 For more than four centuries the Nabataean kingdom dominated, politically and commercially, a large territory and was arguably the first Arab kingdom in the area.The testimony of the 4th and 3rd century external accounts and local materialistic evidence demonstrate that the Nabataeans played a relatively substantial political and economic role in the sphere of the early Hellenistic world.While the Nabataeans didn't attain observable characteristics of a Hellenistic state (i.e.