Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/172

Rh 160 N A B N A D been noted. It arises from our double form of the indefinite article &quot;a&quot; and &quot;an.&quot; Sometimes the &quot;a&quot; has abstracted the &quot; n &quot; from the beginning of the noun : thus &quot; a nadder &quot; has turned into &quot; an adder,&quot; &quot; a napron &quot; into &quot; an apron,&quot; &quot; a nauger &quot; into &quot; an auger.&quot; On the other hand the letter has had one compensatory gain : &quot;an ewt&quot; (eft) has turned into &quot;a newt.&quot; (j. P.) NABAT/EANS, a famous people of ancient Arabia, whose settlements in the time of Josephus (Ant., i. 12, 4 ; comp. Jerome, Qu. in Gen. xxv.) gave the name of Nabatene to the border-land between Syria and Arabia from the Euphrates to the Red Sea. The language of Josephus suggests, and Jerome, apparently following him, directly affirms, that the name is identical with that of the Ishmaelite tribe of Nebaioth (Wl), Gen. xxv. 13 ; Isa. Ix. 7), which in later Old Testament times had a leading place among the northern Arabs, and is associated with Kedar much as Pliny v. 11 (12) associates Nabat&i and Cedrei. The identification is still followed by many scholars, but is rendered uncertain by the fact that the name Nabataean is properly spelled with t not t (it333 on the inscriptions, Arabic Nabat, Nabti, &c.). Thus the history of this remarkable people cannot with certainty be carried back beyond 312 B.C., at which date they were attacked without success by Antigonus in their mountain fortress of Petra. They are described by Diodorus (xix. 94 sq.) as being at this time a strong tribe of some 10,000 warriors, pre eminent among the nomadic Arabs, eschewing agriculture, fixed houses, and the use of wine (which were forbidden on pain of death), living on flesh and milk, and drinking water sweetened with manna, but adding to pastoral pursuits a considerable and profitable trade with the seaports in myrrh and spices from Arabia Felix, as well as a trade with Egypt in bitumen from the Dead Sea used in the preparation of mummies. Their arid country was the best safeguard of their cherished liberty ; for the bottle-shaped cisterns for rain-water which they excavated in the rocky or argillaceous soil were carefully concealed from invaders. Petra or Sela was the ancient capital of Edom ; the Nabataeans must have occupied the old Edomite country, and succeeded to its commerce, after the Edomites took advantage of the Babylonian captivity to press forward into southern Judaea. This migration, the date of which cannot be determined, also made them masters of the shores of the Gulf of Akaba and the important harbour of Elath. Here, according to Agatharchides (Geog. Gr. Min., i. 178), they were for a time very troublesome, as wreckers and pirates, to the reopened commerce between Egypt and the East, till they were chastised by the Greek sovereigns of Alexandria. Tenacious as they were of the nomad usages of their ancestors, the Nabataeans had already some tincture of foreign culture when they first appear in history. That culture was naturally Aramaic ; they wrote a letter to Antigonus &quot; in Syriac letters,&quot; and Syriac continued to be the language of their coins and inscriptions when the tribe grew into a kingdom, and profited by the decay of the Seleucids to extend its borders northward over the more fertile country east of the Jordan. They occupied the Hauran, and about 85 B.C. their king Aretas (Haritha) became lord of Damascus and Coele Syria. Allies of the first Hasmonseans in their struggles against the Greeks, they became the rivals of the Judaean dynasty in the period of its splendour, and a chief element in the disorders which invited Pompey s intervention in Palestine. The Roman arms were not Very successful against the sons of the desert (expedition of Scaurus, 63 B.C.) ; King Aretas retained his whole possessions, including Damascus, as a Roman vassal. 1 1 Compare 2 Cor. xi. 32. The Nabatoean Aretas or ^Eneas there mentioned reigned from 7 B. c. to 40 A. D. or thereby. As &quot; allies &quot; of the Romans the Nabataeans continued to flourish throughout the first Christian century. Their power extended far into Arabia, particularly along the coast of the Red Sea ; and Petra was a meeting-place of many nations, though the importance of its commerce was diminished by the rise of the Eastern trade-route from Myoshormus to Coptus on the Nile. Under the Roman peace they lost their warlike habits, and were a sober, acquisitive, orderly people, wholly intent on trade. They had now agriculture and houses of stone, and were not unacquainted with foreign luxuries and arts (Strabo, xvi. 4). Such a people might have long been a valuable bulwark between Rome and the wild hordes of the desert but for the short-sighted cupidity of Trajan, who reduced Petra and broke up the Nabataean nationality (105 A.D.). The new Arab invaders who soon pressed forward into their seats found the remnants of the Nabataeans transformed into felldhin, and speaking Aramaic like their neighbours. Hence Nabataeans became the Arabic name for Aramaeans, whether in Syria or Irak, a fact which was misinterpreted by Quatremere into a theory that the Nabatseans were originally Aramaean immigrants from Babylonia. More recent inquiry has shown this view to be quite false. The Nabatasans were true Arabs as the proper names on their inscriptions show who came under the influence of Aramaean civilization. See especially Noldeke in Z. D. M. G., xvii. 705 sq., xxv. 122 sq. For the inscriptions and coins of the Nabatrcans consult De Luynes in Revue Numism., 1858; Levy in Z. D. M. G., xiv. 363 sq.; De Vogue, Mil. $ Arch. Or., 1868, Syrie Centrals,, 1866-77, and Inscr. Stinitiques, 1868-77. The character of De Vogue s inscriptions from the Hauran appears to be the parent of the Cufic Arabic. The so-called Faldha Nabat.iya, or &quot; Nabatean agricul ture,&quot; which professes to be an Arabic translation by Ibn-Wahshiya from an ancient Nabatsean source (MSS. in Leyden and elsewhere), is a forgery of the 10th century. See Gutschmid in Z. D. M. G., xv. 1 sq. ; and Noldeke, Ibid., xxix. 445 sq. NABHA, or NARBAL, one of the Cis-Sutlej states in the Punjab, India, lying between 30 17 and 30 40 N. lat., and between 75 50 and 76 20 E. long., has an area of 863 square miles, with a population in 1881 of 261,824. The first relations of the state with the British were in 1807-8, when the rajd applied for and obtained protection against the threatened encroachments of Ranjit Sinh. During the mutiny in 1857 this chief showed distinguished loyalty, and was rewarded by grants of territory to the value of over 10,000. The raj 4 is a Sikh of the Sidhu Jat tribe ; he has full powers of life and death over his subjects, and has an estimated annual revenue of .65,000. The chief products of the state are sugar, cereals, cotton, and tobacco. NABULtiS, or NABLUS. See SHBCHEM. NADfM. Abulfaraj ibn Ishak of Baghdad, known as Ibn abi Ya kiib al-Nadim (ob. 995 A.D.), is the author of one of the most interesting works in Arabic literature, the Fihrist, or &quot; list of the books of all nations that were to be found in Arabic,&quot; with notices of the authors and other particulars, carried down to the year 377 A.H. (987-88 A.D.). A note in the Leyden MS. places the death of the author eight years later. Of his life we know nothing ; the name Nadim belonged to a distinguished family of Persian origin. The oldest Arabic scholars, of whose works comparatively little has been preserved to us, had a much wider range of interest than their successors. Even then Islam and the Kordn were the centre of all study; but curiosity was not limited by religious scruples ; men were eager to know the wisdom and the literature of all nations and sects ; the free thought which was afterwards so sternly suppressed in the reaction of orthodoxy towards the close of the 9th century lifted men above narrow pre judices. The work of Al-Nadim gives us a complete picture of the most active intellectual period, of the Arab