Not far from the Ecolodge, on the way to wadi Feran via wadi Sahab, stand the ruins of a Nabatean village, dating from the 3rd-4th century AD. There are approximately 10 houses, store rooms and graves. The entrances of the houses are low, partly to give maximum isolation against heat and cold.
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About the Nabateans
(from ARAMCO World)
A pre-Islamic Arab group, the Nabateans, or "Nabatu," made their first impact on the ancient world as Red Sea raiders, but then, defeated too often, became nomads who next appear herding their goats and sheep along the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula and moving ever northward toward less populated areas. Gradually advancing into this territory -in today's Jordan - the tribal groups who made up the Nabatu found a land-locked site which offered security (4th century BC), pasturage and access to the major trade routes of the ancient Middle East - a paramount factor since the Nabatu, who had traversed the southern ends of those routes, had sensed the importance of controlling them. The site in which they settled, characterized by a towering mountain within a rock-girt valley, had been known in Edomite times as Sela' - "Rock"- but the Nabatu renamed it Rekumu when they settled in. Today it's called Petra
From this strange urban center in the midst of nowhere, this once pastoral culture expanded until Petra became the hub of a civilization embracing over 1,000 sites scattered from Madain Salih, 500 miles from Jiddah, in today's Saudi Arabia, to the upper edge of the Dead Sea, with brokers and agents equally scattered along the Arabian Gulf, Egypt, and on into Greece and Rome.
. Profiting from their days as wandering nomads, the Nabateans came to control this international trade by carrying their wares on their own caravans, along their own closely guarded routes, using their own rest stops and depots, and collecting their own taxes. Rarely before, if ever, had a single Middle Eastern kingdom so completely dominated mercantile endeavors so profitably.
It's no wonder, of course, that distant Rome, as well as such neighbors as Herod the Great, began to envy Nabatean control of the great north-south, east-west trade routes, nor that the Nabateans developed amazing political skills as well as business acumen. While every other major local kingdom of the Middle East was being absorbed by Rome, Nabatea alone seems to have survived
Mighty Rome, of course, was seldom balked for long and eventually the Romans struck at Nabatean through her commerce -the very lifeblood of the kingdom - by diverging trade routes in the south to Alexandria and trade routes in the north to Palmyra. Gradually, as a result, Nabatean power diminished.
But the story did not end there. The acumen of the Nabateans, which had brought them to such pinnacles of progress, did not fade simply because of foreign invasion. As recent excavations at Petra have disclosed, the economic level of the Nabatu does not seem to have diminished after A. D. 106. Instead, new buildings were erected - once attributed to the "the Romans", but, in fact, strikingly similar to classical Nabatean decoration - and as late as the fourth century the old trade lines across Sinai and across the Red Sea were converging at Tell el-Shuqafiya in the northwestern Delta area of Egypt - on their way to Rome's transit center at Alexandria.
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