A suppressed Roman campaign vs. the Nabateans?

NABATEAN (NABATAEAN) WATCH: Archaeologists Find Evidence of ‘Lost’ Ancient Roman Campaign in Arabia. The Romans tell that their conquest of the Nabateans was peaceful, but is that a tall tale of the victor? Or did they erase the memory of a fiasco in Arabia? (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).

In the year 106, the Romans annexed the Nabatean kingdom and renamed it Arabia Petraea. The question is how exactly that was achieved.

Roman historians described this as a nonviolent process following the demise of the last Nabatean king, Rabbel II Soter. But now, in the barren desert of northern Arabia, archaeologists have detected what they believe were three Roman army camps. They're situated in a straight line between the Bayir oasis near the Nabatean capital of Petra and Dûmat al-Jandal in what is now northern Saudi Arabia.

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If that's what they are, then something happened, but who knows what?

One possible explanation is that at the first camp the force was split in two and the second route hasn’t been discovered yet. Or maybe half the force split off and advanced ahead of the other half, and was responsible for ferrying water, the archaeologists postulate.

A grimmer possibility is that the size discrepancy holds clues about the soldiers’ fate: Half the force was lost en route from the big camp to the middle one. ...

But why be a downer? “This may not appear because nothing much happened! They started the campaign and halfway through the kingdom surrendered,” [archaeologist Michael] Fradley speculates. “If you’re being realistic, that may be why nothing appeared in the historic record. Or maybe the campaign was very small, run by a general who didn’t have a political career.”

History is written — or not — by the winners.

The underlying article in Antiquity is available for free with Cambridge Core:

A lost campaign? New evidence of Roman temporary camps in northern Arabia

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2023

Michael Fradley, Andrew Wilson, Bill Finlayson and Robert Bewley

Abstract

Remote sensing survey in southern Jordan has identified at least three Roman temporary camps that indicate a probable undocumented military campaign into what is today Saudi Arabia, and which we conjecture is linked to the Roman annexation of the Nabataean kingdom in AD 106.

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