What do we know of Nabataean law? Or, rather, what are our sources for Nabataean law?

Although some legal customs can be inferred and gleaned from literary sources about the Nabataeans, most, if not all, the evidence derives from documentary texts, inscriptions and papyri, written in the Nabataean script in Nabataean Aramaic (and as will become clear later on, also in Greek). This documentary evidence, to use John Healey's phrase, ‘is not “supported”, so to speak, by the survival of any contemporary or later literature in Nabataean’. ‘Unsupported’ is indeed an understatement: in contrast to Roman or Jewish law for example, a vacuum exists outside the documents whose testimony cannot be enhanced, modified, explained or nuanced by a body of literary legal tradition. In this Nabataean shares the fate of several other Near Eastern Semitic languages represented by epigraphic documents alone. On the other hand, the Nabataean legal document in the Nabataean script is part of the ‘Aramaic common law tradition’, and its formulae and provisions can be profi tably compared and contrasted with sibling documents. My aim in the present exercise, however, is not to detect identity, similarity and continuity of formulae, not even ‘to identify the diversity existing within commonality’ of ‘heirs to a rich Aramaic tradition,’ but rather to isolate pieces of substantive Nabataean law, more precisely the Nabataean law of persons. Paradoxically as it may seem at first sight, my task was rendered easier by the fact that I rely on documents written mostly in Greek rather than in Nabataean Aramaic.

This book is devoted to processes of continuity and change over the thousand years which separate Alexander the Great from Muhammad the Prophet – two men perceived as instrumental in changing the linguistic and cultural map of the Middle East, the former responsible for the spread of Greek, the latter for the demise of Greek and the rise of Arabic. Obviously the reality is not so simple, and the main purpose of this book is to examine the finer details and complexities of the relationship between languages and cultures during this period, and also to offer some account of the variety of responses that Greek, and other languages, evoked in the peoples of that area from Greece (and Rome) eastwards to Iran.

Like many other collective works, this book too has its own history. It grew out of the success of a conference, and the conference itself out of the experience of the editors as leaders and participants in a yearlong research group at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2002–3. The group was led by Hannah M. Cotton (of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Jonathan J. Price (of Tel Aviv University) and David J. Wasserstein (then of Tel Aviv University, now of Vanderbilt University); the other members were Leah Di Segni and Shlomo Naeh (of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Robert G. Hoyland (then of Oxford University, now of the University of St Andrews), E. Axel Knauf (of Bern University), Marijana Ricl (of the University of Belgrade) and Seth Schwartz (of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York).