Plaque with Nabataean inscription
Like graffiti in any urban setting, Nabataean stone inscriptions provide glimpses of their original writers. The common written language of the Nabataeans was a form of Aramaic—the most widespread language of the ancient Near East. The Nabataeans wrote on scrolls made of leather and papyrus, materials that have long since disintegrated. What have survived are more than 4,000 stone inscriptions written in Nabataean. Details gleaned from these texts reveal who built Petra's grand monuments, the identity of people buried in the tombs and whom the Nabataeans worshipped and honored.
More than 80 percent of the inscriptions recovered from Petra are signatures. Some were grouped together at temples and ritual sites, where participants would sign their names as a permanent record of their religious devotion. Found throughout the ancient Near East, Nabataean inscriptions testify to the widespread cultural presence of this people.
Lingua Franca
At the height of Petra, 100 BC-AD 100, Nabataean writing was widely used throughout the surrounding region. A dialect of Aramaic, Nabataean may have served as the basis for later classical Arabic script.
Writing Tools
Scribes crafted stone inscriptions using hammers and chisels. The looping links, or ligatures, of Nabataean script suggest that this dialect of Aramaic first developed on paper and that scribes copied the same style when carving inscriptions.
How Do We Know?—The anatomy of Nabataean
To understand how the Nabataean written language may have evolved, researchers compared several Aramaic alphabets. Letters resemble each other, but they may appear in a variety of forms. Written right to left, the Nabataean language consisted of 22 consonants. Like similar scripts, such as Hebrew, the vowel sounds are only inferred, making it hard to sound out the ancient language.
