Word: nabataeans
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...Nowadays, however, Ali is lucky to be guiding a handful of backpackers, let alone world leaders in inappropriate attire. On a good day, Petra?the ancient city of the Nabataean kingdom that ruled Arabia 2,000 years ago and was, until recently, Jordan's primary tourist attraction?drew 3,000 visitors daily. But that was before Israel erupted in a spate of violence that sent tourists packing region-wide. These days, only a few trickle through the two-kilometer-long narrow, rose-hued stone gorge to emerge, blinking in the sunlight, opposite the Treasury building, a location easily recognizable...
...Richard Debs, a managing director of New York's Morgan Stanley investment banking house, recalls the time that Quraishi invited him and his wife on an excursion to the hills north of the Saudi town of Medina, where they picnicked Bedouin-style on rice and lamb among the Nabataean ruins...
Guided by Glueck's creative archaeology, young pioneers from the cramped nation of Israel are already putting the Nabataean waterworks back into use, repairing the dams, cleaning out the cisterns, planting crops in the walled fields. The population there is rising, even beyond the ends of the spreading pipelines. Some day it may pass the level that it reached at the time of Abraham...
...Albright's system. For three years he served as his professor's pottery man, labeling, studying and endlessly discussing every potsherd from Albright's excavations. He acquired an uncanny feeling for these humble trifles. He could tell at a glance whether a fragment came from a Nabataean water bottle or a cooking pot from the days of Joshua. He still has this ability, and when he picks up a potsherd, he handles it as tenderly as a Chinese esthete caressing a piece of jade. "Pottery is man's most enduring material," he says with emotion. "Wood...
...basic Nabataean trick was to throw stone walls across the wadies to delay flash floods. Trapped by the walls, the water sank into the ground, depositing silt that built up fertile soil. To trap even more water, the Naba-taeans built good-sized stone dams across the larger wadies; they cut channels along hilltops to divert water to fields that could use it best. To supply