Stephens could not see from the back of an Arabian horse—and what I could not spot from a speeding bus—was that the Negev lands north of Eilat were littered with petroglyph-inscribed boulders and pockmarked with a scatter of hidden cisterns and “chains of wells.” The Nabataeans controlled the Frankincense Trails by virtue of the intimate knowledge of where the scant supplies of water might be found along the routes from southern Yemen to the Levant.
The Nabataeans and their Idumean neighbors were among the finest desert hydrologists and geomorphologists the world has ever known. The hidden waters of the desert seldom eluded them. Even in the seemingly hostile moonscape of Machtesh Ramon, the largest natural crater in the Nabataean kingdom, they found the artesian flows of Ayn Zaharan, the water source now known among the Jews as Ein Saharonim. If the Nabataeans could control access to freshwater, the most precious and scarce substance on the entire Arabian Peninsula, they knew that they would control its spice trade. They would have made good nanotechnologists, for they were fascinated by the little things that could leverage large gains in wealth.
Only through the use of aerial photography have archaeologists been able to realize how richly the Nabataeans had transformed the Negev into a network of signposts marking trade routes and outposts replete with freshwater reserves. The signposts take the form of isolated boulders and cliff faces where Nabataeans scratched their pale messages into the dark desert varnish that had accumulated over the millennia. These messages were mostly left in their Kufic-like script, but it appears that others were left in Safaitic, Thamudic, Aramaic, and even Greek alphabets, for perhaps they were used as “code languages” by Nabataean polyglots. Some of their signs are directional, such as “Go east, over the ridge and into the wadi for water.” Others document a missed rendezvous: Sa’id ma shaf Sud plaintively reports that “Sa’id didn’t get to see his friend Sud” after all the work it took to arrange and attempt an illfated reunion.13
FIGURE 7. Wells in extremely arid landscapes such as the Negev were critical to keeping Nabataean traders alive. (Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/mpc2004005723/PP.)
By 50 CE, these signposts also pointed to another, unprecedented set of developments in the Negev: islandlike vineyards, orchards, and flood-water fields of fodder and staple crops.
Yes, crops. As noted earlier, at first, all Nabataeans adhered to a taboo against cultivating the soil; instead, they traded, raided, herded, or reaped the wild harvests that the desert offered. Although they flourished because of their tenacious control of certain trade routes, it was perhaps inevitable that the Romans and others would try to capture or circumvent those routes. At some point during the first century CE, anticipating that the larger armies and arsenals of the Romans might bear down on their trade centers, the Nabataeans lifted their selfimposed ban on farming. They then used their extensive knowledge of water harvesting to grow crops in some of the driest places that agriculture has ever been practiced. To avoid domination by their Roman competitors, the Nabataeans began to target their agricultural production to provide the foodstuffs in scarcest supply throughout the Roman Empire. As archaeologist Douglas Comer has explained,
Wealth from agriculture became more important as what had been a spectacular source of wealth from trade attenuated. For hundreds of years before the time of Christ, the Nabateans enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the trade of spices, incense and other precious goods from Southeast Asia and Africa, transporting them from the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean, over which they were shipped to Rome. Only the Nabateans knew the routes across the Empty Quarter. But beginning with Pompey’s war on the pirates in 66 BC, sea lanes were gradually made safer, finally breaking the hold that the Nabateans had on the transportation system of the Arabian Peninsula. . . . [And so, they turned to exporting transportable cereals.] Agricultural producers would have found a ready market in the Roman Empire, which suffered a shortage of grain that has been compared to the chronic shortage of oil throughout much of the developed world.14
The Nabataeans suddenly shifted from trade in wild spices and incense to the production and trade of agricultural commodities. They became some of the world’s first cereal commodity brokers, holding or dumping grains into markets to profit from drought, plagues, famines, or inflation in one part of the empire or another. They not only offered the grains themselves to the Romans, Greeks, and Persians but also introduced certain cereal-based condiments, such as the fermented balls of barley dough that became widely known as bunn.15
In some ways, Nabataean grain traders played an economic role much like that of Glencore International, a multinational brokerage firm that today controls a quarter of the world’s barley, rape, and sunflower-seed supply and a tenth of its wheat supply. Although Glencore is far from a household word, the transnational firm and its subsidiaries are valued at more than $60 billion and hold assets worth over $79 billion, including half of the world’s available copper supply, a third of the aluminum supply, and a quarter of the thermal coal supply. When its shares went public on the London Stock Exchange in the summer of 2011, its chief executive officer made an estimated $9 billion in a matter of weeks. Without Glencore ever actually holding large stores of these commodities in its own facilities for very long, it is, according to Al Jazeera, “profiteering from hunger and chaos.” As Chris Hinde, a mining industry analyst, told Al Jazeera’s Chris Arsenault, “They are the stockbrokers of the commodities business [that operate] in a fairly secretive world. They are effectively setting the price for some very important commodities.”16
The Nabataean shift in roles from desert traders, herders, and foragers to irrigation farmers ultimately transformed the desert in which they had lived, but the extent of that transformation was not realized until centuries later. Around 1870, the archaeologist E. H. Palmer began to map the thousands of intentionally shaped mounds of cobbles where grapes once grew—the enigmatic tuleilat el-anab.17 They were moisture catchers, agrohydrological structures that were engineered to condense, capture, and deliver fog and dew to fuel the growth of the vines, wheat, and fruit trees. Not long after Palmer, others discovered lengthy alignments of cobbles that channeled the infrequent storm runoff from square miles of desert down into fertile terraced grain fields on the floodplains.
Just twenty-five miles north of where my bus sped out of Eilat, archaeologists noticed a series of round features on the ground near Ain Ghadian. They looked at first like bomb craters, and then like prayer beads strung on a necklace.18 It took considerable effort by a desertsoil scientist who had once worked with hydraulic engineers to identify these features and definitively determine their function.
These later Nabataean innovations were clandestine water catchments linked through well-like shafts connected to a horizontal tunnel that tapped into groundwater and harvested rainwater and stored them both in underground cisterns. The scientist who discovered their efficacy and extent, Berel Aisenstein, referred to these ingenious Nabataean creations as “artificial springs.”19 These chains of wells were so effective in providing a steady flow of fresh drinking water that Nabataeans were able to survive in areas that received as little as a single inch of rainfall in a drought year! They are called qanats in several Semitic languages, and that term may be at the root of a tree of words now widely used in water management. The related words canal, channel, cane, and alcantarilla are in use around the globe.20
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