Inscribed in stone
The Nabataeans are famously known today for their carved-stone memorial tombs in the ancient city of Petra, or as they named it—Raqmu.
Each year, around a million people travel to Raqmu/Petra (named as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World), to marvel at this city—its structures seeming to sprout from the red sandstone cliffs of the Shara mountains. When they arrive, these tourists know next to nothing about Petra or its Nabataean builders, other than what they saw in the movie, “Indiana Jones, the Last Crusade.” And when they leave, they know barely more.
Who were they?
Ignorance of the Nabataeans is not entirely the fault of the tourists. The Nabataeans themselves left virtually no archives or records of any kind. Unlike most of their contemporaries—who left volumes of archives recording their great achivements and victories—the Nabataeans seemed to avoid writing down anything that might give any details about their history. Almost nothing is known about their origin—exactly who they were and where they came from. And little to nothing is known about how they lived, the details of their governance, or what they thought about the nations around them. And lastly, we know vanishingly little about what became of them when the Roman Empire annexed the Nabataean Kingdom (apparently without military conquest). They seemed to simply vanish from sight.
It’s not that these people were illiterate. It is common knowledge of archaeologists that the deserts of that region are filled with tens of thousands of gaffiti, scratched and chiseled into the rocks lying about. It is clear from the expressions of these texts that most of these were left by common people traveling through those regions: shepherds, pilgrims, soldiers, and traders. From the sheer number of known inscribed graffiti, it was a very significant portion of the population which could read and write.
And what has been formally written down by the Nabataeans, exists today in the form of professionally inscribed official statements on the facades of tombs, temples, and public works projects. These commonly mention the names of the sponsors, the builders, and sometimes the royalty in power at the time. The inscriptions on tombs also often state who can use the tomb, and the penalty (usually monetary and/or religious) for violating the tomb’s sanctity. But these inscriptions do little in the way of helping us understand the lives of these people.
Typically, formal Nabataean inscriptions were very professionally carved using single-point iron chisels. There is a certain simplistic beauty to the lettering, and the specific form of the letters seems to have evolved to accommodate the manner of writing in rock. The alphabet they used and they language in which they wrote was a Nabataean-specific form of Aramaic, the lingua-franca of much of the world at that time between India and the Mediterranean Sea.
My own inscription
I was so taken by the beauty of these tomb inscriptions, that I commissioned a local stone-cutting artist, the sculptor Sean Klinksiek, to fabricate a pseudo-Nabataean inscription for me. The inscription is just over a foot in length, and a couple of inches in thickness, and the material is cream-colored limestone.
Sean is an accomplished stone artist, having produced many major stone works in the San Antonio area. At the time I commissioned my inscription, he was working on a huge stone cross for a church. You can find out more about his work at: Sean Klinksiek, Custom Stone Carving
I knew what I wanted the stone to say—”Brock Meier’s The Stone Cutter.” And I wanted the text to be presented in Nabataean Aramaic script. So I researched the language and alphabet, and came up with what I wanted on the stone. One thing to remember is that Nabataean Aramaic, like most other written languages of the region (e.g., Arabic and Hebrew), reads right-to-left. And instead of translating “The Stone Cutter” into the equivalent Aramaic words, I opted for a phonetic reading. Finally, the written language has no vowels or spaces between words (again, like other languages of the region). So what I ended up with was (in roman letters) “RTKNTSThZRYMKRB”, or reading from right-to-left: “BRKMYRZThSTNKTR.” With vowels inserted, you might more easily recognize this as “BROCKMEIERSTHESTONECUTTER.”
Sean completed the work, and I was extremely pleased with the resulting piece. It was unveiled at the book launch party for The Stone Cutter, September 30. (photos of the inscription appear above and below this article)
A survival based on secrecy
But all this doesn’t answer the question: Why didn’t the Nabataeans leave written texts or archives about themselves, and about what they did?
An historian of all things Nabataean, Dan Gibson, posits that much of the missing nature of information about the Nabataeans may be explained by their typical penchant for secrecy. These people had almost no resources (other than a waterless desert), almost no military might, and nearly non-existent civil organization. And yet, they became the economic envy of the first-century world. Gibson explains how they rose to such heights using secrecy, deception, and subterfuge.
When armies swept through the region, intent on conquering whomever might be in their path, they often faltered in the middle of the desert, desperate for water. The Nabataeans would arrive on the scene, and offer them as much water as they needed, all for a dear price, of course. When the army asked where the water came from, they invented fanciful stories about long conduits they had made of cow hides, which they unrolled in the desert, easily transporting water from some unknown river far off in the desert. Of course none of that was true, the water having been fetched from hidden underground cisterns they had excavated in the desert bedrock, filled with the catchment of rain from large areas.
And when they began monopolizing the transport and merchandising of luxury goods to the Mediterranean (frankincense in particular), countless others tried to horn-in on their business, and cut them out of their lucrative deals. But they kept the location of the sources of incense secret, again, concocting (what seems to us) outrageous myths about dragon-like flying snakes which protect the places where the product was gathered.
Around the turn of the first millennium, the Nabataean prime minister Syllaeus (probably, “Sullay” originally) volunteered to “guide” a large Roman military expedition, that was attempting to locate the source of incense. Instead, he caused them to mindlessly circle in the desert, many of the soldiers succumbing to thirst, starvation, and disease. The Romans never found the location where incense was produced, as long as the Nabataean Kingdom existed.
So it seems logical to believe that a people coming from an oral-based culture, and knowing that their economic existence depended on secrecy, would simply not be interested in writing down what might be interesting to know about them. It was to their benefit, and our detriment.
