this huge book called The Architecture of Petra in 1990, and for a very excellent scholar, full of detail and so forth. She dated everything to the early period, to Alexandria. But now, because of the archaeology, a decade later, we begin to date it differently.

So the point is, this is still an open question. We have a few clues. The general assumption is that the ornate tombs were designated for each one of the Nabataean kings. And there we play games, who was buried at the Kasne, who was buried at Adir, so we don't know. What's interesting about Adir, which is up high in the mountains, it doesn't have any tombs around it. It's all alone. And the function of it is not real clear. It's called Adir Monastery, so it may have had a different function than the other tombs. So there's still a lot of unknowns. And right in front of it, just in the last couple of years, they've been excavating. There's a circle right in front of Adir, and they thought it might be related to some kind of ritual performed by people at the monastery. But the circle is

prehistoric. It has nothing to do with the Nabataeans at all. It's much earlier. So trying to pull everything together into a coherent narrative about the Nabataeans is a real problem. There are problems of the literature, problems of the inscriptions, problems with the material culture, and all of it just keeps accumulating because of excavation. So we are constantly re-examining all these questions. I mean, David, what you're saying is absolutely astonishing. It sounds from like what you're saying that Petra was the nucleus of this powerful, prosperous, well-developed state before the Romans arrive. Yeah, and my reason for thinking that is that they were connected with the Hellenistic Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt, but also the culture, as I indicated. The representation of the kings and the queens

is done in Ptolemaic style. The kings are represented as Dionysus, and I say that because of their hairstyle. Dionysus had dreadlocks, and the dreadlocks are represented in various ways of Dionysus elsewhere. And the kings begin, not just the kings, some of the kings of outlying areas also began to adopt this dress style. But I think it had to do with the cult of Isis. Isis was represented on the queens of the Nabateans in their headdress. So the kings and the queens are being portrayed as Dionysus and Isis. What goes along with that is the drinking of wine. It used to be assumed that the Nabateans were nomads. They drank milk.

They didn't drink wine. But now we know they were drinking wine. I found in a survey, just north of Petra, 24 wine presses from the Nabataean period. And I've been able, by going through the various archaeological manuals, to find amphora that were used for the transporting of wine, so that we know now that the Nabataeans were not only producing wine, but distributing wine. And what's interesting, I was in Israel, and I was talking to Raquel Barnathan, who publishes the pottery at Jericho, at Masada, at Dariusite. She's the world-renowned

author. She said, oh, I've got one of those ompra at Masada. And at Masada, there was an exact ompra just like the ones that were found at Petra. And I found one in reading through an excavation in the Sinai. So it's a matter of kind of connecting dots. And once you begin to do that, you begin to see that they were producing wine. And secondly, in all of the cultic centers, we find triclinium. Triclinium were places where you came together to drink wine at a symposia. And that is recorded for us about the Nabataean kings by Strabo. So now my assumption is the kings were performing and behaving just like the Hellenistic kings elsewhere. So they had become very acculturated, and this is before the Romans

arrive. So when the Romans arrive, of course, it takes on a different persona, and they begin to develop in a different way. But I think they retained this all the way to the end of the kingdom, this belief in Isis, because we have a number of inscriptions and cultic centers at Petra for Isis. I could go on, but that's the general thesis I have about the sophistication of these Nabataean kings. And it's not just the Nabataean kings. I think the military, the administrators, other people were also very cultured. And we know this from bilingual inscriptions. They were writing in Greek and Aramaic, and they were part of the Roman Hellenistic world. And they functioned that way. Well, David, talking about figures who talk about this

sophistication of the kingdom before the Romans arrive, someone who struck me doing some research for this podcast and looking at your work was a certain Athenodorus of Tarsus. Is he a valuable source? Yeah, I've written an article and a friend of mine in France has written an article at the same time without knowledge of what I wrote. So he's wrong and I'm right. I'm kidding. I've talked to him, and he thinks he's right and I'm wrong. But I don't think he read my article very closely. Athena Doris is cited as being in Rome in 50 BC by Cicero. Not an unknown man. He's moving in high circles in Roman culture, and he's in Rome. What's he doing in Rome? He's from Tarsus, the same city that Paul, the apostle, is from. His father probably had received citizenship. I don't know. But the point is, he has moved to Rome and has become a friend of Augustus. How did he do that? He functioned as an educator at Rhodes, the educational center,

the Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Berlin. It was all those universities wrapped up into one in antiquity. Cicero, Caesar studied there. And Pompey had a good friend there, the leading scholar, Posidonius. And I believe Pompey, we know, visited there a couple of times. And he's going to the east to conquer the east. He wants to take a group of scholars with him to record what transpires and to preserve the culture. I believe that Athena Doris probably was part of that mission. We know of a number of other scholars. So that after it was over, so that after it was over, he returned with Pompey to Rome, and there in 50, Cicero mentions him. By the time of Augustus in 30, he is the educator of Augustus, and as an old man, he returns to Tarsus. Everyone assumes, including my French scholar friend Thaubeck, that it was after he returned

that he went to Petra. My guess is he was old, blind, couldn't function very well. I doubt that he was going to Petra at over 60 years of age. It was probably during the time of Pompey or afterwards, before 50, that he went to Petra. So his recording of what he observed is probably his reflections of that period. That it was maintained by Strabo and recited by him doesn't mean it was not unaltered, that Strabo didn't infuse it with his own ideas here or there, that it was corrupted, so to speak. But my point is, the only time I can possibly imagine Athena Doris visiting Petra would have been at that time. And he mentions how the kings came together for symposia and drank wine. He gives a lot of information of that period, that they're democratic,

that the kings listen to what the people have to say and so forth. In other words, he creates an image of the Nabataeans. I'm not sure it's right. It may not be accurate, but the point is his reflections, I think, go back to this earlier period of time. David, all of that stuff, including Athena Doris, and all that you've mentioned during this podcast whilst we've been chatting. And as I said just now, it really seems to emphasise that Petra before the Romans is just as extraordinary, if not more extraordinary, than Petra during the Roman period. Absolutely. And more intriguing for that reason, because rather than just being parrots of the Romans, they have their own culture and they're assimilating a foreign culture and they have a uniqueness about them. Their pottery is unique.

Their inscriptions are unique. Various facets of their society are unique, not duplicated anywhere else. So I think the creativity of the Nabataeans, just because you drink Coca-Cola doesn't mean you're an American. They can imitate culture, but there is a difference. The way they function, the way they think, the way they're organized, so forth. So that I look at it as much more complex in this period than previously assumed that they were just simple nomadic people and then became very developed and sophisticated when the Romans appear. David, you are a leading archaeologist at Petra and your work has been remarkable over the many,

many years that you've done excavations there and all I can say is thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah thank you for inviting me it was a pleasure and you're a joy. Too kind. Thank you.