Rome and the East
and that successive tolls and charges had to be paid en route and finally to the
Romanpublicani(tax collectors) at Gaza. Unfortunately Pliny does not give
an estimate of the original value of each load in denarii.
It is a great pity that Pliny also fails to indicate that the latter stages of this
route, before it reached Gaza, will have passed through the territory of the
kingdom of Nabataea. But we know that it must have done so, until that
area became in the Roman province of ‘‘Arabia.’’ For the regal period, at
any rate, we can fill in the picture from the description in Strabo’sGeography,
written under Augustus and Tiberius. According to him there was a regular
trade route from Petra to Leuke Kome, at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba,
‘‘to which and from which camel traders travel safely and easily on the route
from and to Petra, in such numbers of men and camels as to differ in no way
from an army.’’^12 Strabo is in fact touching here on a different aspect of the
movement of trade, namely that which came by sea up the Red Sea as far
as Leuke Kome, where goods were landed and taken up to Petra. Hence the
Periplusmentions Leuke Kome, ‘‘through which there is a way inland up to
Petra, to Malichus, king of the Nabataeans. This harbour also serves in a way
the function of a port of trade for the craft, none large, that come to it loaded
with freight from Arabia. For that reason, as a safeguard there is dispatched
for duty in it a customs officer to deal with the (duty of a) fourth on in-
coming merchandise, as well as a centurion with a detachment of soldiers.’’^13
In spite of much argument, it can be taken as certain that the ‘‘centurion’’
was in fact a Nabataean officer, and the king was Malchus II, who reigned
from.. to . Here, also, for the first time, we have a description of a
regular ‘‘caravan.’’ Ships still came up this route three centuries later, perhaps
indeed even further up, to Aqaba or Elat at the head of the gulf, the ancient
Aela. Eusebius identifies this place as ‘‘lying next to the Red Sea, sailed by
those coming from Egypt and those from India.’’^14
From Leuke Kome, caravans will clearly have travelled up the east side
of the Gulf of Aqaba; from Aela onwards they could either go up what was
later (after the Roman annexation of the area in ) to be the Via Nova
running north-eastwards to Petra and beyond; or perhaps they may have di-
verged almost due north, to reach the Mediterranean at Gaza. In fact it is
perhaps more likely that even goods eventually bound for Gaza normally
went through Petra, avoiding the more mountainous parts of northern Sinai;
if so, the route will then have crossed the Wadi Arabah westwards and then
. Strabo,Geog. .. ().
.Periplus, trans. Casson.
. Eusebius,Onomastikon, ed. Klostermann, .