Observations sur les representations du Panthéon Nabatéen

Abstract

On the steep sides of the narrow ravine of El-Siq which leads from the vast Jordanian desert into the heart of the secret Nabataean city of Petra, one can see, at intervals, several conchac that have been hewed out of the rock, some of which are surrounded by arches and others by temple-like decorations. Inside these concime, there are various rectangular parallelepipeds, some of them single, others double, trible or even multiple, but not always equivalent or of the same height. However, these concime often contain single hemispheric or omphaloid geometric figures (figures similar to the delphic omphaluses, that is paraboloids of revolution). These are representations of deities of the Nabataean Pantheon.
By studying extracts from the Bible we can deduce that, in very ancient times, the stone-worshiping'Nabataean Arabs represented the deities of the semitic pantheon in the form of unshaped, natural slabs of rock (menhirs, bethels), and during the historic times in the form of prisms (pyramids, rectangular parallelepipeds, cubes, hemispheres or paraboloids of revolution).
Dhu-Shara was the supreme deity of the Nabataeans and Alilat his female counterpart, and these appelations have been preserved in the ancient Greek literature (Herodotus, Strabo, Hesychios and others). Herodotus and Strabo have recorded specific information on the Nabataean religion.
This text contains all the related passages from the work of Pausanias, who, with his well-known curiosity to know and record all kinds of legends and popular beliefs and, also, with the perceptiveness that characterized him, has recorded all the information he gathered during his visits to the oldest temples of the Greek world, so that we can see that the worship of the
statues of the Greek Pantheon replaced a very ancient (in some cases prehellenic) general stone worship.
During that ancient period, amorphous or crudely worked stones represented most of the primeval deities which were, later, identified with the Olympian gods (Cybele, Aphrodite, Zeus) and with other secondary but equally important ancient deities of fertility, such as Eros, in the form of phalluses or hermaic columns.
The Ancient Greeks believed that some rocks were the dwellings of certain gods and, in the end, the rocks were identified with these deities. The religious beliefs of the simitic peoples evolved in a somewhat similar way.
The Bible contains many references to stone worship (op. cit. p. 26 ff.) where the significance of the erection of a sjab of stone is explained (menhir, avadir, bethel, where the interpretation of the event is inherent in the appelation).
As a matter of fact the word “bethel” derives from the hebrew word bêt-elaha, which means “house of God”. But the Byzantine word for “brick” (tubulon, besalon) also derives from the same root and has the same meaning.
The name of the Nabataean capital, too, which can be found in many regions of greater Macedonia, where it designates “cols”, “passes” and “passages” is probably pre-hellenic; and it is particularly interesting that it appears in such a critical part of the nabataean world as its capital Petra.
I believe that Petra had been the original name of the famous and very narrow pass which led to the secret capital of the Nabataean kingdom, which, for many centuries, had controlled the caravan routes, the land routes by which the Asian countries communicated with the West: in other words the pass of El-Siq.