I have recently been cultivating an interest in the coinage of Nabataea, centred on Petra and covering parts of North Arabia, the Transjordan and Syria.
The earliest coins ascribed to Nabataea have no real identifying legend but the association is down to the provenance, the area in which they are found and the coins they are found with.
It was only by chance that I was reading a note by Rachel Barkay in the 2015 volume of the journal Aram that it was pointed out that the earliest Nabataean coins imitate, in bronze, the gold staters of Macedon struck by Alexander the Great and Philip III featuring the helmeted head of Athena on the obverse and Nike on the reverse.
