Stephan G. Schmid, “The ‘Hellenisation’ of the Nabataeans: A New Approach,” Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan 7 (2007): 407-419.
In this article, Schmid “give[s] a short overview on what is known about Nabataean material culture in its best understandable categories today and to look for whether there is any common line of development or even a model that could fit to most of these categories” (407). He notes that, although the Nabataeans are historically attested from 312 BCE, there is no evidence of a Nabataean material culture until around 100 BCE; moreover, when it appears, it is thoroughly Hellenistic. Schmid argues, following Diodorus Siculus, that the Nabataeans were “nomads or semi-nomads frequenting once or twice a year the same place for trade and business” (415) until ca. 100 BCE, after which they sedentarized. Their sedentarization lead them to develop a material culture. In the absence of an existing material culture, the Nabataeans simply “oriented their new material culture according to the mainstreams of the contemporary Hellenistic world in its Near Eastern variant” (415), into which they gradually incorporated Roman and “proper Nabataean” (416) elements.