NABATAEANS (Greek: Nāḥāṭaṭṭo; Latin: Nabataei). - A powerful Arab people who in the last three centuries B.C. and in the early centuries A.D. acquired notable political and economic importance through the development of trade between Asia and Syria. Flavius Josephus (Antiq. Iud., 1, 12, 4) and St. Jerome (Quaest. in Gen., 25, 12; PL 23, 977) trace their descent from the Ishmaelite tribe of Nabaioth (Gen. 25, 13; 28, 9; 36, 3; I Par. 1, 29). The Nabātu, associated with Qidri in the Assyrian inscriptions and whom Ashurbanipal drove back into the Naḡd, may be the ancient ancestors of the N. of the Hellenistic and Roman period. Still nomads in the 4th century B.C., they gradually became sedentary and, pushing pushing northward, they invaded the Edomite region, taking refuge in Petra, which became their capital.
Having made themselves independent, by 312 B.C. they were strong enough to resist two expeditions of Antigonus, king of Syria. The center of their commerce was the city of el-Hiğr (Madā'in Şālih), rich in rock-cut monuments adorned with Nabataean inscriptions and where the routes from the Persian Gulf, from Yemen and from the Red Sea crossed. From there the caravans supplied the depots of Petra, whence the goods were distributed, by way of Gaza, both to Egypt, to Greece, to Italy and to the ports of Syria. The power of their kingdom grew as that of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies declined, and in the period of their greatest expansion they dominated from the Elanitic Gulf as far as Damascus. In their well-organized and populous territory, they reactivated all the roads of Transjordan, furnishing them with forts and guard posts for the defense of traffic and also to collect taxes on goods. They pushed the boundaries of arable land into the interior of the desert with provident irrigation and with the creation of cisterns, dams and aqueducts.
Besides from the accounts of the classical writers (Diodorus Siculus, 19, 94; Strabo, 16, 4), the civilization of the N. is known from coins, important for establishing the chronology of the kings, and from the numerous inscriptions written in the Aramaic language, but full of Arabisms, so that in the eyes of the Roman writers they appeared as Arabs. The kingdom fell within the new political organization of the East established by Trajan, who destroyed it in 106, reducing it to a province under the name of Arabia. Many rock-cut monuments and temples remain in many localities of Transjordan: 'Abdē' (v.), Hirbet Tannūr, Petra, Kerak, Qaṣr Rabbah, 'Ajneh. The national god was Dusares with the paredra Allāt. Little is known of their civil and military organization.