Arabs and Nabataeans

Last night, I was reading Jan Retso's The Arabs in Antiquity: Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads. In the book, the author seeks the original meaning of the term "Arab." It cannot mean simply "speakers of Arabic," as the latter term is derived from the former, and most of the other possibilities Retso questions on similar grounds. Another point is that there is no early ancestor called "Arab," not in their own traditions, nor in those of other people in the region. Even the Hebrews didn't include them, and they included everybody. (For example, Genesis 10, the "Table of Nations," mentions "Canaan," "Cush," and "Egypt" as sons of Ham. Ham was the term used for the Egyptian sphere of influence when these traditions were germinating - other peoples were grafted in as they appeared.) The bulk of this very intense study is scraping together every mention of the word "Arab" across the 15 centuries before Islam.

During his discussion of the Hellenistic period, Retso shows convincingly how Greek geographers led by Eratosthenes began using the term "Arabia" to refer to a much broader area than it had previously denoted, and began calling all of its inhabitants "Arabs." (This was before the Arabic language had spread throughout the peninsula.) In fact, many Greeks believed "Arabia" was everything from the Nile delta to the mountains of modern Iran, thus including part of modern Egypt in their definition. However, this does not stop elements of older usages from entering into their records, as is perhaps seen here. (Like via Jonathan Edelstein.)

One interesting case of all this is the history of the Nabataean kingdom as described in Greek and Jewish sources. The traditional view is that the Nabataeans were Arabs under a different name. Retso argues, again convincingly, that this identification is false. (For example, some rulers are mentioned as kings of both "Arabs and Nabateans" in the same title.) Instead, he sees the "?Arab" and the "Nabat" as two different sectors of a society which existed in the region under a common political framework, witht he Arabs being militant nomads and the Nabati as settled cultivators. He further suggests the the Nabat of Petra in southern Jordan are the same as the Nabatu of Assyrian inscriptions, and the Nabat who are mentioned in lots of scattered literary and epigraphic evidence from the Arabian peninsula as far south as Najran.

Anyway, Retso's tentative conclusion is to note that the Nabat (actual plural is al-Anbat, but who cares) appear with Arabs throughout history "like a shadow." And this comes up futher because we also have Nabat in the early Islamic period. Here, Retso again suggests that the word was broadened during the Umayyad period so that is simply came to mean cultivators. However, if we accept the fact that it originally denoted a specific sort of person in a relationship with Arabs - and even if we reject where Retso's heading with his overall conclusion in the book, we can still keep the old idea of "Arab" as meaning primarily a nomad and accept the idea that they were in a special relationship with certain settled groups with anthropological happiness - then this definitely matters for the way we view early Islamic history. This is certainly relevant to my own dissertation, since I'm writing about a tribal confederation called the Azd where were often criticized by others for not always having been Arabs, and who went to southern Iraq were there were a lot of Nabat.

This also interests me as a problem of applying Western categories to non-Western societies. In the post-colonial world this doesn't matter so much, but ethnic identity as it developed in Europe was never a truly universal concept. Yet today it is fundamental enough to the way we view the world that scholars carve people into ethnicities without giving it a second thought. (This issue has long interested me because I have a certain mistrust of ethnic nationalism born from coming of intellectual age during this and this.) If Retso's right - and this really has a good feel about it - this might be an interesting opportunity to explore a non-ethnic means of cultural organization, though perhaps complicated by the long-time Persian domination of Oman in which they would have brought their own concepts to the table.

I don't quite know how this fits my own work yet, but it definitely fits. I've consulted the main work likely to have information directly relevant to me, but the author basically took his definition from 10th-century geographers and applied that broad defintion to the early Islamic traditions. The issue at least bears another look.