Nabataea in 218 B.C.

Nabataea — Spring 218 BC · Lords of the Incense Road.

The Nabataeans — an Arab people of caravan-traders who hold the deserts of the southern Levant and north-west Arabia. In 218 BC they are still a loose tribal, semi-nomadic confederation rather than a formal monarchy, but already the undisputed masters of the incense road: they carry South-Arabian frankincense and myrrh, Indian and Gulf goods, and the bitumen of the Dead Sea north to Gaza and the Mediterranean. Their power rests not on walls but on water — hidden cisterns in waterless country, the same secret that let them destroy the armies of Antigonus the One-Eyed a century before.

While the great Hellenistic powers fight over the settled lands, the Nabataeans command the routes between them. From their rose-red fastness at Petra they tax the trade that crosses the desert — incense out of Arabia Felix, spices out of the Indian Ocean, bitumen out of the Dead Sea — and grow rich beyond what their barren country could ever yield. They keep no farms, build few houses, and plant no vines by their own ancestral law; their wealth is movable and their defence is the desert itself, which no army can cross without the water only they know how to find. A formal kingship with named kings like Aretas crystallises only in the next century — for now they are a free people, led by their chiefs and bound by custom rather than a crown.