ABSTRACT
In spite of 75 years of excavations at Petra, the period before the 1st century bc remains elusive and relatively unknown. Much of the recent archaeological focus has been the on monuments of the Nabataean capital during the Roman and Byzantine periods—temples, the theater, tombs, and churches—ignoring the preceding centuries of the Hellenistic age when the Nabataeans first made their appearance. Hints of an earlier Hellenistic settlement are only scattered finds spread across the heart of the civic center, in fills, dumps, and unstratified contexts. Most of these discoveries were made during the earlier British excavations at Petra, during the first excavations by the Horsfields between 1929 and 1936 and later those directed by Peter Parr between 1958 and 1964. These finds consist mainly of Hellenistic imported wares and coins. The pottery consists of black-glazed Attic sherds of early Hellenistic date, an ostracon inscribed in Greek of the 2nd century BC, and approximately three dozen Greek stamped amphorae, scattered widely across the whole civic center, primarily in the al-Katuta dump south of az-Zantur and along the Colonnaded Street, but also a dozen from the Swiss-Liechtenstein excavations at az-Zantur and a few more from the American excavations of the Temple of the Winged Lions and ‘Great’ Temple. The Greek-inscribed handles yield dates stretching from ca. 240 bc to the early decades of the 1st century BC. In addition, the finds include several dozen Ptolemaic and Phoenician coins. The list is extensive enough to prevent it from being characterized as merely of intrusive elements or random finds. Both the pottery exports and foreign coins are widespread and ample enough to suggest that they represent the foundations of an earlier occupation, one that was either destroyed during the construction of the later Nabataean settlement or one that still lies buried beneath the later constructions.
