Nabataeans

Nabataean religion is known almost entirely from inscriptions, from coins and from the rock cut monuments themselves, because no Nabataean literature survives. John Healey's conspectus assembles what those sources allow. At the head stands Dushara, whose name means of the Shara and ties him to a mountain range, with Al-Uzza and Allat as the principal goddesses and Manat also attested.

The distinctive feature is aniconism. The god is represented by a betyl, a plain rectangular block set in a niche, sometimes with the barest indication of eyes and nose and often with nothing at all. Hundreds of these niches are cut into the rock along the approaches to Petra, so that the whole gorge is a processional way lined with them. Whether the practice reflects a doctrine about images or a regional convention is not settled, and figured Hellenistic images of the same deities appear later.

The high places, open air platforms cut on the ridges above the city with basins and channels, are the other principal installation. Funerary religion is prominent. The tomb facades carry inscriptions invoking Dushara against anyone who alters the burial, which makes the god a guarantor of contract as well as a recipient of offerings.

The Nabataeans emerge in the record in the fourth century BCE as an Arab people of the northern desert whom Greek writers found impossible to pin down, and within two centuries they held a kingdom running from the Hejaz to the neighbourhood of Damascus, with a capital at Petra. Their wealth came from control of the caravan routes carrying frankincense and myrrh north out of southern Arabia, a trade Nigel Groom's study reconstructs in detail, and from a technical mastery of water in a place that has almost none: dams, cisterns and channels that made a city possible inside a gorge.

Petra's monuments belong to that period. The facades cut into the rock combine Hellenistic architectural vocabulary with local forms, and the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985.

Rome annexed the kingdom in the year 106 of the common era as the province of Arabia, without a war so far as the record shows, and the trade routes shifted afterwards. Christianity followed, and some tombs were converted into churches. Nabataean Aramaic, written in a cursive hand, is the direct ancestor of the Arabic alphabet, which is the tradition's longest lasting bequest: the letters in which the Quran is written descend from the writing on these tomb facades.