What do we know of Nabataean law? Or, rather, what are our sources for Nabataean law?

Although some legal customs can be inferred and gleaned from literary sources about the Nabataeans, most, if not all, the evidence derives from documentary texts, inscriptions and papyri, written in the Nabataean script in Nabataean Aramaic (and as will become clear later on, also in Greek). This documentary evidence, to use John Healey's phrase, ‘is not “supported”, so to speak, by the survival of any contemporary or later literature in Nabataean’. ‘Unsupported’ is indeed an understatement: in contrast to Roman or Jewish law for example, a vacuum exists outside the documents whose testimony cannot be enhanced, modified, explained or nuanced by a body of literary legal tradition. In this Nabataean shares the fate of several other Near Eastern Semitic languages represented by epigraphic documents alone. On the other hand, the Nabataean legal document in the Nabataean script is part of the ‘Aramaic common law tradition’, and its formulae and provisions can be profi tably compared and contrasted with sibling documents. My aim in the present exercise, however, is not to detect identity, similarity and continuity of formulae, not even ‘to identify the diversity existing within commonality’ of ‘heirs to a rich Aramaic tradition,’ but rather to isolate pieces of substantive Nabataean law, more precisely the Nabataean law of persons. Paradoxically as it may seem at first sight, my task was rendered easier by the fact that I rely on documents written mostly in Greek rather than in Nabataean Aramaic.