Nabataean inscriptions

Nabataean inscriptions are a large corpus of inscriptions associated with the Nabataean Kingdom, centred on Petra in modern Jordan and extending across the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and parts of the Mediterranean. The texts date roughly from the 2nd century BCE until the Roman annexation of Nabataea in 106 CE, and in some cases continue into the post-Nabataean period. They are written in the Nabataean Aramaic dialect using the Nabataean alphabet, a cursive script that is considered to have later developed into the Arabic alphabet (see e.g. Namara inscription). The majority of Nabataean inscriptions are undated and of uncertain provenance. Securely dated texts are concentrated in the 1st century CE.^[1]

Nabataean is primarily an epigraphic language, known almost entirely from inscriptions and a small number of documentary papyri, and are therefore the principal source for the language, history, religion, and society of the Nabataeans. Approximately 6,000–7,000 Nabataean inscriptions have been identified, though the majority are short graffiti consisting mainly of personal names. A much smaller subset, such as the funerary inscriptions from Madā’in Ṣāliḥ, provides longer, continuous texts and forms the core corpus for linguistic and historical analysis. The 15 known papyrus and leather include more complex sentence structures and a wider range of verbal forms than the stone inscriptions. The known vocabulary is only a few hundred distinct words, such that grammatical reconstruction is often uncertain. A number of multilingual inscriptions are known, particularly bilingual Greek–Nabataean inscriptions.

Most inscriptions were discovered in Petra, Hegra (Mada'in Salih), the Sinai Peninsula, and northern Arabia, as well as along trade routes linking Nabataea with Egypt, Syria, and the wider Mediterranean world. Today, Nabataean inscriptions are preserved both in situ and in museum collections worldwide, including the Louvre, the British Museum, and regional museums in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

The study of Nabataean inscriptions began in the early eighteenth century with travellers’ copies of inscriptions from the Sinai Peninsula and Petra. The earliest inscriptions to enter publication were the Sinaitic graffiti, from Wadi Mukattab. These first became known through a sequence of 18th-century travel accounts and scholarly editions. The earliest widely circulated discussion derived indirectly from Cosmas Indicopleustes (published in Bernard de Montfaucon’s 1706 edition), followed by notices such as the Franciscan “Prefetto” journal translated by Richard Clayton (bishop) in An Essay on the Character and Origin of the Sinaitic Inscriptions (1753). More concrete publication of the inscriptions themselves began with Edward Wortley Montagu, who printed copies of twenty-five Sinai inscriptions in a letter to the Royal Society (1766). These were subsequently republished and reinterpreted by scholars including Antoine Court de Gébelin (1775), while further copies appeared in the works of Carsten Niebuhr (Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien, 1774–1837) and later travellers. By the early 19th century the Sinaitic inscriptions were well established in print, albeit poorly copied and misidentified.^[2]

The decipherment of the Nabataean script was achieved in 1840 by Eduard Friedrich Ferdinand Beer.^[1][3] Beer published Inscriptiones veteres litteris incognitis in Sina et Aegypto repertas, in which he worked primarily from the previously printed Sinai corpus and succeeded in identifying almost the entire alphabet and reading numerous inscriptions correctly. At this point, no Nabataean inscriptions from Petra had yet been published, and Beer explicitly noted the absence of any known epigraphic material from Petra for comparison. His attribution of the script to the Nabataean cultural sphere was therefore made on the basis of the Sinaitic material as transmitted in earlier printed sources.^[2]

The first publication of Petra inscriptions was by Willem Blaeu in 1855, who printed a small number of Nabataean texts from Petra. These publications provided monumental inscriptions in the same script as the Sinaitic graffiti. Building on this, Moritz Abraham Levy (1860) demonstrated the palaeographic relationship between the Sinaitic inscriptions, the Petra inscriptions, and Aramaic texts from the Ḥawrān, consolidating the identification of the script as Nabataean. Only much later, in 1896, did the material copied decades earlier by William John Bankes, including his copy of the five-line Nabataean inscription on the Qabr al-Turkmān façade at Petra and his copies of Sinai inscriptions finally become available to scholarship.^[2]

A further turning point came with the discovery of Nabataean papyri in the mid-twentieth century, including documents from the Cave of Letters near the Dead Sea.

6,000 – 7,000 Nabataean inscriptions have been published, of which more than 95% are mostly short inscriptions or graffiti, and the vast majority are undated, post-Nabataean or from outside the core Nabataean territory.^[1] A majority of inscriptions considered Nabataean were found in Sinai,^[1] and another 4,000 – 7,000 such Sinaitic inscriptions remain unpublished.^[4] Prior to the publication of Nabataean papyri, the only substantial corpus of detailed Nabataean text were the 38 funerary inscriptions from Mada'in Salih (Hegra), discovered and published by Charles Montagu Doughty, Charles Huber, Philippe Berger and Julius Euting in 1884–85.^[1][5] Early corpora included the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (CIS) and later publications by Alfred von Domaszewski and Rudolf Ernst Brünnow. The work of Jean Cantineau in the early twentieth century provided the first comprehensive grammatical description of Nabataean Aramaic based on the expanding corpus.

The Nabataean corpus is dispersed across numerous publications and catalogues. Major corpora and reference systems include:

• CIS – Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, containing early editions of Nabataean inscriptions
• RES – Répertoire d'épigraphie sémitique
• NE – Handbuch der Nordsemitischen Epigraphik
• Jaussen–Savignac – early twentieth-century publications of inscriptions from Arabia
• PPUAES – Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expeditions to Syria
• SEG – Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (for Greek parallels and bilinguals)
• TSSI – Texts from the Semitic Inscriptions series

A selected concordance of the inscriptions is shown below:

Nabataean inscriptions cover a range of social, religious, and economic contexts:

• Funerary inscriptions are among the most significant, especially those from Hegra (Mada'in Salih), which include dated tomb inscriptions referring to Nabataean kings
• Graffiti constitute the majority of the corpus; these are usually brief texts carved on rock surfaces, often consisting only of personal names or short phrases.
• Dedicatory inscriptions record offerings to deities such as Dushara and Al-'Uzza.
• Building inscriptions commemorate construction or restoration of temples, tombs, and public works.
• Legal and documentary texts are primarily known from papyri (e.g. the Babatha archive), including contracts, deeds, and administrative records.

• Nabataean Kingdom
• Nabataean alphabet
• Aramaic inscriptions
• Arabic alphabet
• Pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions

• Hackl, Ursula; Jenni, Hanna; Schneider, Christoph (2003). Quellen zur Geschichte der Nabatäer. Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus (NTOA), Volume 51. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
• Lewis, Norman Nicholson; MacDonald, Michael Christopher Archibald; Clackson, S.; Hoyland, R.G.; Sartre, Maurice (2003). "W.J.Bankes and the identification of the Nabataean script". Syria (in French). 80 (1): 41–110. doi:10.3406/syria.2003.7778. ISSN 0039-7946. Retrieved 2026-03-18.