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Petra is a historical and archaeological city in the southern Jordanian governorate of Ma’an that is famous for its rock-cut architecture and water conduit system. Another name for Petra is the Rose City due to the color of the stone out of which it is carved.
It lies on the slope of Jebel al-Madhbah (identified by some as the biblical Mount Hor) in a basin among the mountains which form the eastern flank of Arabah (Wadi Araba), the large valley running from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba.
It was first established sometime around the 6th century BC, by the Nabataean Arabs, a nomadic tribe who settled in the area and laid the foundations of a commercial empire that extended into Syria. It was established possibly as the capital city of the Nabataeans as early as 312 BC.
Despite successive attempts by the Seleucid king Antigonus, the Roman emperor Pompey and Herod the Great to bring Petra under the control of their respective empires, Petra remained largely in Nabataean hands until around 100AD, when the Romans took over.
It was still inhabited during the Byzantine period, when the former Roman Empire moved its focus east to Constantinople, but declined in importance thereafter. The Crusaders constructed a fort there in the 12th century, but soon withdrew, leaving Petra to the local people until the early 19th century, when it was rediscovered by the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1812.
Petra is today a symbol of Jordan, as well as Jordan’s most-visited tourist attraction. It was described as “a rose-red city half as old as time” in a Newdigate Prize-winning poem by John William Burgon, and was chosen by the Smithsonian Magazine as one of the “28 Places to See Before You Die.”
Petra has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985. UNESCO has described it as “one of the most precious cultural properties of man’s cultural heritage”.
The Nabataeans, also Nabateans, were an ancient people who inhabited northern Arabia and Southern Levant, their settlements in CE 37 – c. 100, gave the name of Nabatene to the borderland between Arabia and Syria, from the Euphrates to the Red Sea.
Located between the Sinai Peninsula and the Arabian Peninsula, its northern neighbour was the kingdom of Judea, and its south western neighbour was Ptolemaic Egypt. Its capital was the city of Petra in Jordan, and it included the towns of Bostra, Mada’in Saleh, and Nitzana.
Petra was a wealthy trading town, located at a convergence of several important trade routes. One of them was the Incense Route which was based around the production of both myrrh and frankincense in southern Arabia, and ran through Mada’in Saleh to Petra. From here the aromatics were distributed throughout the Mediterranean region.
Diodorus Siculus (book ii) described them as a strong tribe of some 10,000 warriors, pre-eminent among the nomads of Arabia, eschewing agriculture, fixed houses, and the use of wine, but adding to pastoral pursuits a profitable trade with the seaports in frankincense, myrrh and spices from Arabia Felix (today’s Yemen), as well as a trade with Egypt in bitumen from the Dead Sea.
Onomastic analysis has suggested that Nabataean culture may have had multiple influences. Classical references to the Nabataeans begin with Diodorus Siculus; they suggest that the Nabataeans’ trade routes and the origins of their goods were regarded as trade secrets, and disguised in tales that should have strained outsiders’ credulity.
Their loosely-controlled trading network centered on strings of oases that they controlled, where agriculture was intensively practiced in limited areas, and on the routes that linked them, had no securely defined boundaries in the surrounding desert.
Trajan conquered the Nabataean kingdom, annexing it to the Roman Empire, where their individual culture, easily identified by their characteristic finely-potted painted ceramics, became dispersed in the general Greco-Roman culture and was eventually lost.
The brief Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews that began in 586 BCE opened a minor power vacuum in Judah (prior to the Israelites’ return under the Persian King, Cyrus the Great), and as Edomites moved into open Judaean grazing lands, Nabataean inscriptions began to be left in Edomite territory.
The first definite appearance was in 312/311 BCE, when they were attacked at Sela or perhaps Petra without success by Antigonus I’s officer Athenaeus as part of the Third War of the Diadochi; at that time Hieronymus of Cardia, a Seleucid officer, mentioned the Nabataeans in a battle report.
About 50 BCE, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus cited Hieronymus in his report, and added the following: “Just as the Seleucids had tried to subdue them, so the Romans made several attempts to get their hands on that lucrative trade.”
The Nabataeans had already some tincture of foreign culture when they first appear in history. The language of the Nabataean inscriptions, attested from the 2nd century BCE, shows a local development of the Aramaic language, which had ceased to have super-regional importance after the collapse of the Achaemenid Empire (330 BC). The Nabataean alphabet itself also developed out of the Aramaic alphabet.
That culture was Aramaic; they wrote a letter to Antigonus in Syriac letters, and Aramaic continued to be the language of their coins and inscriptions when the tribe grew into a kingdom, and profited by the decay of the Seleucids to extend its borders northward over the more fertile country east of the Jordan.
They occupied Hauran, and in about 85 BC their king Aretas III became lord of Damascus and Coele-Syria. Nabataeans became the Arabic name for Aramaeans, whether in Syria or Iraq, a fact which was thought to show that the Nabataeans were originally Aramaean immigrants from Babylonia.
Proper names on their inscriptions suggest that they were ethnically Arabs who had come under Aramaic influence. Starcky identifies the Nabatu of southern Arabia (Pre-Khalan migration) as their ancestors. However different groups amongst the Nabataeans wrote their names in slightly different ways, consequently archeologists are reluctant to say that they were all the same tribe, or that any one group is the original Nabataeans.
Various native homelands were suggested for the Nabataeans, such as Northern Arabia and the North-East of the Arabian peninsula, based on a probable similarity between the names of deities which were worshiped in those areas, and some similarities between the inscriptions of some other Arab groups who inhabited the southern half of ancient Mesopotamia.
In 1997, a group of scholars of the University of Exeter in England made a critical review of all these theories in a multi-volume study, arguing that the original homeland of Nabataens was to the south of Al Jawf Province, a region of Saudi Arabia, located in the north of the country, bordering Jordan.
This Aramaic dialect was increasingly affected by the Arabic dialect of the local population. From the 4th century, the Arabic influence becomes overwhelming, in a way that it may be said the Nabataean language shifted seamlessly from Aramaic to Arabic.
The Arabic alphabet itself developed out of cursive variants of the Nabataean script in the 5th century, and Ibn Wahshiyya claimed to have translated from this language in his Nabataean corpus.
Pre-Islamic religion – Allah
Allah is the Arabic word for God (literally ‘the God’, as the initial “Al-” is the definite article). It is used mainly by Muslims to refer to God in Islam, Arab Christians, and often, albeit not exclusively, by Bahá’ís, Arabic-speakers, Indonesian and Maltese Christians, and Mizrahi Jews. Christians and Sikhs in Malaysia also use and have used the word to refer to God.
The term Allāh is derived from a contraction of the Arabic definite article al- “the” and ilāh “deity, god” to al-lāh meaning “the [sole] deity, God”. Cognates of the name “Allāh” exist in other Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic.
The name was previously used by pagan Meccans as a reference to a creator deity, possibly the supreme deity in pre-Islamic Arabia. In pre-Islamic Arabia amongst pagan Arabs, Allah was not considered the sole divinity, having associates and companions, sons and daughters–a concept that was deleted under the process of Islamization.
The name Allah was used by Nabataeans in compound names, and was found throughout the entire region of the Nabataean kingdom. From Nabataean inscriptions, Allah seems to have been regarded as a “High and Main God”, while other deities were considered to be mediators before Allah and of a second status, which was the same case of the worshipers at the Kaaba temple at Mecca.
Many inscriptions containing the name Allah have been discovered in Northern and Southern Arabia as early as the 5th century B.C., including Lihyanitic, Thamudic and South Arabian inscriptions.
The name Allah or Alla was found in the Epic of Atrahasis engraved on several tablets dating back to around 1700 BC in Babylon, which showed that he was being worshipped as a high deity among other gods who were considered to be his brothers but taking orders from him.
Dumuzid the Shepherd, a king of the 1st Dynasty of Uruk named on the Sumerian King List, was later over-venerated so that people started associating him with “Alla” and the Babylonian god Tammuz.
Enki is a god in Sumerian mythology, later known as Ea in Akkadian and Babylonian mythology. Enki/Ea is essentially a god of civilization, wisdom, and culture. He was also the creator and protector of man, and of the world in general. He was the deity of crafts (gašam); mischief; water, seawater, lakewater (a, aba, ab), intelligence (gestú, literally “ear”) and creation (Nudimmud: nu, likeness, dim mud, make beer).
He was originally patron god of the city of Eridu, an ancient Sumerian city in what is now Tell Abu Shahrain, Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq, long considered the earliest city in southern Mesopotamia, but later the influence of his cult spread throughout Mesopotamia and to the Canaanites, Hittites and Hurrians.
As Ea, Enki had a wide influence outside of Sumer, being equated with El (at Ugarit) and possibly Yah (at Ebla) in the Canaanite ‘ilhm pantheon, he is also found in Hurrian and Hittite mythology, as a god of contracts, and is particularly favourable to humankind.
A large number of myths about Enki have been collected from many sites, stretching from Southern Iraq to the Levantine coast. He figures in the earliest extant cuneiform inscriptions throughout the region and was prominent from the third millennium down to Hellenistic times.
He was associated with the southern band of constellations called stars of Ea, but also with the constellation AŠ-IKU, the Field (Square of Pegasus). The planet Mercury, associated with Babylonian Nabu (the son of Marduk) was in Sumerian times, identified with Enki.
Beginning around the second millennium BCE, he was sometimes referred to in writing by the numeric ideogram for “40,” occasionally referred to as his “sacred number.
The exact meaning of his name is uncertain: the common translation is “Lord of the Earth”: the Sumerian en is translated as a title equivalent to “lord”; it was originally a title given to the High Priest; ki means “earth”; but there are theories that ki in this name has another origin, possibly kig of unknown meaning, or kur meaning “mound”.
The name Ea is allegedly Hurrian in origin while others claim that his name ‘Ea’ is possibly of Semitic origin and may be a derivation from the West-Semitic root hyy meaning “life” in this case used for “spring”, “running water.” In Sumerian E-A means “the house of water”, and it has been suggested that this was originally the name for the shrine to the god at Eridu.
The pool of the Abzu at the front of his temple was adopted also at the temple to Nanna (Akkadian Sin) the Moon, at Ur, and spread from there throughout the Middle East. It is believed to remain today as the sacred pool at Mosques, or as the holy water font in Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches.
In 1964, a team of Italian archaeologists under the direction of Paolo Matthiae of the University of Rome La Sapienza performed a series of excavations of material from the third-millennium BCE city of Ebla. Much of the written material found in these digs was later translated by Giovanni Pettinato.
Among other conclusions, he found a tendency among the inhabitants of Ebla to replace the name of El, king of the gods of the Canaanite pantheon (found in names such as Mikael), with Ia. Jean Bottero (1952) and others suggested that Ia in this case is a West Semitic (Canaanite) way of saying Ea, Enki’s Akkadian name, associating the Canaanite theonym Yahu, and ultimately Hebrew YHWH.
This hypothesis is dismissed by some scholars as erroneous, based on a mistaken cuneiform reading, but academic debate continues. Ia has also been compared by William Hallo with the Ugaritic Yamm (sea), (also called Judge Nahar, or Judge River) whose earlier name in at least one ancient source was Yaw, or Ya’a.
Pre-Islamic religion
Allāt, Al-Uzzá and Manāt was three chief goddesses of Arabian religion in pre-Islamic times and was worshiped as the daughters of Allah by the pre-Islamic Arabs. They were goddesses of Mecca.
Allat is an alternative name of the Mesopotamian goddess of the underworld, now usually known as Ereshkigal. She was reportedly also venerated in Carthage under the name Allatu.
The goddess occurs in early Safaitic graffiti (Safaitic han-’Ilāt “the Goddess”) and the Nabataeans of Petra and the people of Hatra also worshipped her, equating her with the Greek Athena and Tyche and the Roman Minerva.
She is frequently called “the Great Goddess” in Greek in multi-lingual inscriptions. According to Wellhausen, the Nabataeans believed al-Lāt was the mother of Hubal (and hence the mother-in-law of Manāt).
The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, considered her the equivalent of Aphrodite: The Assyrians call Aphrodite Mylitta, the Arabians Alilat, and the Persians Mitra. In addition that deity is associated with the Indian deity Mitra.
This passage is linguistically significant as the first clear attestation of an Arabic word, with the diagnostically Arabic article al-. The Persian and Indian deities were developed from the Proto-Indo-Iranian deity known as Mitra.
According to Herodotus, the ancient Arabians believed in only two gods: They believe in no other gods except Dionysus and the Heavenly Aphrodite; and they say that they wear their hair as Dionysus does his, cutting it round the head and shaving the temples. They call Dionysus, Orotalt; and Aphrodite, Alilat.
The first known mention of al-‘Uzzá is from the inscriptions at Dedan, the capital of the Lihyanite Kingdom, an Ancient Northwest Arabian kingdom in the fourth or third century BC. A stone cube at aṭ-Ṭā’if (near Mecca) was held sacred as part of her cult. Al-‘Uzzá, like Hubal, was called upon for protection by the pre-Islamic Quraysh.
Al-‘Uzzá was also worshipped by the Nabataeans, who equated her with the Greek goddess Aphrodite Ourania (Roman Venus Caelestis). She had been adopted alongside Dushara as the presiding goddess at Petra, the Nabataen capital, where she assimilated with Isis, Tyche, and Aphrodite attributes and superseded her sisters.
Manāt was one of the three chief goddesses of Mecca. The pre-Islamic Arabs believed Manāt to be the goddess of fate. She was known by the cognate name Manawat to the Nabataeans of Petra, who equated her with the Graeco-Roman goddess Nemesis, and she was considered the wife of Hubal.
According to Grunebaum in Classical Islam, the Arabic name of Manat is the linguistic counterpart of the Hellenistic Tyche, Dahr, fateful ‘Time’ who snatches men away and robs their existence of purpose and value. There are also connections with Chronos of Mithraism and Zurvan mythology.
Dushara, (“Lord of the Mountain”), also transliterated as Dusares, a deity in the ancient Middle East worshipped by the Nabataeans at Petra and Madain Saleh (of which city he was the patron). He was mothered by Manat the goddess of fate.
In Greek times, he was associated with Zeus because he was the chief of the Nabataean pantheon as well as with Dionysus. His sanctuary at Petra contained a great temple in which a large cubical stone was the centrepiece.
Chaabou (perhaps the original version of the Arabic word Ka’bah) is one of the goddesses in the Nabataean Pantheon, as noted by Epiphanius of Salamis (c.315–403). The description points to either Allat or Uzza, but is most likely the former, since Allat is also associated with Aphrodite, a fertility goddess.
According to Epiphanius, Chaabou was a virgin that gave birth to Dusares (aka Dhu Sharaa, and DVSARI), the ‘Lord of Mount Seir’, the god of the Nabataeans who was equated with Zeus. Epiphanius records a festival celebrating the birth of Dusares on the 25th of December whereby the Black Stone of Dusares (considered newly born) is carried around the courtyard of the temple seven times.
Remnants of this practice are observed not only in the present-day Muslim Hajj, but also in most Arab countries where, upon birth of a child, the family carries the baby around the house seven times.
This ritual is called Subu’ (meaning ‘the sevens’). It is also interesting that once the pilgrims return from the Hajj, they are considered as those who have been purified from sin, as if they were newly born.
John of Damascus, in his accounts regarding the Hagarenes or Saracens, noted that they revered a certain black stone and showered it with kisses, and that it was the head of Aphrodite, the goddess that they once worshipped and whom they called Chobar in their language.
Hagarenes, is a term that widely used by early Syriac, Greek, Coptic and Armenian sources to describe the early Arab conquerors of Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt.
The name was used in Judeo-Christian literature and Byzantine chronicles for “Hanif” Arabs, refering to one who maintained the pure monothestic beliefs of the patriarch Ibrahim during the period known as the Pre-Islamic period or Age of Ignorance, and later for Islamic forces as a synonym of the term Saracens.
The Syriac term “Hagraye” can be roughly translated as “the followers or descendants of Hagar”, while the other frequent name, “Mhaggraye”, is thought to have connections with the Arabic “Muhajir”, other scholars assume that the terms may not be of Judeo-Christian origin.
Hagar, meaning “uncertain”, is a biblical person in the Book of Genesis Chapter 16. She was an Egyptian handmaid of Sarai (Sarah), who gave her to Abram (Abraham) to bear a child. Thus came the firstborn, Ishmael, the patriarch of the Ishmaelites.
The name Hagar originates from the Book of Genesis, is mentioned in Hadith, and alluded to in the Qur’an. She is revered in the Islamic faith and acknowledged in all Abrahamic faiths. In mainstream Christianity, she is considered a concubine to Abram.
Pre-Islamic religion – The end
The “Hijra”, also Hijrat or Hegira, is the migration or journey of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina between June 21 and July 2 in 622 CE.
The shrine and temple dedicated to al-Lat, who was then known as “the lady of Tā’if, in Taif, about 100 km (62 mi) southeast of Mecca, was demolished along with all of the other signs of the city’s previously pagan existence on the orders of Muhammad, during the Expedition of Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, in the same year as the Battle of Tabuk (which occurred in October 630 AD).
The destruction of the idol was a demand by Muhammad before any reconciliation could take place with the citizens of Taif who were under constant attack and suffering from a blockade by the Banu Hawazin, led by Malik, a convert to Islam who promised to continue the war against the citizens of the city which was started by Muhammad in the Siege of Taif.
Both Ta’if and Mecca were resorts of pilgrimage. Ta’if was more pleasantly situated than Mecca itself and the people of Ta’if had close trade relations with the people of Mecca. The people of Ta’if carried on agriculture and fruit‑growing in addition to their trade activities.
During the 5th century Christianity became the prominent religion of the region following conquest by Barsauma.
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