[146] At Medain Sâlih or Hijr, southward from Teimâ, the ancient Thaema, there has recently been found by the travellers Doughty and Huber, a series of Nabataean inscriptions, which, in great part dated, reach from the time of Augustus down to the death of Vespasian. Latin inscriptions are wanting, and the few Greek are of the latest period; to all appearance, on the conversion of the Nabataean kingdom into a Roman province, the portion of the interior of Arabia that belonged to the former was given up by the Romans.
[147] The city of Damascus voluntarily submitted under the last Seleucids about the time of the dictatorship of Sulla to the king of the Nabataeans at the time, presumably the Aretas, with whom Scaurus fought (Josephus, Arch. xiii. 15). The coins with the legend βασιλέως Ἀρέτου φιλέλληνος (Eckhel, iii. 330; Luynes, Rev. de Numism. 1858, p. 311), were perhaps struck in Damascus, when this was dependent on the Nabataeans; the reference of the number of the year on one of them is not indeed certain, but points, it may be presumed, to the last period of the Roman republic. Probably this dependence of the city on the Nabataean kings subsisted so long as there were such kings. From the fact that the city struck coins with the heads of the Roman emperors, there follows doubtless its dependence on Rome and therewith its self-administration, but not its non-dependence on the Roman vassal-prince; such protectorates assumed shapes so various that these arrangements might well be compatible with each other. The continuance of the Nabataean rule is attested partly by the circumstance that the ethnarch of king Aretas in Damascus wished to have the Apostle Paul arrested, as the latter writes in the 2d Epistle to the Corinthians, xi. 32, partly by the recently-established fact (see following note) that the rule of the Nabataeans to the north-east of Damascus was still continuing under Trajan.—Those who start, on the other hand, from the view that, if Aretas ruled in Damascus, the city could not be Roman, have attempted in various ways to fix the chronology of that event in the life of Paul. They have thought of the complication between Aretas and the Roman government in the last years of Tiberius; but from the course which this took it is not probable that it brought about a permanent change in the state of possession of Aretas. Melchior de Vogué (Mélanges d’arch. orientale, app. p. 33) has pointed out that between Tiberius and Nero—more precisely, between the years 33 and 62 (Saulcy, Num. de la terre sainte, p. 36)—there are no imperial coins of Damascus, and has placed the rule of the Nabataeans there in this interval, on the assumption that the emperor Gaius showed his favour to the Arabian as to so many others of the vassal-princes, and invested him with Damascus. But such interruptions of coinage are of frequent occurrence, and require no such profound explanation. The attempt to find a chronological basis for the history of Paul’s life in the sway of the Nabataean king at Damascus, and generally to define the time of Paul’s abode in this city, must probably be abandoned. If we may so far trust the representation—in any case considerably shifted—of the event in Acts ix., Paul went to Damascus before his conversion, in order to continue there the persecution of the Christians in which Stephen had perished, and then, when on his conversion he took part on the contrary in Damascus for the Christians, the Jews there resolved to put him to death, in which case it must therefore be presupposed that the officials of Aretas, like Pilate, allowed free course to the persecution of heretics by the Jews. Moreover, it follows from the trustworthy statements of the Epistle to the Galatians, that the conversion took place at Damascus (for the ὑπέστρεψα shows this), and Paul went from thence to Arabia; further, that he came three years after his conversion for the first time, and seventeen years after it for the second time, to Jerusalem, in accordance with which the apocryphal accounts of the Book of Acts as to his Jerusalem-journeys are to be corrected (Zeller, Apostelgesch. p. 216). But we cannot determine exactly either the time of the death of Stephen, much less the time intervening between this and the flight of the converted Paul from Damascus, or the interval between his second journey to Jerusalem and the composition of the Galatian letter, or the year of that composition itself.
[148] The Nabataean inscription found recently near Dmêr, to the north-east of Damascus on the road to Palmyra (Sachau, Zeitschr. der deutschen morgenl. Gesellschaft, xxxviii. p. 535), dates from the month Ijjar of the year 410 according to the Roman (i.e. Seleucid) reckoning, and the 24th year of king Dabel, the last Nabataean one, and so from May 99 A.D., has shown that this district up to the annexation of this kingdom remained under the rule of the Nabataeans. We may add that the dominions here seem to have been, geographically, a tangled mosaic; thus the tetrarch of Galilee and the Nabataean king fought about the territory of Gamala on the lake of Gennesaret (Josephus, Arch. xviii. 51).
[149] Perhaps through Gabinius (Appian, Syr. 51).
[150] Strabo, xvi. 4, 21, p. 779. The coins of these kings, however, do not show the emperor’s head. But that in the Nabataean kingdom dates might run by the Roman imperial years is shown by the Nabataean inscription of Hebrân (Vogué, Syrie Centrale, insc. n. 1), dated from the seventh year of Claudius, and so from the year 47. Hebrân, a little to the north of Bostra, appears to have been reckoned also at a later time to Arabia (Lebas-Waddington, 2287); and Nabataean inscriptions of a public tenor are not met with outside of the Nabataean state; the few of the kind from Trachonitis are of a private nature.
[151] “Leuke Kome in the land of the Nabataeans,” says Strabo under Tiberius, xvi. 4, 23, p. 780, “is a great place of trade, whither and whence the caravan-traders (καμηλέμποροι) go safely and easily from and to Petra with so large numbers of men and camels that they differ in nothing from encampments.” The Egyptian merchant also, writing under Vespasian, in his description of the coasts of the Red Sea (c. 19), mentions “the port and the fortress (φρούριον) of Leuce Come, whence the route leads towards Petra to the king of the Nabataeans Malichas. It may be regarded as the emporium for the goods conveyed thither from Arabia in not very large vessels. Therefore there is sent thither (ἀποστέλλεται) a receiver of the import-dues of a fourth of the value, and for the sake of security a centurion (ἑκατοντάρχης) with men.” As one belonging to the Roman empire here mentions officials and soldiers, these can only be Roman; the centurion does not suit the army of the Nabataean king, and the form of tax is quite the Roman. The bringing a client-state within the sphere of imperial taxation occurs elsewhere, e.g. in the regions of the Alps. The road from Petra to Gaza is mentioned by Plin. H. N. vi. 28, 144.
[152] Waddington, 2196; Ἀδριανοῦ τοῦ καὶ Σοαίδου Μαλέχου ἐθνάρχου στρατηγοῦ νομάδων τὸ μνημεῖον.
[153] Epiphanius, Haeres. li. p. 483, Dind., sets forth that the 25th December, the birthday of Christ, had already been festally observed after an analogous manner at Rome in the festival of the Saturnalia, at Alexandria in the festival (mentioned also in the decree of Canopus) of the Kikellia, and in other heathen worships. “This takes place in Alexandria at the so-called Virgin’s shrine (Κόριον) ... and if we ask people what this mystery means, they answer and say that to-day at this hour the Virgin has given birth to the Eternal (τὸν αἰῶνα). This takes place in like manner at Petra, the capital of Arabia, in the temple there, and in the Arabic language they sing the praise of the Virgin, whom they call in Arabic Chaamu, that is the maiden, and Him born of her Dusares, that is the Only-begotten of the Lord.” The name Chaamu is perhaps akin to the Aumu or Aumos of the Greek inscriptions of this region, who is compared with Ζεὺς ἀνίκητος Ἥλιος (Waddington, 2392–2395, 2441, 2445, 2456).
[154] This is said apart from the remarkable Arabo-Greek inscription (see below) found in Harrân, not far from Zorava, of the year 568 A.D., set up by the phylarch Asaraelos, son of Talemos (Waddington, 2464). This Christian is a precursor of Mohammed.
[155] Αὐσονίων μούσης ὑψινόου πρύτανις, Kaibel, Epigr. 440.