Nabataean Kingdom: Hidden Cisterns, Bitumen Raids and Petra's Dams

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In 312 BC Antigonus, one of Alexander the Great's successors, sent his general Athenaeus with about 4,000 infantry and 600 cavalry to raid the Nabataeans at the stronghold called the Rock while their men were away at a festival. Athenaeus took silver and spices, camped without scouts about 20 miles away, and was overrun at night by some 8,000 Nabataean fighters; only about 50 horsemen escaped. The Nabataeans then wrote Antigonus a polite letter claiming self-defense, he blamed his dead general, and they used the lull to build watchtowers and smoke signal posts. When his son Demetrius arrived with another 8,000 men, a Nabataean called out that his people lived in the desert precisely so they would never be slaves, and Demetrius accepted gifts and left.

The Nabataeans, likely from the Hejaz, survived by carving cisterns into rock, sealing them with hydraulic plaster and hiding them flush with the desert floor under secret markers. Control of the frankincense and myrrh caravans to Gaza made them rich, and they formalized a monarchy with kings such as Aretas I, minted coins and briefly turned to Red Sea piracy when Ptolemaic ships learned the monsoon winds. Obodas I lured a Seleucid army into the desert to starve and was later worshipped at Avdat, while Aretas III briefly held Damascus. Petra was carved from the top of the cliffs down, with dams and a diversion tunnel turning flash floods into a city water supply, until Rome made the kingdom a client in 62 BC and Trajan annexed it in 106 AD.

• Antigonus sent a crew to harvest Dead Sea bitumen, and Nabataeans on reed rafts shot them down with arrows.
• Diodorus Siculus wrote that Nabataeans thrived where invading armies died of thirst.
• The Milan Papyrus records a formal Arabian cavalry belonging to a Nabataean king.
• Aretas I was called the tyrant of the Arabs and alternately allied with and imprisoned Maccabean leaders.
• After annexation the territory became the Roman province of Arabia Petraea, and trade later shifted north to Palmyra.