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The Nabataeans Are Coming
Pre-Islamic history was once taboo in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Will the ‘rediscovery’ of an ancient people – the Nabataeans – encourage international tourism? The volte face has been astonishing.
Until 2017, or thereabouts, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was seen as the hallmark of Islamic puritanism, where compulsorily veiled women were forbidden to travel without their male guardian’s permission, shops closed during prayer time, and the ‘religious police’ brandished canes to marshal the faithful into mosques. Writing in the first century BC the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus described the Nabataeans as a nomadic tribe of traders who avoided agriculture, fixed dwellings, and wine, while pursuing a profitable trade in frankincense, myrrh, and other spices from Arabia Felix (now Yemen) as well as bitumen from the Dead Sea. The site contains an ensemble of tombs and monuments cut into the local sandstone that bear ‘outstanding witness to important cultural exchanges in architecture, decoration, language use and the caravan trade’ linking the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.
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