Nabataeans
The Nabataeans or Nabateans (; Nabataean Aramaic: , , vocalized as ; Arabic: , , singular , ; compare ; ) were an ancient Arab people who inhabited northern Arabia and the southern Levant. Their settlements—most prominently the assumed capital city of Raqmu (present-day Petra, Jordan)—gave the name Nabatene () to the Arabian borderland that stretched from the Euphrates to the Red Sea. The Nabateans emerged as a distinct civilization and political entity between the 4th and 2nd centuries BCE, with their kingdom centered around a loosely controlled trading network that brought considerable wealth and influence across the ancient world. Described as fiercely independent by contemporary Greco-Roman accounts, the Nabataeans were annexed into the Roman Empire by Emperor Trajan in 106 CE. Nabataeans' individual culture, easily identified by their characteristic finely potted painted ceramics, was adopted into the larger Greco-Roman culture. They converted to Christianity during the Later Roman Era. Jane Taylor describes them as "one of the most gifted peoples of the ancient world". Name The original form of the name of the Nabataeans was , which is recorded in Babylonian Akkadian as , and was the "broken" plural form of the Arabic term , meaning "distinguished man." This name underwent two principal evolutions, with the omission of the glottal stop producing the form , and the replacement of by a voiced palatal approximant producing the form . The name of the Nabataeans is recorded in Akkadian sources as , , , , , , and . In Latin sources, the name of the Nabataeans was recorded as . Identity The Nabataeans were an Arab tribe who had come under significant Babylonian-Aramaean influence. Some scholars have identified the people named as in Neo-Assyrian Akkadian records and in the Hebrew Bible based on the similarity of their names with , which is the Arabic name of the Nabataeans. The scholar Israel Ephʿal has rejected this identification because of the use of a in the Akkadian and Hebrew forms while the Arabic form uses a , and because the former forms possess a which is absent from the Arabic form, as attested by to the discovery of a Taymanitic inscription in the Jabal Ġunaym which records the name of the as . The scholar Edward Lipiński has however refuted this rejection by demonstrating that these various forms of the name were derived from an original form , from which the glottal stop was replaced by a palatal approximant, hence producing the Akkadian and Hebrew forms and , while omission of the glottal stop produced the Arabic form . History Hellenistic period The first mention of the Nabataeans dates from 312/311 BCE, when they were attacked at Sela or perhaps at Petra without success by Antigonus I's officer Athenaeus in the course of the Third War of the Diadochi; at that time Hieronymus of Cardia, a Seleucid officer, mentioned the Nabataeans in a battle report. About 50 BCE, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus cited Hieronymus in his report, and added the following: