Incense, Water and a Kingdom That Became a Province

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.