[3] The start date of the Bostran era was once a matter of dispute, in part because the Chronicon Paschale explicitly puts it the year of the consuls Candidus and Quadratus, that is, 105.
[11] The occasional use of the name "Bostra" for dating should not, however, be taken to indicate that it was the capital of the province; Petra was in fact more prominent in the early years.
The dating formula and the use of the Bostran era have no special connection to the city beyond the fact that as the seat of the main Roman military base, it was symbolic of the incorporation of Nabataea as a province.
Zbigniew Fiema suggests that the Crisis of the Third Century, which ultimately resulted in the division of the province of Arabia, caused locals to see their calendar with its base date corresponding to 106 as distinctly associated with different major cities.
For Fiema, the Emperor Philip the Arab's granting to Bostra of metropolis status in 244 and the transfer of the administration of Palaestina Tertia from Petra to Elusa after the earthquake of 551 are the proximate causes of the shift in nomenclature.
[16] The Bostran era may itself be a spontaneous local response to the political changes which rendered the old Nabataean regnal year numbering impossible.
[19] Some inscriptions have been tentatively identified as dated by the Bostran era in the neighbouring provinces of Syria to the north or Judea to the west.
[18] A Jewish Aramaic document of AD 111 from Masada in Judaea written in Hebrew letters may use the era,[9] but David Goodblatt doubts it.
[20] There are several Christian inscriptions of the late fifth and early sixth centuries in the Arabic script that bear dates in the Arabian era.