- Introduction
- Roman historians tell us surprisingly little about the annexation of the Nabataean kingdom in AD 106, and their testimonies date from roughly 100 to 200 years after the event. Our only contemporary references are in two papyri (see below) and in some of the Safaitic graffiti carved by nomads in the basalt desert (ḥarrah) east of the Ḥawrān. In a small minority of these, the author dates his graffito, or what he describes in it, by things which had happened to him or to others either in the desert or, in about a third of the dated texts, in the Nabataean and Jewish kingdoms and/or the Roman Provinces of Syria and Arabia. The subject of this article is a recently discovered Safaitic inscription which provides a very explicit contemporary reference to the Roman annexation of Nabataea. In addition to this, its unique wording provides an important glimpse into the lexicon and phonetics of Safaitic.
Historical background
When Rabbel II, the last Nabataean king, died in AD 105/6, Rome, which seems to have been preparing for this moment, apparently launched a pincer attack on the kingdom from the north and the south. From Syria, Roman troops, probably from the VI Legion Ferrata (Kennedy 1980; Bowersock 1983, pp. 81–82; and Cimadomo 2018), under Aulus Cornelius Palma Frontonianus, the governor of the Province of Syria, may have captured Boṣrā which had, to all intents and purposes, been Rabbel’s ‘northern capital’ (See Sartre 2001, p. 500). Roughly at the same time, Gaius Claudius Severus, with detachments of the III Legion Cyrenaica, seems to have invaded from the south and taken Petra. Thus, within a short time, Rome had captured Nabataea’s two most important seats of government.
We know of Severus’ invasion from two letters (7 P.Mich. 465 and 466 (Winter 1936, pp. 465–466), see Préaux 1950-1951), one undated and the other dated March 26, AD 107, from a cache of papyri found in Karanis, in the north-east of the Fayoum, Egypt, where the III Legion Cyrenaica was based. The letters are from a young man, Gaius Iulius Apollinarius, who was serving with the III Legion Cyrenaica in or near Petra and are addressed to his parents. It would seem that the decision to make Boṣrā the capital of the new Provincia Arabia was taken very early since the new era which the Romans created for it was indiscriminately described as ‘the era of the Province’ or ‘the era of Boṣrā’. This era starts in AD 106, and must have been declared almost immediately, since there is a fragment of a Nabataean inscription from Avdat in the Negev dated to šnt trtyn l-hprkyʾ (“year two of the governorate”) (Negev 1963), i.e. AD 107, and a Nabataean-Greek bilingual inscription found in Madaba which is dated to year three of the governor of Boṣrā (Milik 1958, pp. 243–246). The Nabataean text gives the date as b-šnt tlt l-hprk bṣrʾ ‘in year three of the governor of Boṣrā’ (i.e. AD 108/109) and the Greek as ἔτους τρίτου ἐπαρχείας ‘the third year of the governorate’. Thus, we know that Severus was in the former Nabataea in at least AD 107 and, from milestones along the Via Nova Traiana and other roads, that he was governor between 111– 115 (Sartre 1982, p. 78). It is not clear, however, whether he was actually governor of the new province in the years between 107 (or even 106) and 111, or was simply in charge of the preparations for turning it into a functioning province (Sartre 2001, p. 432, n. 11).
The inscription
Transliteration:
Palaeography:
- Personal Names
- Both names in the genealogy are well attested in Safaitic. The first, tm, should probably be vocalized /taym/, on the basis that it is regularly found as θαιμ- in Greek transcription (Al-Jallad and Al-Manaser 2016, p. 56).
Location:
