A small silver figure of a camel and its riders, from the Nabataean world
Camel and riders, ca. 1st century BCE–1st century CE
Marked Petra

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Petra and the Nabataeans

Nabataean traders grew rich carrying incense across the Arabian desert, and carved their capital, Petra, into red sandstone cliffs in what is now Jordan, with clever systems to catch every drop of water.

Date
About 300 BC to AD 106VI · The classical world
Place
Petra · Hegra (Mada’in Salih) · BostraThe Middle East
Laid out as
A cityOne city, district by district, from its centre outwards.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IIncense and caravans
  2. IICarved in the rock
  3. IIIWater in the desert
  4. IVQueens on the coins
  5. VBecoming Roman

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Aretas IV
  • Shaqilath
  • Johann Ludwig Burckhardt

Objects

  • The Treasury (Al-Khazneh)
  • Nabataean inscriptions
  • Fine painted pottery

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

300 BC to AD 106. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?