he Nabataeans, also Nabateans, are ancient peoples of Jordan, whose oasis settlements in the time of Josephus (CE 37 – c. 100), give the name of Nabatene to the borderland between Syria and Arabia, from the Euphrates to the Red Sea.

Their loosely controlled trading network, which centers on strings of oases that they control, where agriculture is intensively practiced in limited areas, and on the routes that link them, have no securely defined boundaries in the surrounding desert.

Trajan conquers the Nabataean kingdom, annexing it to the Roman Empire, where their individual culture, easily identified by their characteristic finely-potted painted ceramics, becomes dispersed in the general Greco-Roman culture and is eventually lost.