Who were the Nabataeans?

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The Nabataeans were an Arab people who, from about the fourth century BC, held the old highlands of Edom south of the Dead Sea and the caravan roads of the desert, with Petra, cut into the sandstone of today's southern Jordan, as their capital. The map's point for Paul's Arabia stands in their country, about 190 km south of Jerusalem in a straight line, with Petra 30 km to its north. The Bible names them directly only in 1 Maccabees, and once through their king: in Damascus “the governor under Aretas the king kept the city of the Damascenes with a garrison, desirous to apprehend me”, Paul writes, and he was let down the wall in a basket. They enter history in 312 BC, when the generals of Antigonus, Athenaeus and then Demetrius, raided “the rock”. Diodorus, drawing on an eyewitness, describes nomads who planted no grain, built no house and drank no wine, who carried frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia and gathered bitumen from the Dead Sea. Judas and Jonathan Maccabeus met them as friends in the 160s BC. Within two centuries they had a kingdom from Hegra in the Hejaz to the Hauran, a script of their own, and towns in the Negev, Avdat among them; Aretas III held Damascus about 85–72 BC. Aretas IV (9 BC–AD 40) was the king of Paul's day. Herod Antipas had married his daughter and put her away for Herodias, the marriage John the Baptist condemned; in AD 36 Aretas destroyed Antipas's army, and many Jews, Josephus says, saw in it God's punishment for John. When Paul “went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus”, it was into this kingdom. How Aretas's governor came to be in a Roman city is debated: some think Caligula ceded Damascus to him about AD 37, others that an ethnarch headed the Nabataean colony there. The last king, Rabbel II, moved his court to Bostra, and in AD 106 Trajan made the kingdom the Roman province of Arabia. Petra went on as a city of the province; its tombs and temples, the Khazneh, the theatre and the Deir, belong mostly to the century on either side of Christ, and Johann Ludwig Burckhardt found the site again in 1812. The Nabataean form of Aramaic script became the ancestor of Arabic writing. Petra has been a World Heritage Site since 1985, and the tombs of Hegra, Mada'in Salih in Saudi Arabia, since 2008. A link with Nebaioth, the firstborn of Ishmael whose rams Isaiah sees brought to the altar, has often been proposed, but most scholars doubt it: the two names are spelt with different consonants.