Nabataean History: The Kingdom and Roman Annexation

The Nabataean kingdom grew around routes connecting Arabia, the southern Levant and the Mediterranean. Its best-known centre, Petra, became a city of temples, houses, public buildings and elaborate tombs. Yet the earliest surviving account describes a community whose strength rested on mobility, difficult terrain and knowledge of desert water supplies.

Between that account in 312 BCE and Roman annexation in 106 CE, Nabataean rulers acquired territory, struck coins and negotiated with powerful neighbours. Their history includes caravan commerce and farming, warfare and marriage alliances, and the gradual development of an urban kingdom. Roman rule ended the monarchy while leaving many communities and economic connections in place.

On this page6 sections

The encounter of 312 BCE

The first detailed historical account of the Nabataeans comes from campaigns ordered by Antigonus, one of the generals who competed for Alexander the Great’s empire. The historian Diodorus Siculus preserves the narrative, drawing on the work of Hieronymus of Cardia, who knew the events of this period.

Antigonus sought the wealth associated with Nabataean trade. In 312 BCE, his commander Athenaeus attacked a rock refuge while many Nabataean men were away at a market gathering. The attackers seized valuable goods, including aromatics and silver, but the returning Nabataeans overtook and defeated them. A second expedition, led by Antigonus’s son Demetrius, encountered a community prepared for attack and ended in negotiation rather than conquest.

Diodorus describes concealed rainwater cisterns, the withdrawal of herds and families to defensible places, and lookouts who communicated through prearranged fire signals. Water knowledge made movement through dry country possible; narrow approaches made a refuge difficult to storm. The account explains a form of power based on resources and terrain before the monumental city familiar today had developed.

The same narrative describes the collection of bitumen from the Dead Sea and its sale to Egypt for embalming. Nabataean commerce therefore involved a range of valuable materials, as well as the incense that later became central to the kingdom’s reputation.

Trade, settlement and the emergence of kingship

The Nabataeans’ earlier origins remain debated. Named kings, dated inscriptions and royal coins provide a progressively clearer picture of their political institutions, while archaeology traces the growth of settlements and productive landscapes.

A king called Aretas is mentioned in connection with events around 168 BCE. By the first century BCE, Nabataean rulers were prominent participants in the politics of the southern Levant. Growing settlements and royal institutions developed alongside the movement of goods, animals and people through the region.

Petra’s position helped connect inland routes with Gaza on the Mediterranean and with approaches to the Red Sea. Caravans needed access to water, provisions and stopping places; settlements could supply those services while benefiting from passing commerce. Investment in water channels, cisterns and storage also supported permanent residents and agriculture. Trade and farming became complementary parts of an increasingly settled economy.

Urban growth was especially visible in the first century BCE and first century CE. Houses, workshops, temples and tombs reveal different uses of the wealth circulating through Petra. Across the kingdom, inscriptions and coins made royal authority recognizable beyond the capital.

Expansion and conflict with neighbouring kingdoms

To the west and north, Nabataean rulers faced the Hasmoneans, the dynasty governing Judaea, and the Seleucids, whose once extensive empire had fragmented into competing territories. These neighbours sought control of settlements, farmland and routes in the same border regions.

Around 93 BCE, Obodas I defeated the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus in Transjordan, the lands east of the Jordan River. Nabataean military success checked Hasmonean expansion and helped recover territory. In 84 BCE, the Seleucid ruler Antiochus XII died in fighting against Nabataean forces. Aretas III subsequently brought Damascus under Nabataean rule for a period.

Coins struck for Aretas III at Damascus used Greek inscriptions and imagery familiar from Hellenistic coinage. They show a ruler presenting himself through the conventions of the city he governed. At the same time, royal activity at Petra and elsewhere retained Nabataean language and religious traditions.

Aretas III also intervened in a struggle between two Hasmonean claimants, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II. Supporting one contender offered the prospect of recovering towns previously lost to Judaea. It also drew Nabataean forces toward Jerusalem, where Roman intervention changed the balance of power.

Living beside Roman power

Pompey’s campaigns brought Rome into Syria and Judaea in the 60s BCE. In 62 BCE, the Roman commander Marcus Aemilius Scaurus advanced against the Nabataeans. Josephus describes the difficulties of the campaign and a negotiated payment by Aretas that brought it to an end. A few years later, a Roman coin issued by Scaurus portrayed the Nabataean king in a posture of submission.

The kingdom nevertheless continued to have its own rulers, coins and institutions. Its independence operated within a region where Rome could intervene in disputes and determine the fortunes of neighbouring dynasties. Nabataean diplomacy had to account for Roman commanders as well as for local rivals.

Herod the Great, king of Judaea, was one such rival. Warfare and disputed border territories alternated with political and family connections. At the Nabataean court, the powerful official Syllaeus handled diplomacy during the reign of Obodas III, who ruled from 30 to 9 BCE. After Obodas’s death, Syllaeus contested the succession of Aretas IV, making recognition at Rome part of a struggle for authority at home.

Aretas IV and the flourishing of the kingdom

Aretas IV ruled from 9 BCE to 40 CE. His long reign coincided with extensive building and urban development. His coins describe him as a king who loved his people, while portraits of royal women made the dynasty visible in everyday monetary exchange.

At Petra, monumental facades belonged to a much wider city of residential neighbourhoods, workshops and water infrastructure. At Hegra in northwestern Arabia, dated tomb inscriptions record family commissions during his reign. These texts identify owners, descendants, masons and rules governing burial. They show royal chronology being used to date the acts of people far from Petra.

Agriculture contributed to this prosperity. Communities grew cereals in suitable districts, cultivated olives around Petra and maintained date orchards in irrigated oases. Commercial routes connected these productive landscapes with consumers and travellers. The kingdom’s economy therefore supported many activities beyond transporting luxury goods.

Aretas’s relations with Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee and Peraea, deteriorated after Antipas rejected Aretas’s daughter in favour of another marriage. A territorial dispute also contributed to the conflict. Nabataean forces defeated Antipas’s army in 36 CE, prompting the emperor Tiberius to order Roman action. Tiberius’s death in 37 interrupted the planned campaign.

Annexation in 106 CE and its aftermath

The monarchy continued under Malichus II and Rabbel II, the last Nabataean king. In 106 CE, during Trajan’s reign, Roman forces under the governor Cornelius Palma took control of the kingdom and created the province of Arabia. Bosra became its provincial capital.

The immediate motives and military course of the annexation are incompletely documented. Proposed evidence for resistance includes destruction at particular sites and inscriptions describing fighting, but connecting each of these securely to 106 is difficult. The clear outcome was the replacement of the monarchy by Roman provincial government.

Rome developed the Via Nova Traiana between 111 and 114 CE, linking Bosra with Aila, modern Aqaba, through the region of Petra. The highway incorporated older connections and helped support provincial movement. Excavations along the Negev routes also show commercial activity continuing after annexation, with some roadside establishments developing further in the Roman period.

Local families adapted to the new administration. Babatha’s documents from the Dead Sea region span the transition, preserving earlier Nabataean Aramaic property deeds alongside later records of taxation, marriage, loans and court disputes. Nabataean writing and religious traditions likewise outlasted the kings. The political kingdom ended in 106, but the history of its settlements continued within Roman Arabia and the later Christian world.