What Is Petra? The Rose City the Nabataeans Cut From Rock
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The way into Petra is a crack in the mountains a kilometre long and in places three metres wide, with walls two hundred metres high, and at the end of it, framed by the rock, is the facade of a building forty metres tall carved into the cliff face, with columns, pediments and statues cut from the living stone. It is a tomb, and behind it are hundreds more, along with a theatre for six thousand, temples, houses and the pipes and cisterns that let a city of twenty thousand live in a desert. The people who made it were Arab traders who controlled the incense route, and their capital was lost to the outside world for six centuries.
The Nabataeans
The Nabataeans were a nomadic Arab people who, by the fourth century BC, had settled around a spring in a basin of the mountains between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea and made themselves the middlemen of the incense trade. Frankincense and myrrh grew only in southern Arabia and were burned in every temple from Rome to Persia, and the camel caravans that carried them north had to pass through Nabataean territory and pay for water, protection and the right to pass. The kingdom grew rich on the tolls, extended from Damascus to the Hejaz, and fought off the successors of Alexander; its kings struck coins, its merchants wrote in an Aramaic script that became the ancestor of Arabic, and its capital, which they called Raqmu and the Greeks called Petra, rock, was the storehouse of the trade.
The city
Petra's fame is its rock-cut architecture, and the monuments were carved from the top down, the masons cutting a ledge at the top of the cliff and working their way to the ground, so that no scaffolding was needed. The features:
- •The Siq: the narrow gorge that is the city's entrance, lined with carved niches and the channels of the water supply
- •The Treasury, al-Khazneh: the facade at the end of the Siq, a tomb probably of King Aretas IV around the time of Christ, named by Bedouin who believed an urn on top held a pharaoh's gold and shot at it for centuries
- •The Street of Facades and the Royal Tombs: hundreds of tomb fronts in Nabataean, Egyptian, Greek and Roman styles, since the Nabataeans borrowed from everyone they traded with
- •The theatre: cut from the rock in the first century AD, seating 6,000
- •The Monastery, ad-Deir: a facade larger than the Treasury, up 800 steps at the top of the mountain, probably a temple
- •The free-standing city: a colonnaded street, a great temple, markets and houses on the valley floor, most of it still unexcavated
Water in the desert
A city could not have existed in that basin without engineering. The Nabataeans dammed the flash floods that came down the Siq, diverting them through a tunnel cut in the rock, and they collected every drop that fell on the surrounding mountains in channels carved into the cliffs and lined with clay pipes, feeding some 200 cisterns cut into the rock and sealed with waterproof plaster. Springs outside the city were piped in along the Siq in terracotta conduits with settling tanks to drop the silt, and the flow was regulated so that the city had running water through a dry summer. The system watered gardens and a pool with an island in the city centre, as archaeologists found in 2004, and the same techniques of catchment and storage let the Nabataeans farm the Negev desert with terraces and cisterns that still hold water.
Rise, fall and rediscovery
Rome annexed the kingdom in 106 AD without a fight, and Petra prospered for a while as a provincial capital with a Roman street and a Roman gate, but the trade shifted to the sea, as ships from Egypt learned the monsoon and carried the incense direct, and to Palmyra in the north. An earthquake in 363 wrecked much of the free-standing city, another in 551 finished it, and the population dwindled to a few families in the tombs and to the Bedouin. The Crusaders built a fort there in the twelfth century and then it vanished from Western knowledge until 1812, when a young Swiss explorer, Johann Burckhardt, travelling as a Muslim scholar, persuaded a local guide to take him through the Siq on the pretext of sacrificing a goat at a shrine beyond, and saw the Treasury. He wrote it up, and the painters, poets and archaeologists followed; the phrase rose-red city half as old as time is from an Oxford prize poem of 1845 by a man who had never been there.
Petra now
Petra was listed as a World Heritage site in 1985 and named one of the new seven wonders in 2007, and about a million people a year walk the Siq, which is its main problem, since the sandstone is soft and the tourists, the flash floods and the salt in the rock are eroding the facades. The Bedouin who lived in the tombs were moved to a village outside in 1985 and returned as guides and traders. Around 85 percent of the city is thought to be still underground, and the excavations of the last thirty years, of the pool, the temple and a monumental platform found by satellite in 2016, keep adding to a place that was first described to Europe by a man who had to pretend to be someone else to see it.
The takeaway
Petra was the capital of the Nabataeans, Arab traders who grew rich on the incense caravans between Arabia and the Mediterranean, and from about the first century BC they carved its tombs, temples and theatre into the sandstone cliffs of a mountain basin in southern Jordan, supplying it with water by dams, channels and hundreds of rock-cut cisterns. Annexed by Rome, bypassed by the sea trade and wrecked by earthquakes, it was known only to Bedouin until a disguised Swiss traveller entered the Siq in 1812.