Underwater archaeologists searching just off the western Mediterranean coast of the city of Pozzuoli in central Italy discovered the remains of a submerged 2,000-year-old Nabatean temple dedicated to their god Dushara. What they found specifically were two Roman marble altars, which linked the temple to the period when Nabataeans were living freely on the Phlegrean Peninsula 125 miles (200 km) south of Italy’s capital city, in territory fully controlled by the Roman Empire.
The Nabataeans were an Arab tribal group who lived as wandering nomads in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula in the first few centuries of the first millennium. But once they’d formed enough alliances among themselves to establish their own kingdom, they began to settle down and devote themselves to trade and commerce.
The Nabataean Kingdom formed a voluntary alliance with Rome in the late first century BC, officially launching an association that would last for the next several centuries (although the Nabataeans lost their independence to the Roman Empire in the early second century).