Arabia Petraea in the Iron Age

With the Iron Age, we move into the heart of Hebrew Bible history, familiar to many Americans from Sunday School. Iron was more easily available than tin or copper, so the switch to iron technology contributed to growing power of smaller groups. Controlling the Nile still required Pharaoh’s centralized power, but small groups like the Hebrews, the Moabites, the Philistines, or the Arameans could arm themselves without empires to bring metals from far-off places.

Most probably, the core population that spoke Old Arabic was centered in the rocky zone between Palmyra in Syria and Petra in Jordan.

This placed the culture squarely in an iron region. Damascus, which at the time was Aramaean, became an early iron-smelting center. Damascus steel was later famous for its quality.

Arabic-speaking societies seem to have always been primarily traders. Their rocky zone between Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia was difficult for transport, so they were specialists in traveling there. They adopted camels early, so they could travel slowly but surely with heavy loads. Caravans connected settled places, bringing steel from Aram, copper and pearls from Oman (former Dilmun), and especially myrrh and frankincense from South Arabia. Pearls and incense were light compared to their value, so they were perfect for camel caravans. South Arabia struck gold, too. Gold could flow from Africa as well as Arabia, with caravans transporting it all.

As the Old Arabs became caravan specialists, they settled farther into Arabia Deserta, the great wilderness in the center of the peninsula. Old Arabic speakers also spread into southern Mesopotamia, toward modern Basra. From the deep desert, to the Nabataean settlement of Petra, to the marshes of the Mesopotamian river delta, there was some degree of shared language, though the dialects varied widely.

We have no reason to believe that they called themselves “Arabs,” at this time. They would have named themselves for the place where they lived, without a sense of shared culture with others whose language they could most easily understand. Aramaic, too, was a widely-understood language across the region, and both being Semitic, they may have been as similar as Italian and Spanish. So they knew they understood each other, but at this time, they had no cultural or ethnic story for why.

Let’s turn next to South Arabia, which was culturally very different.

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