Map 5. Different architectural styles of the Hauran (Dentzer-Feydy 1988 fig. 1). Chapter Five

Nabataeans in the Hauran: Political and Religious Boundaries

Part of the volcanic landscape of southern Syria has been known as the Hauran since antiquity. The area is naturally divided into various geo- graphic sub-regions by the different volcanic flows that have passed over it. Neighbouring Gaulanitis and Trachonitis form other sub-regions, and it has been suggested that the characteristic ‘–itis’ names date back to a time when the whole area was under Ptolemaic control.1 The Hauran only begins to feature significantly in the literary sources at the begin- ning of the first century BC, when there seems to have been no dominant authority in the region. The Seleucid Empire was weakening rapidly, and the Hasmonaeans to the west and Nabataeans to the south competed for control of the region (map 5). After the Romans established the province of Syria just to the north, they also lost little time in becoming involved further to the south. The picture becomes a little clearer in the first cen- tury AD, and we can more firmly establish who exactly was in control of where. By now, the Nabataeans controlled the southern part of the Hau- ran, up to Bosra. Their territory was bordered to the south-west by the cities of the Decapolis, and to the north by the Jewish Tetrarchy of Philip, son of Herod, and later the two Agrippas. To the east, settled territory ended at the Jebel al-Arab, and, beyond this, tens of thousands of Safaitic inscriptions scattered across the desert attest to a substantial nomadic population. The Hauran occupies a unique position in Nabataean studies, which is reflected in the amount of literature published on the region.2 It is the

1 Dentzer-Feydy 1988 pp. 219–220. 2 There has been much archaeological work and scholarship focussed on the Hau- ran in the last twenty years, before which little had been added to our knowledge since the beginning of the twentieth century. On the archaeological side, the most significant contribution has been from the Dentzers and other French archaeologists, who have led detailed excavations at Sia as well as surveying the whole of the Hauran (see Dentzer 1985, Dentzer-Feydy et al. 2003, Clauss-Balty 2008, Dentzer and Weber 2009 and Dentzer- Feydy and Vallerin 2010). For overviews of the area’s Aramaic inscriptions, see Starcky 1985 and Nehmé 2010. There have also been several smaller scale studies focussing on individual sites, e.g. Bosra (Dentzer et al. 2002b; Dentzer-Feydy et al. 2007), Umm el-Jimal