Arabia Petraea, also called Provincia Arabia or simply Arabia, is a frontier province of the Roman Empire beginning in the second century; it consists of the former Nabataean kingdom in modern Jordan, southern modern Syria, the Sinai Peninsula and northwestern Saudi Arabia.
Its capital is Petra.
It is bordered on the north by Syria, on the west by Iudaea and Aegyptus.In 106, when Cornelius Palma is governor of Syria, the part of Arabia under the rule of Petra is absorbed into the Roman Empire as part of Arabia Petraea and becomes its capital.
The native dynasty comes to an end but the city continues to flourish under Roman rule.
It is around this time that the Petra Roman Road is built.Annexed by Trajan, like many other eastern frontier provinces of the Roman Empire, it is held onto, unlike Armenia, Mesopotamia and Assyria, well after Trajan's rule—its desert frontier being called the Limes Arabicus.
It produces no usurpers and no emperors (Philippus, though Arab,was from Shahbā, a Syrian city added to the province of Arabia at a point between 193 and 225—Philippus was born around 204).
As a frontier province, it includes a desert populated by the nomadic Saraceni, and bordering the Parthian hinterland.Though subject to eventual attack and deprivation by the Parthians and Palmyrenes, it has nothing like the constant incursions faced in other areas on the Roman frontier, such as Germany and North Africa, nor the entrenched cultural presence that define the other, more Hellenized, eastern provinces.
At some point during the time of Alexander Severus, Bostra replaces Petra as the provincial capital.
