The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

26 INTRODUCTION
He was perhaps himself a Jerusalemite, for he has an excellent knowledge of the
environs of the Holy City (26: 2-27: i); at the very least he must have travelled
there frequently (see below, p. 36). His information about the aromatics and
their botanical habitats—obviously gained from hearsay—suggests fairly
clearly, in my opinion, that he was engaged, in his role as a modest official,
in the perfume and spice trade. This hypothesis is confirmed by his reference
to a second town which he must have known devisUy namely Petra,^ the capital
of the Nabataeans. He admires above all the aqueduct of the city, impressive
remains of which can still be seen today in the es-Siq gorge of the Wadi Musa.
The Nabataeans were already fully engaged in transcontinental trade
during the fourth century B.C.; their merchant caravans—according to
Diodorus Siculus {Bibl. Hist. xix. 94. 5)—'carried as far as the [Mediterranean]
Sea, incense, myrrh, and the most precious aromatics, which were
delivered to them by convoys from the so-called Arabia Felix'. By the year
312 B.C. the fame of the riches which they had accumulated, thanks to this
trade, was such that it gave rise to two abortive expeditions sent by Antigonus,
who controlled a large part of Alexander's empire. But at the time
when the author of the Book of Watchers was living Petra was already a
fully constituted town. This development took place gradually only in the
course of the third century, and still on quite a modest scale, as has been
shown by the soundings (since 1929) and the systematic excavations undertaken
by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and by the British School
of Jerusalem from 1954 onwards. These excavations unearthed the pavement
of the cardo maximus of the Roman town of Petra, along the Wadi Musa
(the place where the canal admired by our Jewish writer flowed). Underneath,
several streets were recognized, one on top of the other, of simple stone,
covering two levels of buildings: the oldest, flush with the virgin soil, showed
the remains of partitioned habitations, with walls made of shingle and clay,
the latter also forming the floor. The fragments of pottery collected in these
modest houses enable us to attribute them to the Nabataeans of the second
and even the third century. 'There is evidence, in the shape of Hellenistic
pottery and coins of the third century B.C. [the currency of coastal Phoenician
towns of the third century], of settlement in Petra by that date.'^
^ Dp*1 or K^l^yi Dpi in Aramaic; rqmw in a *A Sequence of Pottery from Petra' in Essays
Nabataean inscription, RB Ixxii (1965), 95-7 in Honor of V. Glueck, 1970, pp. 352-4 and
(En. 28: 1-29: i); see the notes to En« xxvi 3-5 369-70; K. Schmitt-Korte, Archdologischer
(below p. 233).
Anzeiger, 1968, 501-2; J. Starcky, Diet, de la
* P. Parr, Palestine Exploration Quarterly^ Bible-Suppldment, fasc. 39, 1964, col. 943.
i960, 135; cf. id., RB xlix (1962), 76-7, and