Petra

• 1. Introduction

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  Petra, the ancient stone city of southern Jordan, was unknown to the western world until the year 1812. That year a Swiss traveller named Johann Ludwig Burckhardt was heading toward the Niger River when he heard stories of a dead city that held the tomb of the Prophet Aaron. The tale gripped him. Burckhardt already spoke fluent Arabic, so he dressed as a local and spoke nothing else. He also brought along a goat, meant for sacrifice in Aaron's honour. After a single day of exploring, he was certain he had found the lost city. What he had found was a place its own people once called Raqmu, cut into cliffs of sandstone the colour of roses. Who carved it, and how did they grow rich in a land with almost no rain? Which gods did they honour, which empires took the city, and what made so grand a place fall silent?

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• 2. Water And Trade

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  The Nabataeans began as one of several nomadic Bedouin tribes that crossed the Arabian Desert with their herds, going wherever pasture and water could be found. Some older theories gave them Aramean roots. Many modern scholars reject that idea, and the archaeological, religious and linguistic evidence points to a northern Arabian tribe. They settled at Petra in the 4th century BC and made it their capital in the second century BC. People had lived in the area far earlier, from as long ago as 7000 BC.

  The Edomites held the site during the Iron Age, which ran from 1200 to 600 BC. The mountains here formed a natural reservoir, so merchants stopped to rest and trade wines, olive oil and wood. An Edomite settlement on top of Umm el-Biyara dates to no earlier than the seventh century BC. A story says 10,000 men were thrown from that mountain, but scholars have debated it.

  In 312 BC, the general Antigonus sent expeditions against the Nabataeans, and the Greek writer Diodorus Siculus described them. He wrote that they were nomads who believed owning property made a person easy to control. His account speaks of a "petra," the Greek word for rock, but that was a natural fortress and refuge rather than a town. Nothing in it suggests a city stood there yet.

  A city did appear, and water explains it. Excavations show that the Nabataeans tamed the flash floods that strike the basin using dams, cisterns and water conduits. They stored water through long droughts and profited by selling it, creating an artificial oasis. The archaeologist Philip Hammond, who visited Petra for nearly 40 years, believed ceramic pipes once carried water from rock-cut systems on the canyon rim. Today the climate is semi-arid. About 193 millimetres of rain fall in a year, mostly in winter.

  The Petra Pool and Garden Complex shows how far this mastery went. Scholars once took it for a market. Excavation revealed an elaborate Nabataean garden with a large swimming pool, an island pavilion and an intricate hydraulic system.

  Pliny the Elder and other ancient writers named Petra as the Nabataean capital and the centre of their caravan trade. Cliffs enclosed it and a perennial stream watered it, so it worked as a fortress. It also controlled routes to Gaza in the west, to Bosra and Damascus in the north, to Aqaba and Leuce Come on the Red Sea, and across the desert to the Persian Gulf. The incense trade brought the Nabataeans considerable revenue. In the 1st century AD, the population peaked at an estimated 20,000. The city's most famous monuments belong to that age of wealth.

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• 3. Carved In Stone

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  The walk into Petra begins in the Siq, a dark gorge that in places is only 3 to 4 metres wide. It is a natural split in the sandstone and a waterway that flows into Wadi Musa. At its end stands Al-Khazneh, the Treasury. It is 24 metres wide and 37 metres tall, and its design echoes the architecture of Alexandria. The twin gods Castor and Pollux, protectors of travellers, appear near its base. Near the top, two victories flank a female figure usually identified as Isis-Tyche, a blend of the Egyptian and Greek goddesses of good fortune. The Treasury was possibly the mausoleum of the Nabataean king Aretas IV.

  Local Bedouin once believed riches lay hidden inside the Treasury. Hundreds of bullet holes in its face come from tribes who fired at it hoping to dislodge them.

  A little farther on, a theatre sits at the foot of the mountain called en-Nejr. Its builders placed it so that the greatest number of tombs were in view. They cut it into the hillside and even through several tombs, and rectangular gaps in the seating remain. It was said to hold around 8,500 people, who came for poetry readings and dramas. Gladiator fights were also said to be held here and drew the biggest crowds. The heavy death toll meant no gladiator rose to fame.

  The Colonnaded Street was one of the few features of Petra that people built rather than carved. Once the Romans took control, they narrowed the street to make room for a sidewalk and added 72 columns along each side. A semicircular nymphaeum on the street held Petra's only tree, intended as a symbol of peace. Flash flooding has since ruined it.

  The Monastery, known in Arabic as Ad Deir, is the largest monument in Petra. It stands 45 metres tall and 50 metres wide. Like the Treasury, it has a broken pediment and a central tholos, but it feels more distinctly Nabataean. Its only light comes through an entrance 8 metres high. The ground outside was deliberately flattened for worship.

  The Royal Tombs form another group, made up of the Palace Tomb, the Corinthian Tomb, the Silk Tomb and the Urn Tomb. The Palace Tomb is speculated to have belonged to the kings of Petra. The Corinthian Tomb, right beside it, shares the Treasury's Hellenistic style.

  In 2016, archaeologists using satellite imagery and drones found a huge monument nobody knew existed. It lies about half a mile south of the city centre, at the foot of Jabal an-Nmayr. A platform of 184 by 161 feet carries a monumental staircase on its east side. Inside it sits a smaller platform topped by a 28-foot-square building. Only the Monastery complex is larger. Researchers have not yet offered even a speculative explanation for what it was for.

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• 4. Gods And Mountains

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  Dushara was the chief god of the Nabataeans, and three goddesses accompanied him: Al-Uzza, Allat and Manat. Statues cut into the rock depict them. The Nabataeans also deified a few of their kings. Obodas I became a god after he died in 85 BC, and the Monastery is dedicated to him. An inscription on its ruins records this. New evidence suggests their theology was tied to the Earth and the Sun, since prominent buildings in Petra line up with equinox and solstice sunrises and sunsets.

  The Temple of the Winged Lions dates to the reign of Aretas IV, who ruled from 9 BC to 40 AD. It stands in the Sacred Quarter at the end of the Colonnaded Street. Across from it, the Qasr al-Bint rises on the opposite side of the street.

  Above the city, the High Place of Sacrifice crowns Jebel Madbah. The climb of roughly 800 steps starts near the theatre. Worshippers poured libations and sacrificed animals there, and they burned frankincense. Because Muslims hold that the tomb of the Prophet Aaron lies near Petra, a goat was sacrificed there each year.

  That link to Aaron runs through local tradition. Petra is said to be where Moses, called Musa in Arabic, struck a rock with his staff and brought forth water, and the valley at its head is Wadi Musa. Aaron, called Harun, is said to be buried at Mount Hor, known in Arabic as Jabal Haroun. Josephus already placed his death on a mountain near Petra. Hammond reported local folklore that Moses's wand created the city itself.

  A memorial church built in the 5th century under the peak grew into a monastery that pilgrims visited. A papyrus dated to 573 names it as the House of the High Priest Aaron. A shrine to Moses's sister Miriam stood on a mountaintop and was still shown to pilgrims in the time of Jerome in the 4th century. Nobody has identified where it stood.

  Epiphanius of Salamis added a late echo of the old religion. He wrote that a feast was held at Petra on the 25th of December, honouring the virgin Khaabou and her offspring Dushara.

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• 5. Empire And Decline

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  In 106, under the governor Aulus Cornelius Palma Frontonianus, Rome absorbed Petra's territory into the province of Arabia Petraea. The native dynasty ended, yet the city kept flourishing. Between 111 and 114, Trajan built the Via Traiana Nova, which ran from the Syrian border to the Red Sea through Petra. It followed old Nabataean caravan routes and revived trade between Arabia, Syria and Mediterranean harbours.

  In 130, Emperor Hadrian visited and gave the city the name Hadriānī Petra Metropolis, which appeared on his coins. Unlike in Jerash, his visit sparked no building boom. The provincial governor Sextius Florentinus built a monumental mausoleum for his son near the King's Wall tombs. In the Nabataean period those tombs had generally been reserved for the royal family.

  By the time of Severus Alexander, the minting of coins at Petra had stopped. Builders no longer made sumptuous tombs, apparently after some sudden catastrophe such as an invasion by the Sasanian Empire. Meanwhile Palmyra pulled the pre-Islamic Arab trade away. Even so, Petra seems to have lingered as a religious centre. In the 3rd century, Emperor Elagabalus declared it a Roman colony. The Madaba Map made under Justinian I leaves out the section where Petra would appear.

  The revision of sea-based trade routes drained the city, and in 363 an earthquake did worse. It destroyed many buildings, damaged the theatre and crippled the water management system that had made the city possible.

  Christianity reached Petra in the 4th century, after Constantine I and Licinius issued a decree of tolerance. Athanasius mentions a bishop of Petra named Asterius. In the 440s, the Urn Tomb was consecrated as a church. A red-paint inscription records the event in the time of bishop Jason.

  By the Byzantine era, Petra was the capital of the province of Palaestina III. In the Byzantine Church, excavators found 140 papyri, mostly contracts dated from the 530s to the 590s. They show the city was still thriving in the 6th century. The last reference to Byzantine Petra is an anecdote about its bishop Athenogenes, in the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschus. Its status as a metropolitan bishopric moved to Areopolis before 687. Early Islamic records never mention it.

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• 6. Lost And Found

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  Baldwin I of Jerusalem conquered the region after the First Crusade, and Petra became the second fief of the barony of Krak. The Crusaders held it until 1189. One of their castles, al-Wu'ayra, was seized by a band of Turks with the help of local Muslims. The Crusaders recovered it only when they began destroying the olive trees of Wadi Musa, and the locals surrendered rather than lose their livelihood. Another Crusader castle stood on the summit of el-Habis, in the heart of Petra. Near the end of the 13th century, the Mamluk sultan Baibars visited the ruins as a curiosity. After that the location of Petra was forgotten.

  Even the city's identity stayed muddled. Clergy in Jerusalem believed that Kerak, where the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate ran a diocese called Battra, was the ancient Petra. Names were equally slippery. Nabataean inscriptions give the name as Raqēmō. Josephus said Arabs of his day still called it Rekeme after its royal founder. The Arabic root raqama means to mark or decorate, which may refer to the carved facades. In 1964, workmen clearing rubble near the gorge's entrance found funerary inscriptions in Nabataean script. One honoured a man named Petraios, who was born in Raqmu and buried in Garshu, which is Jerash. The Hebrew word sela means rock, and an old theory linked Petra to a place of that name in the Bible. The 1911 Britannica cautioned against it.

  The drawing of Petra began in 1828, when Léon de Laborde and Louis-Maurice-Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds made the first accurate sketches. The Scottish painter David Roberts came in 1839 and brought back sketches and stories of local tribes. In 1868, Frederic Edwin Church, a leading American landscape painter of his century, visited and painted El Khasné, Petra, one of his most important works. The missionary Archibald Forder published photographs in the December 1909 issue of National Geographic.

  As the structures weakened, thieves raided vulnerable tombs and carried off many treasures. In 1929, a team of four surveyed and excavated the site: the British archaeologists Agnes Conway and George Horsfield, the Palestinian physician Tawfiq Canaan, and the Danish scholar Ditlef Nielsen. In December 1993, diggers found numerous Byzantine-era scrolls in Greek in a church near the Temple of the Winged Lions.

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• 7. Guardians And Visitors

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  The Bedul Bedouin lived in Petra's caves until 1985, when the Jordanian government resettled them in Umm Sayhoun. This happened before the UNESCO designation process. They were given block-built houses with a sewage and drainage system. Their name means "the changing ones." Today they work in local tourism alongside the Liyathnah, the larger tribe based around Wadi Musa. UNESCO proclaimed the Bedoul's cultural heritage and traditional skills in 2005 and inscribed them in 2008.

  On the 6th of December 1985, Petra became a World Heritage Site. UNESCO has called it "one of the most precious cultural properties of man's cultural heritage." A popular poll in 2007 named it one of the New 7 Wonders of the World. In August 2007, the Petra Archaeological Park became an autonomous legal entity managing the site.

  The attention carried a cost. Visitors reached 1.2 million in 2019. Threats to the site include collapsing structures, flood erosion, poor rainwater drainage, salt weathering, improper restoration and unsustainable tourism. The Petra National Trust was founded in 1989 to protect the site. A 2011 Strategic Master Plan set a 20-year course for the Petra Region.

  Conservation work stretches back decades. In 1958, USAID funded the restoration of the third pillar of the Treasury. From 1996, the Petra National Trust worked on the Siq floor. From 2006 to 2010, a project led by that trust with the Courtauld Institute of Art preserved wall paintings at Siq al Barid. From 2016 to 2019, the Petra Painting Conservation Project, funded by the German Research Foundation, studied paintings and sculpture.

  In 2018, the group PETA released a video alleging that handlers beat and whipped animals that carry tourists and pull carriages. The Jordanian authority responded by proposing a veterinary clinic. More video in 2020 suggested nothing had improved, and by 2021 PETA was running what appeared to be the only vet clinic in the area.

  In December 2022, heavy flooding hit Petra again, the same force the Nabataeans once learned to master.

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• 8. Petra In Imagination

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  In 1845, the British poet John William Burgon won Oxford's Newdigate Prize with a poem titled "Petra." It described "a rose-red city half as old as time." Writers kept returning to the site. Agatha Christie set her novel Appointment with Death there, and Petra appears in The Red Sea Sharks, the nineteenth Tintin adventure. In Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett, the character Petra Andalee takes her name from it. In 1977, the Lebanese Rahbani brothers wrote a musical called Petra in response to the Lebanese Civil War.

  Real lives unfolded there too. In 1979, Marguerite van Geldermalsen of New Zealand married a Bedouin named Mohammed Abdullah and lived in a cave in Petra until his death. She wrote Married to a Bedouin. The Englishwoman Joan Ward lived in Umm Sayhoun and chronicled nine years with the Petra Bedouin, from 2004 to 2013, in Living with Arabs.

  Cinema discovered the Treasury too. Petra appears in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Mummy Returns and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. A National Geographic episode of Time Scanners laser-scanned six ancient structures, including Petra, and the 3D model revealed how it was built. The PBS Nova special "Petra: Lost City of Stone" premiered in February 2015. Netflix's first Arabic original series, Jinn, is a five-episode supernatural drama set there. In 2018, an Overwatch update added a fictionalized Petra as a playable arena. It has appeared in every Civilization game since Civilization V.

  In Israel, Petra took on a darker role for youth movements whose hikes crossed borders into Jordan. Meir Har-Zion reportedly pioneered these trips, which were often deadly. In 1958, Haim Hefer wrote the lyrics to a ballad about one such trek that ended in death, called HaSela haAdom, "The Red Rock."

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