Excavations at ancient Petra in the Middle East indicate
something of the process by which a nomadic Arabian tribe
became settled and Hellenized over a period of centuries
by Peter J. Parr
One of the most persistent themes in the history of the Near East has been the gradual movement of the Bedouin nomadic tribesmen out of the desert heart of the Arabian peninsula toward its more fertile and attractive fringes. From prehistoric times onward, the lands of the Fertile Crescent╤Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine╤have all had their ethnic complexion and their civilization affected by the culture of the infiltrating nomads, and this primitive desert way of life has in its turn been refined and transmuted by contact with the civilizations of the more technologically advanced peoples. The histories of the Amorites, the Aramaeans and the Moslem Arabs, to give but three examples, all illustrate the truth of this statement, but the process by which the desert has invaded the sown is nowhere more clearly apparent than in the stages by which an Arabian tribe called the Nabataeans settled down in southern Palestine and Jordan during the centuries immediately preceding the Christian era.
The world with which the Nabataeans came into contact at this time was in the throes of a great change. Both before the advent of Alexander the Great, and particularly after the establishment of his short-lived empire, the whole of the Near East was rapidly becoming Hellenized. Alexander had broken what barriers remained between East and West, and his successors, the rival Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria, continued his deliberate policy of implanting Western culture in the ancient lands to which they had fallen heir. Not only in the fields of civil administration and military organization but also in the realms of art and architecture, literature and philosophy, the ancient East was becoming Westernized. The cultural traffic was, of course, not just one-way, and soon the religion, philosophy, literature and art of the West were to become influenced by the Oriental modes. But at least in art and architecture╤those aspects of culture with which the archaeologist is mostly concerned╤it was the East that was the more profoundly affected, and within a few centuries one language of artistic expression was to stretch from the Tiber to the Tigris and from the Black Sea to the Red.
It was against this cultural background that the expansion of the Nabataeans was set. The Nabataeans came from the heart of an Eastern desert, and they found themselves neighbors of peoples who were no longer truly Oriental. Their history and civilization provide us with a particularly clear picture of the amalgamation of Eastern and Western ways that was everywhere taking place at this time, and it was to throw light on this process of Hellenization that excavations were recently undertaken at the Nabataean capital of Petra by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem.
According to some but not all scholars, the Nabataeans can be equated with the Nebaioth of the Bible and the Nebayat of Assyrian records in the seventh century B.C.; these names apply to one of many Arabian tribes. It was probably during the course of the next two centuries that the Nabataeans began to move northward and westward out of the desert and to settle in the southern part of Jordan, where the formerly strong Edomite state had already collapsed and where, under the lax rule of the Persians, sedentary occupation had practically ceased. But of these early migrations we know nothing; it is not until 312 B.C., 10 years after the death of Alexander, that the Nabataeans appear momentarily in the full light of history.
In that year, according to the first century B.C. Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, they were attacked in their stronghold╤presumably in Petra itself╤by the forces of Antigonus the One-Eyed, ruler of Phrygia and one of the most ambitious of Alexander╒s generals and successors. Although the attack failed, the Phrygian army was able to make off with a large quantity of booty, including 700 camels, and it is this fact that helps to explain why Antigonus was interested in a distant desert tribe. Diodorus Siculus tells us that the Nabataeans had control over a large part of the caravan trade that flowed along the desert routes from the southern coast of Arabia to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, a trade in spices, perfumes, incense and the like that was of great profit to the middlemen involved. At this stage in their history the Nabataeans were caravaners and middlemen par excellence, and the clear implication of Antigonus╒ interest is that by the end of the fourth century B.C. they were already rich and powerful.
Little is known of the Nabataeans during the following centuries, although they appear sporadically in the pages of the Apocrypha and in the writings of the first century A.D. Jewish historian Josephus, and the first century Greek geographer Strabo gives us a brief account of their manners and customs toward the end of the pre-Christian era. That the Nabataeans played a part in the political events of the time cannot be doubted, and Josephus bears witness to the number of occasions on which they interfered in the internecine strife that tore Palestine during those centuries.
Taking advantage of the collapse of the Seleucid dynasty, the Nabataeans were able to extend their power early in the first century B.C. as far north as Damascus. It may well have been at this same time that they consolidated their position in northwestern Arabia and also in southern Palestine, where many important Nabataean cities were to rise. The territorial expansion brought with it concomitant perils. Of these the greatest was the antagonism of Rome, which in the person of Pompey was rapidly becoming the most important force in the East. Pompey╒s settlement of 64 B.C. was not so hard for the Nabataeans as it was for their Jewish neighbors in Palestine, and the Nabataeans were left in control of both their territory and the all-important trade. But at the same time, the rulers of Petra╤whose names we know from coins and inscriptions from this time onward╤became little more than vassals of Rome, and their territorial expansion was checked. In the long run this undoubtedly had beneficial effects: it encouraged these enterprising Arabs to seek other outlets for their energies. It is from this time on that they began wholeheartedly to adopt the material civilization of their more advanced neighbors and to institute the agricultural exploitation of their territories that was soon to become the mainstay of their economy and was to shield them from economic ruin when, at a later date, the Arabian trade declined in importance and profit.
The Nabataeans retained their independence until A.D. 106, when they were incorporated by the Roman emperor Trajan into the newly created province of Arabia, with its capital at Bostra in southern Syria. Yet the consequent loss of status does not seem to have affected the former Nabataean capital adversely, and Petra flourished for another century or so. This final period of Nabataean history, however, is as obscure as the earlier phases. A decline in prosperity set in, probably during the third century, concurrently with the general decline in the well-being and stability of the Roman Empire as a whole, and no doubt basically for the same economic reasons. In the middle of the fifth century, Petra was a Christian city and the seat of a bishop; in the sixth century it seems to have been a squalid Byzantine town, and early in the seventh it appears to have been virtually deserted. It is nowhere mentioned in the annals of the Moslem invaders who passed along its caravan routes. After nearly 1,000 years, the Nabataeans disappeared from history as unheralded as they had come, giving way to yet another wave of Semitic nomads from the vast Arabian reservoir.
It was their concern with the caravan trade of Arabia that must have led the Nabataeans to choose Petra for their capital; the site is a natural fortress and controls important routes. It lies high up in the sandstone mountains bordering the Jordanian plateau and overlooking the Wadi el Arabah, the continuation of the great Syrian Rift Valley south of the Dead Sea. The sandstone is soft and friable and has been weathered into a thousand fantastic shapes by wind and water; the variegated bands of reds, yellows, browns and purples that run through the rock in no apparent geologic order only add to the fantasy. Two sweeping arcs of these mountains isolate Petra on the east and west; they form almost impenetrable walls except in one place. Here an earthquake fissure has been enlarged by running water, forming the Siq, or Gorge, the most famous and spectacular entrance to the site.
To the north and south, however, the country is more open, and broad wadis provide the main caravan routes to and from the city. In one direction these routes lead up to the plateau and to the main Arabian trade route that runs along its edge: the King╒s Highway of the Bible and the modern Pilgrims╒ Way to Mecca. In the other direction the tracks run south down into the Arabah and across to Palestine and Egypt. Yet even from the north or south the Nabataeans need never have feared surprise attack. Everywhere high mountain crags provide excellent lookout posts, from which a few sentries could have guarded the entire region. At some stage in the history of the site, its natural defenses were augmented by man-made ones, and on the more vulnerable north and south flanks strong town walls were built. Two separate lines of these are traceable. The outer is probably the earlier. It has the typical appearance of a Hellenistic ╥indented trace.╙ The inner is laid out with greater precision; it may be a Roman military work. But the exact course and dating of these walls are still largely conjectural and need to be verified by excavation.
Within these walls, natural and man-made, lie the ruins of Petra, ruins so utter and complete that for the most part nothing remains but piles of sandy debris hiding a few disconnected lines of foundation. Only four public monuments survive in any degree: a theater, a colonnaded street, a monumental gate and a temple. They are all of Roman date, although they are not any the less interesting for that. What catches the eye are the facades of tombs carved out of the rocky cliffs surrounding the site. So ubiquitous and imposing are these that the visitor might at first suppose Petra is nothing more than a vast cemetery, and archaeologists might be excused if they pay more attention to these monuments than to the ruins at their feet. In the past, more study has indeed been accorded the rock-cut remains than the free-standing ones at Petra, and the scholarly analysis of the various architectural styles of the tombs has certainly contributed much to our understanding of how the East became Hellenized.
The tombs combine in varying degrees elements derived from both classical and Oriental art. They range in style from the purely Oriental, decorated simply with bands of crenelations or of ╥crow steps╙ that recall Phoenician or even Assyrian designs, through bizarre, semiclassical facades with applied pilasters and capitals, architraves and pediments in a pseudo-Greek fashion, to great flamboyant Baroque-like tombs embellished with every architectural and sculptural device known to the classical architect. It is interesting to observe, however, that even in the case of the last╤the most ornate and ╥classical╙ of the tombs╤the Oriental element has not entirely disappeared. Many of them show traces of having originally had masonry buildings and large open courts in front of them. These would have screened the rock-cut facade to some extent and would have given the original monument the appearance of an Egyptian temple rather than a Greek or Roman one. The excavation of some of the forebuildings undoubtedly presents the most promising line of inquiry into the age of these splendid monuments. Although the stylistic sequence has a certain chronological value, the absolute age of these tombs is still a matter of great uncertainty and even greater scholarly dispute; it is one of the major problems still to be solved at Petra.
The recent excavations conducted by the British School at Jerusalem have not, however, been primarily concerned with this problem, although they have thrown some revealing light on it. With the limited funds available, it was thought more profitable to excavate in one or two restricted areas of the city itself. Not only was such work bound to produce well-stratified archaeological material, but also it would help to redress the balance between our relatively detailed knowledge of Nabataean funerary architecture and our complete lack of knowledge of Nabataean civic and domestic buildings. In fact, the most important single result of the excavations has been the recovery of enough stratified and dated Nabataean and Roman pottery to establish once and for all a complete corpus of this material, which will be of inestimable value as an archaeological tool for the further investigation of this and other Nabataean sites.
To this aspect of our work, I shall return later. For the moment I shall summarize what we have learned from the excavations about the development of building methods and architecture at Petra, with special reference to our central theme of the progress of Hellenization at the site. Four main phases of building activity have been investigated in various parts of the city, and although it is too soon to speak in detail of these phases, they already seem to make a historically satisfying picture of an orderly and logical progression from a primitive ╥Oriental╙ stage of Nabataean culture to a more sophisticated Hellenized stage. We must now turn to the evidence.
The earliest structures uncovered lie some three meters below the level of the Roman colonnaded street, resting directly on undisturbed gravel. They comprise a group of walls, thin but solidly built of wadi boulders packed and faced with stiff yellow clay. Associated with these at one point was a simple clay oven. Unfortunately, no complete plan was uncovered in the area cleared, but the appearance of the remains suggests that they belong to domestic buildings. Finds from the thin, worn floors were few and difficult to date accurately, but they include coarse potsherds that recall those found in fifth and fourth century B.C. contexts elsewhere in Palestine. Moreover, from a series of occupation levels overlying these early walls came pottery of the third and second centuries B.C., including fragments of black-glazed Hellenistic lamps and coins of the same general date. It seems reasonable to suggest, therefore, that the unpretentious structures we have described are the dwellings of the Nabataeans in the first stages of their process of settling down, in the decades following 300 B.C. That they cannot be much earlier than this is clear if we accept the evidence of Diodorus Siculus, who tells us that at the time of Antigonus╒ attack in 312 B.C. the Nabataeans were still completely nomadic and did not build houses. We may also note parenthetically with regard to these early levels that the coins recovered include a much larger proportion of Phoenician issues than of Egyptian, a fact that could perhaps be interpreted as showing that during the troubled course of the third century, when the Ptolemies and the Seleucids were struggling for control of Palestine, the Nabataeans threw in their lot with the Seleucids, in the hope, no doubt, of seeing the Ptolemies weakened. Egypt was, after all, a dangerous and proximate rival of the Nabataeans in the all-important Arabian and Red Sea trade.
The next stage in the architectural history of Petra, as revealed by the current excavations, is perhaps the most important historically, although it has left few traces. The primitive structures described above continued in use until the first century B.C., but at some point during that century they were abandoned, and an artificial fill of earth and gravel was banked up against their ruins. This fill formed a terrace at least 15 meters wide along the side of the central wadi that must have been supported by a massive retaining wall, although no trace of this has been found. The importance of the terrace is that it provides evidence of a deliberate program of town planning, necessitating a greater expanse of level ground in the center of the site than was naturally available, and it implies the birth of a sense of civic pride among the inhabitants of Petra. The dating of this development to the first century B.C. seems assured from the coin and pottery evidence, and again it is historically reasonable, since it is just at this time that the Nabataeans came into close political and cultural contact with Syria and, what was more important, with Rome.
Next we come to the final century of Petra╒s independence: the first century A.D. At another part of the site a large building of this time has been partially excavated; it is the residence of a wealthy Nabataean family. It consisted of a series of rooms bordering on (but not, apparently, opening on) a long, narrow central courtyard; a similar row of chambers probably exists on the unexcavated opposite side. The building passed through many vicissitudes during the course of its life, and not all of these have yet been worked out; at one stage in particular its long western outer wall was destroyed and rebuilt on a slightly different line from that of the original wall. The external appearance of the building is distinguished; the walls (which still stand at a height of more than three meters above the original floor) are of well-laid masonry, dressed with the fine diagonal tooling that seems to be typical of Nabataean work.
Inside, however, the story is different. The inner faces of the main walls, and the cross walls in their entirety, are poorly made of second-rate material. These faults were concealed, however, by the Nabataean builders, who covered the interior faces of the walls with richly painted and molded stucco, many fragments of which were found in the debris within the house. Such lavish stucco decoration is a typically Hellenistic feature and can be paralleled at many sites in Asia Minor, Syria, Greece and Italy. This fact serves as an indication of the degree to which Hellenistic influence had permeated Nabataean architecture by the end of the independent kingdom. Yet such foreign influences were still not entirely dominant; both the overall plan of the building and certain of its constructional details (particularly the method of roofing the smaller chambers with flat slabs of stone resting on transverse arches, as is indicated by the provision of buttresses centrally in the cross walls) are Oriental, if not specifically Nabataean, and indicate a strong native tradition of architecture surviving side by side with the foreign fashions.
We now come to the architecture of Roman Petra. The recent British expedition has confined itself to a study of two of the few surviving monuments of this period, the Qasr el-Bint temple and its triple gateway. The colonnaded street leading through the center of the city to the gate and temple had been cleared some years before by a Jordanian expedition under the direction of Diana Kirkbride. Another imposing monument, a theater, has recently been excavated by a joint American-Jordanian expedition headed by P. C. Hammond of the Princeton Theological Seminary. The work on the street had uncovered a large inscription belonging to a building flanking it and almost certainly contemporaneous with it; the inscription can be dated accurately to A.D. 114, so that it seems that the street was laid out as part of renewed town-planning activity immediately after the annexation of Petra by the Romans.
The architecture of the temple and gateway had already been studied in some detail in the past, although the date of these structures has always been in doubt. The recent work has established some important new facts. In the first place, it has been shown conclusively that the gate is a real gate, not merely a triumphal arch, and that it provides entry to the temenos, or sacred compound, of the temple beyond. Its plan has been fully revealed for the first time and has been shown to incorporate four free-standing columns on pedestals flanking the triple arches. This fact immediately elucidates the problem of dating. Such a plan is inconceivable before the time of Trajan (A.D. 98╨117), and it is much more likely to be of the middle or end of the second century. This is confirmed by the stratigraphy, which shows that the gate is later than the colonnaded street, across whose line it is set.
As for the Qasr el-Bint, this is manifestly contemporary with the gateway and the temenos. The whole sacred precinct bears witness to the magnificence of second-century Petra, a magnificence that itself implies that the compound was built during the reign of the emperor Septimus Severus (193╨211). Severus, who was an African and had a Syrian wife, is known to have been particularly interested in the eastern provinces and to have lavished favors and money on their cities.
The investigation of these buildings is important, then, for the historical information it has yielded on the condition of Petra in the Roman period; of even greater importance is the evidence it has provided of the continuing amalgamation of Eastern and Western elements in Nabataean art and architecture at this late date. The plan of the gate, for example, is distinctively Roman; that of the temple, on the other hand, with its broad, shallow forecourt and cella (closed interior) and its tripartite adytum (inner sanctuary), is ultimately derived from a type of ancient North Syrian temple. The same amalgamation of styles can be seen in the structural and decorative details of the buildings. The base of the temple (a feature revealed only by the current excavations), for example, was originally faced with marble veneer, affixed to the masonry by means of copper and lead hooks in typically Roman fashion; the masonry of the superstructure exemplifies the standard construction described by the great Roman architect Vitruvius, a rubble core between faces of cut stone. Most interesting of all is the embellishment of the gate. Many fragments of sculpture have been recovered from the decorative frieze that originally ran across the top of the arches; in conception these recall the decoration on other monuments of the period of Severus. The sculpture itself, however, belongs to a distinctive Nabataean school that, although it is Hellenistic, retains many basic Oriental elements, such as the staring eyes of the faces, the exuberance of the leaved decoration and the use of animal motifs. The study of these buildings is still far from complete, but when it is, it will contribute greatly to our understanding of the art and architecture of the Roman East.
So far we have used some of the structural evidence revealed by the excavations to illustrate the progressive Hellenization of, and the mixture of styles in, Nabataean art and architecture. The pottery at the site can be viewed in much the same way. This pottery closely resembles, and is undoubtedly derived from, that of contemporary Palestine and Syria, but it has distinctively Nabataean traits. In particular, the Nabataeans seem to have had a predilection for thin, delicate vessels, notably cups, bowls and plates. This is another indication of the rapidity with which they forgot their Arabian past; the nomad has no use for pottery, thick or thin. Similarly, several vessels seem to be uniquely Nabataean by virtue of their shape: a small basketlike cup and a closed ╥inkwell╙ can be cited as having been found only at Petra. Also of interest are the molded lamps found there; two main types can be called specifically Nabataean, although they are based on Roman originals. These are noteworthy for the information they provide on the Nabataean pottery industry; the many hundreds of lamps uncovered can be seen (from a study of the minor irregularities in their design) to have been produced from the same three or four original molds. This suggests that the manufacture of the lamps was confined to a very few workshops, perhaps even to a single family of lamp makers supplying the whole of Petra╒s needs.
Most distinctive, original and interesting of all, however, is the painted Nabataean pottery. This ware, in spite of its great fragility, was in such common use by the Nabataeans that Nelson Glueck of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati has used it to identify from surface surveys alone many hundreds of settlements in the southern parts of Jordan and Israel. We have learned much about this beautiful painted pottery from our excavations at Petra. We can now say that it appeared in the first century B.C. and was copied, at least indirectly, from the decorated Hellenistic wares of Syria and Egypt; a single fragment of such a foreign vessel has been found at Petra. The earliest examples have leaved patterns painted in red in a light, free-flowing style, but gradually (probably in the first and second centuries A.D.) the designs became more stylized and the brush technique heavier. The final stage of development (which cannot be firmly dated at present) found the pottery itself and the decoration much coarser and heavier. This degenerate style may have had some influence on the painted pottery of the early Arabic period in Jordan, but the evidence is tenuous. It seems that the distinctive and highly advanced ceramic art of the Nabataeans disappeared during the dark centuries of the Byzantine age.
