The Nabataeans- whose capital was that fantastic rock-city Petra- were Semites of Arab stock. Although they must have spoken some sort of Arabic dialect amongst themselves, they used as their official language Aramaic, the lingua franca of that period. Until recently all that was preserved of their written material were thousands of short rock inscriptions mainly above their tombs, all written in lapidary, peculiar script. Now, suddenly, Babata's archive gave us for the first time several papyri written by the official Nabataean scribes, rich in content, terminology and philological data.
from page 234, Bar-Kokhba
from page 234, Bar-Kokhba