Middle East - Anthony Ham [22]
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WHO WERE THE NABATAEANS?
The Romans may have left some spectacular cities all across the Middle East, but there’s one city that captures travellers’ imaginations above all others: Petra (Click here). But who, if not the grandiose Greeks and Romans, was it who built this splendid rock-hewn city?
Petra was built by the Nabataeans in the 3rd century BC and was held by them almost for the entirety of the Roman era. The Romans did try to conquer the Nabataeans, but when they failed, they largely left them to their own devices as long as they posed no military threat. For their part, the Nabataeans never really possessed an ‘empire’ in the common military and administrative sense of the word, but rather, from about 200 BC, they had established a ‘zone of influence’ that stretched north to Rome and south into the Hadramaut (Yemen).
There are many theories about where the Nabataeans came from, although most scholars agree they were early Bedouins who lived a nomadic life before settling in the area as farmers in the 6th century BC. They developed a specialised knowledge of desert water resources (using water channels known as qanats) as well as the intricacies of the lucrative trade-caravan routes. These two skills would form the foundations of the Nabataean ‘empire’.
Nabataean wealth, which had derived initially from plundering trade caravans, shifted to exacting tolls (up to 25% of the commodities’ value) upon these same caravans as a means of securing protection and guiding the caravans to water. Through a mixture of shrewd diplomacy and military force, the Nabataeans kept at bay not just the Romans but also the Seleucids, Egyptians and Persians from their rock-hewn fortress.
Little is also known of what happened to them after the fall of Petra in AD 555, whereafter they disappeared from history to an unknown fate.
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But the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire, as it became known, would soon learn a harsh lesson that the Ottomans (ruling from the same city; Click here) would later fail to heed. Spread too thinly by controlling vast reaches of the earth and riven with divisions at home, they were vulnerable to the single most enduring historic power in Middle Eastern history, stirring in the deserts of Arabia: Islam.
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Under Ptolemaic patronage and with access to a library of 700,000 written works, scholars in Alexandria calculated the earth’s circumference, discovered it circles the sun and wrote the definitive edition of Homer’s work.
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THE COMING OF ISLAM
No-one in sophisticated Constantinople, an opulent city accustomed to the trappings of world power, could have imagined that the greatest threat to their rule would come from a small oasis community in the desert wastes of Arabia. The Byzantines, it is true, were besieged in their coastal forts of the southern Mediterranean, their power extending scarcely at all into the hinterland. And the Sassanid empire to the east was constantly chipping away at poorly defended Byzantine holdings, creating a fault line between the two empires running down through what we know as the Middle East. But there was little to suggest to these heirs to the Roman domain that these were anything more than minor skirmishes on the outer reaches of their empire.
In the 7th century AD, southern Arabia lay beyond the reach of both the Byzantines and the Sassanids. The cost and difficulty of occupying the Arabian Peninsula simply wasn’t worth the effort, home as it was only to troublesome nomads and isolated oases. Thus it was that when, far from the great centres of power, in the nondescript town of Mecca (now in Saudi Arabia), a merchant named Mohammed (b AD 570) began preaching against the pagan religion of his fellow Meccans, no-one in Constantinople paid the slightest attention. For full details on the birth of Islam and Mohammed’s emergence as its most revered prophet, Click here.
Mohammed