A God Who Needed No Image

The chief god of the Nabataean Arabs, Dushara, was worshipped for centuries without ever being carved into human shape. His presence at Petra and at other Nabataean sanctuaries was represented instead by a betyl, a plain rectangular block of stone set into a shrine or a rock cut niche, a form of worship scholars call aniconic because it refuses the image altogether rather than merely simplifying one. Dushara's name is generally read as lord of the mountain, and his cult centered on the high places cut into the sandstone cliffs surrounding Petra, the fortress capital the Nabataeans held against a failed siege by the Macedonian general Demetrius as early as 312 BCE. The kingdom's wealth came from controlling the caravan trade that carried incense and spices out of the Arabian interior toward the Mediterranean coast, and Dushara traveled with that trade, absorbed into new settlements as Nabataean merchants and colonists spread north into Syria and west toward the Red Sea. Later Greek and Roman writers, reading a Nabataean god of storms and mountain heights through their own categories, identified him with Zeus, though the identification captures only part of what Dushara meant to the people who carved his stone into the rock.