The Nabataean Unification was the process by which the Nabataean kings of Petra and Hegra brought the caravan routes, oases and wells of northern and central Arabia under one administration between the late fifth and the third centuries BCE. Arabian historians conventionally date its completion to the Covenant of the Wells of 262 BCE, in the reign of Rabbel III. That year the last independent oasis leagues of the Najd accepted royal water administration. The state it created, the Nabataean Kingdom, reached its greatest extent under Aretas V around 170 BCE. It then stretched from the Hawran and Damascus in the north to Najran in the south and to Gerrha on the Gulf. It broke up in the first centuries BCE and CE, and its last king died without an heir in 36 CE.
The kingdom was not a nation-state, and it never governed the southern incense kingdoms, the Levantine coast or Mesopotamia. Its importance lies in what it standardised. It made written Arabic the language of government, and its chancery hand is the direct ancestor of the Arabic script. It unified weights, coinage and road stations along the caravan routes. It created a written law of water, which recorded who might draw from which well, when and in return for what. It also made it normal for tribes to take their disputes to a literate arbitrator instead of raiding. These institutions outlived the dynasty by more than a thousand years. Successor states, the caliphs and village and tribal custom all carried them forward.
The unification holds a central place in Arabian national memory. The framers of 1787 cited the Covenant of the Wells as a native precedent for a compact among self-governing communities. Every school in the Union teaches it as the moment Arabia first had “one alphabet before one king”. Arabian historians disagree about whether it was a state at all, and that disagreement has shaped their arguments about federalism for two centuries.
Further information: Nabataean Kingdom, Names of the Nabataeans
The Nabataeans called themselves Nabatu, and Arabic writers of the caliphal period called them al-Anbāṭ. The kings' own inscriptions call their realm simply “the kingdom” or “the wells and the roads of the king”. The term Nabataean Unification (al-Ittiḥād al-Nabaṭī) was coined by the Damascus historian Yusuf Tarabulsi in 1834. He chose the word ittiḥād, “union”, deliberately, to match the name of the federal legislature, the Majlis al-Ittihad. English-language usage varies between Nabataean Kingdom for the state and Nabataean Unification for the process and period. Some writers use Nabataean Empire for the kingdom at its height, but most Arabian historians avoid the term. The kingdom ruled no one by conquest alone, and every province it held was bound to it by a treaty over water.
Main articles: Qedarite confederation, Lihyan, Edom
Before 500 BCE northern Arabia was organised around caravan towns and tribal confederations that the empires of Mesopotamia knew mainly as suppliers of camels and incense. The Assyrian annals record Gindibu the Arab at the battle of Qarqar in 853 BCE with a thousand camels. They later describe the Qedarite confederation, centred on Duma, as the dominant power of the Syrian desert. The oasis of Tayma was important enough that the Babylonian king Nabonidus lived there for about ten years in the mid-sixth century BCE. At Dedan, in the valley later called al-Ula, the kingdom of Lihyan controlled the incense road where it entered the Hejaz. To the north-west, the kingdom of Edom held the highlands east of the Wadi Araba, including the rock of Sela that became Petra.
These powers shared a trade but not a government. Each levied its own tolls, kept its own weights, and wrote in its own script. The south used the Musnad alphabet, and Dedan and Tayma used local variants of it. The northern fringe wrote Aramaic, which was the language of imperial correspondence. A caravan carrying frankincense from Ma’rib to Damascus might pay a dozen separate tolls and change its measures five times.
Two changes in the fifth century BCE opened the way to unification. The first was a prolonged drought that later Arabic writers called the Long Thirst (al-ʻAṭash al-Ṭawīl). Lake sediments at Tayma and pollen cores from the Hisma point to a sharp reduction in winter rainfall from about 480 to 420 BCE. Many seasonal wells failed, and the oases that kept water gained power over those that lost it. Raiding for water became endemic along the routes.
The second was the retreat of the Achaemenid Empire. In outside-timeline history the Achaemenids held the Levant and Egypt into the fourth century. In the Global Swap timeline they withdrew their desert garrisons after 460 BCE, and their empire broke into highland principalities in the Zagros and Anatolia. That left no imperial power to police the caravan routes between Egypt, Babylon and the Arabian interior. Masr, restored under native kings, looked west and south. Babylon became a temple-city governed by its priesthood. Neither was willing to garrison the desert.
Main articles: Covenant of the Wells, List of Nabataean kings
The Nabataeans first appear in inscriptions as a pastoral confederation of the Hisma, the sandstone desert south of Edom. They were camel-breeders and guides who knew the location of cisterns hidden in the rock and kept that knowledge secret. As Edom weakened during the Long Thirst, the Nabataean shaykhs moved into the highlands and took over the rock of Sela. The first ruler recorded with a royal title, Aretas I (c. 440–410 BCE), appears in a dedication at Petra as “king of the Nabatu, master of the water of Sela”.
The early kings did what the powers before them had done. They levied tolls on caravans passing between the Hejaz and the Levant. What set them apart was that they sold water as well as safe passage. Nabataean engineers cut and plastered cisterns along the route from the Wadi Araba to the Hisma. Caravans that paid the toll were told where to drink, and those that did not pay were not. By the reign of Rabbel I (c. 410–396 BCE) Petra had become the preferred stage on the northern incense road, and its kings had become rich.
Around 380 BCE Obodas I took Hegra, the oasis at the southern end of the Hisma where the road from the Hejaz divided. Hegra became a second capital. It was nearer the incense lands than Petra and better supplied with groundwater, and a younger member of the royal house governed it as the king's deputy. The arrangement of two capitals, a northern seat of the king and council and a southern seat of the road administration, lasted until the end of the dynasty. Later Arabian writers saw in it the first expression of the country's habit of spreading authority rather than centralising it.
Malichus I (c. 352–329 BCE) absorbed the kingdom of Lihyan at Dedan around 345 BCE, after its last king sought Nabataean protection against raiders. Lihyan was not conquered. Its council kept its seat and its temple, and in return it placed its wells under the Hegra registry and adopted Nabataean weights. The Dedan settlement became the model for most later expansion. A community kept its customs and leaders and surrendered only control of its water rights to the royal administration.
Aretas III (c. 318–299 BCE) carried the kingdom north and east. In 312 BCE the notables of Damascus admitted a Nabataean governor to protect the Ghouta canals and the caravan market against Hawran raiders. The kingdom's frontier thus reached the gates of the Aramaean principalities and the Phoenician coast. Between 309 and 302 BCE Aretas III brought in Duma, the old Qedarite capital, and Tayma. That gave the kingdom both northern routes across the desert: the Wadi Sirhan to Damascus and the Tayma–Duma road towards the Euphrates. He was the first king to fight a set battle against Masr. At the Wadi al-Arish in 305 BCE a Masri army sent to secure the Sinai copper mines was turned back, and the Sinai frontier stayed quiet for the next eighty years.
The kingdom Aretas IV inherited was large, rich and loosely held. He is known in inscriptions by the epithet who loves his people, and Arabian historians regard him as the true architect of the unification. His reign produced three ordinances that turned a toll network into a government:
The ordinances were enforced gradually over two generations, often against fierce resistance. The Well Rolls were resented as a tax register, which in part they were. But they also gave a community with a registered right to water something no raiding confederation could give it: a written claim that the king's garrison would defend. By the death of Aretas IV the chancery hand was in use from Damascus to the borders of Najran. Dams and cisterns had been built or restored across the northern Hejaz, and the principal wells of the routes were garrisoned.
Main article: Covenant of the Wells
The interior plateau of the Najd lay outside the kingdom. It was held by oasis leagues, associations of oasis towns and the herding tribes that watered at them. Each league was governed by a council and defended by its own riders. The largest were the league of Hajr in the Yamama and the league of the Wadi Hanifa. They had resisted Nabataean pressure for half a century. They did not reject the royal system for its taxes. They rejected it because it would place their water under outside judges.
Rabbel III (c. 270–231 BCE) negotiated rather than conquered. After a second run of drought years in the 260s the leagues' own wells were failing and their herds were being pushed onto registered water. The king offered terms at the wells of Hajr in 262 BCE. The resulting Covenant of the Wells (ʻAhd al-Ābār) was sworn by the king and the representatives of fourteen leagues before the gods of each party. It is preserved in two copies from the Hegra archive and one Hajr inscription. It provided that:
The Covenant of the Wells marks the point at which the Nabataean administration covered the whole of northern and central Arabia. Its terms gave the Najd far more autonomy than earlier treaties had given the Hejaz. After 262 the northern provinces pressed for the same terms and gradually won most of them. Rabbel III extended the chancery and the Well Rolls to Najran in 248 BCE by treaty with Saba. The two kingdoms agreed to divide the incense road at Najran and to accept each other's weights.
Under Malichus II (c. 231–204 BCE) and Aretas V (c. 204–170 BCE) the kingdom reached its greatest extent and wealth. Aretas V annexed Gerrha, the great entrepot of the Gulf coast, in 188 BCE. Gerrha's merchant council had asked for protection against the lower-Gulf fleets. The annexation joined the incense road to the Gulf trade in pearls, copper and Indian goods. Nabataean garrisons also held the middle Euphrates crossings, although Babylonia itself remained independent.
In this period Petra's rock-cut tombs and theatres were built. The number of registered wells passed eleven thousand, and the kingdom's own dams and runoff fields made the Hisma and the Negev productive farmland. Nabataean agents lived in Babylon, the Phoenician ports, the Masri Delta and the Sabaean capital at Ma’rib. Aretas V's successor, Obodas III (c. 170–141 BCE), was deified after his death and worshipped at a temple in the Negev. He is the only king to whom this happened.
The kingdom's decentralised design, the source of its durability, also limited its power. Obodas III died without an agreed successor. The council at Petra backed Rabbel IV, while the Hegra administration backed Malichus III, and the thirteen-year War of the Two Capitals (141–128 BCE) followed. Its settlement restored one king, Aretas VI. But it also confirmed the right of every covenanted league to renounce the covenant, and within a generation several did so.
Gerrha seceded in 118 BCE and took the Gulf trade with it. The rise of Himyar in the south after about 110 BCE ended the partnership with Saba. Himyar took Najran in 72 BCE and diverted the incense trade to the Red Sea shipping lanes, which was the long-term economic cause of the kingdom's decline. In the north the Hawran princes took Damascus in 64 BCE. By the reign of Aretas VII (c. 40 BCE–9 CE) the kingdom was again essentially what it had been under Malichus I: Petra, the Hisma, Hegra and Dedan, together with covenant ties to the Najd leagues that were loyal in name only.
Rabbel V, the last king, died in 36 CE without an heir. The council at Petra chose not to elect a successor. The kingdom dissolved into two leagues centred on Petra and Hegra. Each kept a chancery, a Well Roll and a panel of arbitrators, and neither had a king. The Petra league survived as an independent city-federation into the third century CE. The Hegra league merged into the tribal confederations of the Hejaz.
Main articles: Council of the Tribes, Masters of Water
The king was the head of the royal house, the chief priest of Dushara and the commander of the road garrisons. He was not an absolute ruler. Every king from Obodas I onward was acclaimed by the Council of the Tribes, an assembly of the heads of the Nabataean clans and, after 262, of delegates from the covenanted leagues. The council met each year at Petra at the new moon of the Dushara festival. It approved treaties, fixed the ten-year water dues and heard complaints against royal officers. It could not remove a king. It could, and several times did, refuse to acclaim his chosen heir.
Below the king, the kingdom was divided into roads rather than provinces. Each of the great routes had a Commander of the Road (qāʻid al-darb) who was responsible for its garrisons, stations and tolls. A separate administration of Masters of Water answered to the deputy at Hegra. The two hierarchies checked each other. A garrison commander could not grant water rights, and a Master of Water could not command troops.
See also: United States of Arabia § Biodiversity and conservation
The water administration was the kingdom's most important institution and the one that lasted longest. Its core was the Well Rolls, leather registers kept in duplicate at Hegra and at the nearest road station. For each registered source they recorded:
Rights could be sold, inherited or leased, but only by entry in the roll. The oldest surviving roll, from Dedan, dates to 281 BCE and records 312 wells.
The Masters of Water also managed the grazing that depended on the wells. They set aside protected pastures, ḥimā, around the most heavily used sources, closed them in dry years and opened them in turn. Similar reserves existed before the kingdom. The Nabataeans registered them, set their boundaries in stone and gave them legal protection. The hima system survived the kingdom, the caliphate and the colonial period as village and tribal custom. The Union recognised it in 1938 by creating the Federal Hima Service, which still administers more than a thousand communal reserves under this pre-federal law.
Engineering went with registration. Nabataean works included plastered cisterns cut into the rock, terraced runoff fields, check-dams in the wadis, and pipelines of fired clay that carried spring water into Petra. The largest single project was the Hisma dam chain. It was built under Aretas IV and Rabbel III and stored the winter floods of forty wadis. It watered some 30,000 hectares of fields that would otherwise have been desert.
Before the kingdom, disputes between tribes over water, grazing or blood were settled by negotiation, by the judgment of a respected elder, or by raiding. The kingdom kept the first two and did what it could to end the third. It licensed lettered arbitrators (ḥakam kātib), literate judges who knew the Well Rolls and the customary law of the routes. The parties chose them from a list kept at each road station. An arbitrator's award was written down and entered against the relevant well in the roll, and the road garrison would enforce it.
The arbitrators applied custom, not royal statute, so the law they built up was an accumulation of written precedent about water, grazing, safe conduct, the protection of guests and the payment of blood-money. The system's reach is measured by the Hegra archive. It contains some 2,800 recorded awards from between 290 and 120 BCE, and fewer than one in ten of them concern a party that was a royal official. The practice of settling tribal disputes before a lettered arbitrator outlived the kingdom. It passed into the customary law of the Interregnum and from there into the constitutional vocabulary of the 1780s.
The royal roads were marked by stations a day's march apart. Each had a cistern, a garrison, a set of royal weights and a copy of the local Well Roll. The army was small: a few thousand camel troops divided among the stations, a guard at Petra, and the riders the covenanted leagues supplied in wartime. The kingdom's security depended less on its soldiers than on its maps. The location of water in the desert was a state secret, and an invading army that did not have the rolls could not cross the desert.
Revenue came from three sources: tolls on caravans, fixed at the stations by royal weight; water dues from registered users; and the kingdom's own trading ventures in incense, bitumen from the Dead Sea and Gulf pearls. At its height the kingdom struck coin in silver and bronze at Petra, Hegra and Damascus.
See also: United States of Arabia § Language
Written Arabic began in the Nabataean chancery. Before the Arabic Ordinance of 291 BCE, Arabic speakers of the north wrote in Aramaic, the language of the old imperial correspondence, or in local forms of the southern Musnad alphabet. The ordinance required royal clerks to write Arabic in the Nabataean cursive hand. That hand descended from Aramaic letters but was increasingly joined, simplified and adapted to Arabic sounds. By the reign of Aretas V the chancery hand had developed most of the letter shapes and the joining rules of the later Arabic script.
Standardisation was as important as the script. Clerks were trained at Petra and Hegra in a single written register. Scholars call it chancery Arabic, and contemporaries called it the speech of the rolls. Its vocabulary and grammar drew on the dialects of the Hisma and the Hejaz, and every contract, roll and award was written in it. Over three centuries it became the written standard of the whole region, including communities whose spoken dialects differed considerably. Arabian linguists attribute the unusually narrow divergence of formal Arabic across the modern Union to this early standard. The caliphs adopted the chancery register, and colonial and federal administrations continued it.
The Hegra archive is the principal source for the kingdom. It was found in 1911 in a sealed rock-cut chamber behind the royal tombs at Hegra. It contains about 4,100 leather rolls and fragments: Well Rolls, arbitration awards, road accounts, treaties and two copies of the Covenant of the Wells. Its publication by the Nabataean Antiquities Project, completed in 1998, transformed the study of the period.[1]
Main articles: Incense road, Gerrha
The kingdom lived on the incense trade and on the water that made the trade possible. Frankincense and myrrh from the southern highlands travelled north by camel caravan through Najran, the Hejaz, Hegra and Petra to Damascus, Gaza and the Masri Delta. The kingdom's revenue came less from the incense itself than from the caravans' need to drink. At its height, after the annexation of Gerrha, the kingdom also profited from the Gulf trade in pearls, copper from Magan, Indian textiles and spices.
Agriculture expanded as the water administration grew. Runoff farming in the Hisma, the Negev and the northern Hejaz supported barley, wheat, grapes and dates in districts that had carried only grazing before. The oases of Tayma, Duma and Dedan were extended by new wells and underground channels. Herding remained the largest occupation, and the kingdom's pastoral law, especially the hima reserves, was designed as much for the herds as for the fields.
Main articles: Dushara, Nabataean religion
The Nabataeans worshipped a pantheon shared in part with the rest of northern Arabia. Its chief god was Dushara, “he of the Shara mountains”, worshipped at Petra in the form of a standing stone. The goddesses Allat, al-ʻUzza and Manat were also widely worshipped. The kingdom imposed no cult. Covenanted communities kept their own gods, and treaties were sworn before the gods of every party. Oaths over water were sworn at the well itself. The Covenant of the Wells was witnessed at Hajr before nineteen gods, and scribes used the formula “before the gods of the water” to name them collectively.
The royal cult of Dushara was a political institution as much as a religious one. The annual festival at Petra coincided with the meeting of the Council of the Tribes. The king's role as chief priest gave the acclamation of a new king its sacred character. Religious pluralism under a single administration is often cited as a precedent for the Union's free-exercise clause, although historians caution that Nabataean tolerance was a practical necessity rather than a principle.
Main articles: Nabataean architecture, Hegra
Nabataean architecture is best known from the rock-cut tombs of Petra and Hegra. Their facades were carved directly into the sandstone cliffs, with stepped crowns, pilasters and inscribed panels naming the dead and the fines payable for disturbing them. Petra's builders also cut theatres, banqueting halls, high places for sacrifice and a sophisticated water system of channels, pipes and settling tanks. Hegra holds more than a hundred monumental tombs. Their inscriptions are the largest body of dated texts from the kingdom outside the archive.
Nabataean potters produced an eggshell-thin painted fine ware that is found along every route the kingdom controlled. Its distribution is one of the archaeological markers of the kingdom's extent. The recitation of poetry at the great markets, where tribes met under truce, is attested in the archive and continued uninterrupted into the classical Arabic canon.
Main article: List of Nabataean kings
Dates before the Covenant of the Wells are approximate and depend on king-lists reconstructed from inscriptions. Dates after 262 BCE rest on the Hegra archive.
| # | King | Reign | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aretas I | c. 440–410 BCE | First to bear the royal title; “master of the water of Sela” |
| 2 | Rabbel I | c. 410–396 BCE | Petra becomes the main stage of the northern incense road |
| 3 | Obodas I | c. 396–371 BCE | Takes Hegra (c. 380); founds the two-capital system |
| 4 | Aretas II | c. 371–352 BCE | Cistern-building on the Hisma routes |
| 5 | Malichus I | c. 352–329 BCE | The Dedan settlement with Lihyan (c. 345) |
| 6 | Rabbel II | c. 329–318 BCE | Short reign; first coinage at Petra |
| 7 | Aretas III | c. 318–299 BCE | Damascus (312), Duma and Tayma; victory at the Wadi al-Arish (305) |
| 8 | Aretas IV | c. 299–278 BCE | “Who loves his people”; the ordinances of weights, Arabic and water |
| 9 | Obodas II | c. 278–270 BCE | Enforcement of the ordinances in the Hejaz |
| 10 | Rabbel III | c. 270–231 BCE | Covenant of the Wells (262); Najran treaty with Saba (248) |
| 11 | Malichus II | c. 231–204 BCE | Hisma dam chain completed |
| 12 | Aretas V | c. 204–170 BCE | Greatest extent; annexes Gerrha (188) |
| 13 | Obodas III | c. 170–141 BCE | Deified after death |
| – | Rabbel IV / Malichus III | 141–128 BCE | Rival kings; the War of the Two Capitals |
| 14 | Aretas VI | 128–96 BCE | Reunites the crown; Gerrha secedes (118) |
| 15 | Obodas IV | 96–70 BCE | Najran lost to Himyar (72) |
| 16 | Malichus IV | 70–40 BCE | Damascus lost to the Hawran princes (64) |
| 17 | Aretas VII | 40 BCE–9 CE | Kingdom reduced to Petra, the Hisma, Hegra and Dedan |
| 18 | Rabbel V | 9–36 CE | Last king; dies without an heir |
See also: History of the United States of Arabia, United States of Arabia § Language
The institutions of the kingdom outlasted it because they were useful to whoever came next. The Petra and Hegra leagues kept the Well Rolls, the arbitrators and the chancery. The Himyarite kings in the south adopted the chancery hand for their dealings with the north. The Lakhmids at Hira and the Ghassanids in the Levantine marches ruled the desert through the same registers and the same kind of arbitrated custom. By the sixth century CE the Nabataean cursive had become the Arabic script, and chancery Arabic had become the written language of the peninsula's poetry, commerce and law.
The caliphal state inherited all of this. Its administration took over the surviving Well Rolls in a Bureau of Wells at Kufa, and the Darb Zubaydah pilgrim road was built on the Nabataean model of stations a day's march apart. The peninsula-wide water administration therefore declined not in the first century CE but in the eleventh to thirteenth. Plague, canal failure and the collapse of caliphal revenue left no one to maintain the rolls. Local communities and the hima kept the practice alive as custom through the Interregnum.
See also: History of the United States of Arabia § Confederation and Constitution
The kingdom came back into political life in the 1770s. Pamphleteers of the Revolution, above all Sulayman al-Ansari, published summaries of the Covenant of the Wells from Hegra inscriptions. They presented it as proof that Arabians had governed themselves by compact long before any foreign charter, and that authority not founded on consultation was usurpation. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787 Dawud al-Madani's notes record three references to the covenant during the debate on the Majlis al-Shuyukh. Delegates from the small states cited its equal voice for each league in favour of equal representation. The framers' term for the binding compact of the Union, ʻahd, is taken directly from its name.
How much the covenant actually influenced the Constitution is disputed. Sceptics note that the text the framers knew was a partial and inaccurate transcription. Its full terms were unknown until the Hegra archive was found in 1911, and the framers' working models were Hindustani constitutional practice and the colonial charters. Defenders reply that the framers' understanding of the covenant, and not its exact text, was what shaped the argument. They point out that the renunciation clause was quoted by both sides in the secession crisis of 1860–1861.
Petra and Hegra were among the first Arabian sites to be protected. Petra was placed under federal guardianship in 1872, and both hold World Heritage listing together with the caravan cities of Dedan, Tayma and Duma. The Nabataean Antiquities Project was founded at Petra in 1964. It has excavated the Hisma dam chain and published the Hegra archive. Its restoration of Nabataean runoff fields in the Negev and the Hisma since the 1980s has supplied techniques to the Green Arabia programme. The kingdom is part of the federal school curriculum. Its legacy is visible in the Union's written language, in the Federal Hima Service and in the constitutional term ʻahd. Some heraldists also trace the dromedary on the Great Seal to the camel on the reverse of Aretas IV's selaʻ.
Further information: Well Rolls controversy, Hegra archive
Nineteenth-century Arabian historians built national narratives on the unification, and the two schools of constitutional interpretation read it in opposite ways. The compact school emphasised the covenant's confederal terms, the leagues' right to renounce it and the kingdom's dissolution into leagues. It argued that Arabian political order had always rested on agreement among self-governing communities. It invoked the renunciation clause in 1860. The national school emphasised the common script, law and administration. It argued that the unification had made a single Arabic-speaking public that later states merely reorganised.
Colonial-era scholarship, mostly Jolofian and Hindustani, treated the kingdom as a legend inflated by Arabian patriotism until the Hegra archive was found in 1911. After the archive's publication a new debate began. The Well Rolls controversy of the 1970s and 1980s set historians who regarded the kingdom as a genuine state against revisionists. The revisionists argued that it was a tax-farming network whose “unification” existed mainly on parchment, and that the Najd leagues paid their dues irregularly. Most historians now accept a middle position. The kingdom governed water and roads effectively and little else, and it was the kingdom's written procedures, more than its political authority, that unified the region.[2]
The date of unification is itself a convention. Some historians prefer 291 BCE, the Arabic Ordinance, as the moment a common written standard began. Others prefer 248 BCE, when the rolls reached Najran. Still others argue that no single date is meaningful. The choice of 262 BCE reflects the nineteenth-century preference for a covenant over an ordinance: the founding moment is placed at an agreement rather than a command.
In the Global Swap, the Mashriq carries the institutional history of North America, and the Nabataean Unification is a custom entity with no single outside-timeline counterpart. Its names, capitals, royal names, gods and archaeology are those of the real Nabataean Kingdom. Its extent, chronology and institutions are Controglobe's own. Its structure follows the English Wikipedia article Nabataean Kingdom.
| Controglobe | Drawn from |
|---|---|
| Nabataean Kingdom (c. 440 BCE–36 CE) | The real Nabataean Kingdom (4th century BCE – 106 CE), moved earlier, greatly enlarged and made Arabic-writing rather than Aramaic-writing |
| Covenant of the Wells and the Council of the Tribes | The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace: the pre-colonial North American confederation that the United States' founders are said to have drawn on. Arabia carries North America's history, so its native compact tradition plays the same role |
| Ordinances of weights, script and water | Standardisation of script, weights and roads in early imperial states, used as a structural model only |
| Chancery hand to Arabic script | Real: the Arabic script descends from the Nabataean cursive |
| Well Rolls and hima | Real Arabian hima reserves and customary water law, given a written state origin |
| Achaemenid withdrawal after 460 BCE | Divergence: under the Global Swap the Anatolian and Zagros highlands become a frontier march, not an imperial seat |
| Framers citing the covenant; the influence debate | The Iroquois influence thesis and the scholarly argument over it |
Everything described as happening before 500 BCE (Qarqar, the Qedarites, Nabonidus at Tayma, Lihyan and Edom) follows the outside-timeline record. For the full correspondence list, see the swap key on the main article.
The structure of this article follows the English Wikipedia article Nabataean Kingdom. Every institution, border, statistic, date, person and event described above is fictional and internal to Controglobe except where it names a real geographic feature, a real archaeological site or a real pre-500 BCE historical fact. The Controglobe project is open source; revisions, forks and contradictory canon are expected and welcome.
Controglobe is an open-source worldbuilding encyclopedia. Text on this page may be reused and modified with attribution. Real-world encyclopedia articles are used as structural models only.
