The Nabataeans, also Nabateans (Arabic: الأنباط‎ al-ʾAnbāṭ), were ancient peoples of Jordan, whose oasis settlements in the time of Josephus (AD 37 – c. 100), gave the name of Nabatene to the borderland between Syria and Arabia, from the Euphrates to the Red Sea. Their loosely-controlled trading network, which centered on strings of oases that they controlled, where agriculture was intensively practiced in limited areas, and on the routes that linked them, had no securely defined boundaries in the surrounding desert. Trajan conquered the Nabataean kingdom, annexing it to the Roman Empire, where their individual culture, easily identified by their characteristic finely-potted painted ceramics, became dispersed in the general Greco-Roman culture and was eventually lost.

Dr Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi (هتون أجواد الفاسي) is a women's rights activist and an assistant professor of women's history at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, where she has been employed since 1989. At the university, al-Fassi carries out historical research. Al-Fassi claims from her research into the pre-Islamic Arabian kingdom of Nabataea that women in the kingdom had more independence than women in modern Saudi Arabia. Al-Fassi was active in women's right to vote campaigns for the 2005 Saudi Arabian municipal elections and is active in a similar campaign for the 2011 municipal elections.

Hatoon al-Fassi is a member of the traditional Sufi Al-Fassi family from Makkah, that descends from the Sharifi house of Muhammad that belongs to the Hassani Idrissi branch of this line. Through her father Sheikh Ajwad al-Fassi and his father Sheikh Abdullah al-Fassi, she is a great-great-grand-daughter of Qutbul Ujood Hazrat Muhammad al-Fassi (Imam Fassi), the founder and spiritual head of the Fassiyah branch of the Shadhiliyya Sufi order, the twenty-first Khalifa (representative) of Imam Shadhili. She is thus a direct descendant of Muhammad. Her mother is Sheikha Samira Hamed Dakheel,^{[citation needed]} who belongs to the branch of the Hijazi tribe of Harb that resided in Jeddah. She has a brother, Sheikh Muhammad Ajwad al-Fassi, a lawyer and a sister, Hawazan Ajwad al-Fassi, a poet.