NABATAEANS, a people of ancient Arabia, whose settle ments gave the name of Nabatene to the border-land between Syria and Arabia from the Euphrates to the Red sea. The his tory of the Nabataeans cannot be carried back beyond 312 B.C., at which date they were attacked without success by Antigonus I. (Cyclops) in their mountain fortress of Petra.
The Nabataeans were Arabs—as their proper names show— who came under Aramaic influence. They wrote a letter to Antig onus "in Syriac letters," and Aramaic continued to be the language of their coins and inscriptions when the tribe grew into a king dom, and profited by the decay of the Seleucids to extend its borders northward over the more fertile country east of the Jordan. They occupied Hauran, and about 85 B.C. their king Aretas (Harithath) became lord of Damascus and Coele-Syria. Allies of the first Hasmonaeans in their struggles against the Greeks (i. Macc. v. 25, ix. 35; 2 Macc. v. 8), they became the rivals of the Judaean dynasty in the period of its splendour, and a chief element in the disorders which invited Pompey's inter vention in Palestine. The Roman arms were not very success
ful, and King Aretas retained his whole possessions, including Damascus, as a Roman vassal. (cf. 2 Cor. xi. 32). As "allies" of the Romans the Nabataeans continued to flourish throughout the first Christian century. Their power extended far into Arabia, particularly along the Red sea ; and Petra was a meeting-place of many nations, though its commerce was diminished by the rise of the Eastern trade-route from Myoshormus to Coptos on the Nile. A sober, acquisitive, orderly people, wholly intent on trade and agriculture (Strabo, xvi. 4), they might have long been a bulwark between Rome and the wild hordes of the desert but for the short-sighted cupidity of Trajan, who reduced Petra and broke up the Nabataean nationality (A.D. 105). SEMITIC LAN