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Al-Uzza and a Kingdom Absorbed by Rome

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Al-Uzza and a Kingdom Absorbed by Rome

Dushara did not stand alone in the Nabataean pantheon. Beside him the Nabataeans worshipped al-Uzza, one of three goddesses, along with Allat and Manat, honored across pre-Islamic Arabia and later named together in the Quran as objects of the idolatry it rejected. Al-Uzza's cult reached deep into Nabataean territory alongside Dushara's own, and both goddesses and gods were absorbed from the peoples the Nabataeans traded with and settled among, a genuinely regional pantheon built along trade routes rather than confined to Petra alone.

The Nabataean kingdom itself did not survive as an independent power. In 106 CE Rome annexed it outright, folding its territory into the new province of Arabia, and text and coinage from the kingdom's own hand largely end at that point. What the religion left behind is not a scripture, since none is known to have existed, but the physical record of the cult itself, inscriptions naming Dushara and al-Uzza, the carved betyls that stood in for their images, and the temple architecture and high places cut into the rock at Petra and at the Nabataeans' other sanctuaries across the southern Levant and northern Arabia.

The kingdom's own reach at its height extended from the Euphrates in the north to the Red Sea in the south, and by around 85 BCE a Nabataean king, Aretas the third, held Damascus itself, a mark of how far Nabataean power, and the cult that traveled with it, had spread before Rome absorbed both.

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Source Nabataean People (Encyclopaedia Britannica)The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Nabataean People (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.Nabataean people: al-Uzza and the Roman annexation of 106 CEView the Source
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