A rock city with spectacular building carved out of the very rock itself

At one time in its history, Petra was one of the most important trading areas in the world. And yet, almost nothing is known about the people who made it happen.

The early years

The ancient city of Petra has played many roles throughout its history. From being a major city centre for both Hellenistic and Roman eras, to holding the holy chalice for a father and son’s last crusade.

The original name of the great city has been lost to time, but the Greek’s knew the place as ‘Petra’ meaning ‘rock’, which is quite a fitting name for a city built into the rock face. This Greek name is thought to have replaced the Arabic word also for ‘rock’, ‘Sela’.

Found in southwest Jordan, the city itself was built on a terrace right next to Wadi Mūsā or The Valley of Moses, which is meant to have been the site were old mate Moses hit a rock and water started flowing. Lucky guess if you ask me.

We know that Petra has been inhabited for eons because remains have been found belonging to the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods. And the Edomites, an ancient people, are believed to have been in and around the site of Petra from about 1200 BC.

We don’t know a terrible amount about the Edomites, but supposedly they were known for their wisdom and hard work. With fine examples of textiles, ceramics and even metal working finding their way to modern historians.

The Nabateans

As we fast forward a couple of centuries, we find ourselves close to 400 BC and a new people, known as the Nabateans have made themselves at home in Petra, making it the centre and capital of their kingdom.

The Nabatean’s did quite well for themselves. And as a major city centre Petra was going from strength to strength. Sitting on a pretty major ancient trading route, the city didn’t do too badly when goods changed hands, seeing produce come from Greece, India, Egypt and even as far away as China. It was during this time that Petra saw it’s population numbers swell to almost 30 000.

And it wasn’t your typical ancient rock city either, Petra had everything you could ask for; temples, gardens, villas, theatres, tombs, it even had Roman baths and a massive marketplace that would see the regular caravan of camels.

Wojciech Machowski, the author of Petra: An archaeological guide, says that Petra at the time of the Nabatean’s was

The very definition of a cosmopolitan trade centre.

And with its trade reaching right across the ancient world, he’s not wrong. Petra had the fortunate luck to be sitting right in between the trading routes that took one across the east and through the west. If you were around at the time, you could easily find the Silk Road up to the north, a heap of Mediterranean ports off to the west, with Egypt just a bit to the south. Talk about a crossroads.

And yet, extremely little is known about the Nabateans. They were originally a nomadic desert people who found incredible wealth with trading of incense such myrrh and frankincense. How biblical.

But at the very beginning, as in when they first arrived, they scratched out a living with some livestock, mainly sheep and goats and tried their hand at a touch of agriculture. But I suppose the real issue for modern archaeologists and historians is that they left very little behind, not even broken bits of pottery. It’s almost as if they cleaned up after themselves. My days, imagine that.

While it’s believed that the Nabateans were probably wandering around Petra throughout 400 BC, it’s not definitively acknowledged. But what historians do know is that they were definitely there by 312 BC, because that is the first reference to Petra in an historical work. And they were only mentioned because the Greeks attacked them.

But there still is little to pretty much no evidence of the Nabateans being anywhere throughout Petra before the 4th century BC. But this isn’t to say they weren’t there. It just means no archaeological evidence has been found. And it’s no wonder when so little of the city has been studied as according to archaeologist, Zeidoun Al-Muheisen from Jordan’s Yarmouk University:

We have uncovered just 15 percent of the city. The vast majority – 85 percent – is still underground and untouched.

So there is still much to discover about Petra’s origins, and we kind of have an idea of what was going on in 312 BC when the Greeks attacked the Nabateans. Luckily, the home team fought back, using the mountains to their advantage and survived to fight another day, but it wouldn’t be the last time that the Greeks would stop by.

Now the Nabateans weren’t just about that trade life. They had their own writing system, as seen in the scribblings in Petra, but these seem to be basic graffiti, names of peoples and places, and doesn’t really tell us much about themselves as a people, except that their graffitists weren’t much more imaginative than our own today.

Because of the scarcity of Nabatean sources, modern scholars have had to use Greek and Roman written works to help fill in pretty much all the blanks.

So early on the Greeks started complaining that Nabateans were attacking their ships and camel caravans. Over time this turned to receiving compensation for guarding the caravans. Could these guys have been the original mafia?

Over the next several generations, the Nabateans went from nomads to being the leaders of fine exports. Clearly with an understanding of business, these were no cavemen, even if they did live in a rock city.

By 100 BC, Petra was living its best life. It has camels coming through everyday loaded up with things to trade. You could find spices from Oman and India and cloth from Syria.

So much fancy stuff lying around, you would have thought that raids were quite common, but Petra had the fortune to be surrounded by mountains that protected those inside the city.

And the entrance helped to protect the traders as well. Known as The Siq, the formal entrance to Petra is a 900 metre twisting canyon, that can get quite narrow in parts, and it pretty much made Petra the ultimate hide-away. But we’ll revisit this and the other parts of Petra a bit later on.

As the Nabateans made Petra their own, they really left their mark, but because they all of a sudden had cash to spare, the didn’t really have the time, like other cultures, to develop their own building style and so they took this and that from the cultures that came through. As a graduate student working on a dig at the site said:

They borrowed from everybody.

They appropriated some Greek, some Egyptian, some Roman and even some Indian styles into their buildings. You can see examples of this in the columns throughout the monuments in Petra.

At it’s peak, Petra had everything you could ask for. It even had flowing water, pretty amazing for solid rock. But the Nabateans were clever people and had a good mind for engineering. They had carved channels into the rock that would allow rain water to collect in these massive cisterns that they kept for everyday use. Strabo even commented on this amazing feat back in 22 AD:

There are abundant springs of water both for domestic purposes and for watering gardens.

The water collected in the cisterns were also used for irrigating crops, like vineyards and orchards.

As time went and we get to single digit years, Petra went from strength to strength, and the Nabateans kept carving impressive structures into the rock. Caravan’s kept coming through, and Petra became an important trading post for the ancient Middle East. But Petra’s wealth brought with it the jealous type. First it had been the Greeks and now, in 106 AD, the Romans arrived. And they took Petra, supposedly very easily, with the Nabateans putting up very little fight.

With Petra now officially as part of the growing Roman Empire, the city actually continued to flourish. But with time comes change, and change wasn’t kind to Petra.

First there was a bad earthquake, not the first that the inhabitants of the city had felt, but the earthquake of 551 seemed to do a fair bit of damage, destroying a number of buildings. And not too long after, trade routes shifted. With the growing popularity of sea trade routes, the number of caravans coming through Petra became less and less. So much so that by the 7th century, Petra was basically abandoned.

Even though Petra sat abandoned for several centuries it was still home to some nomadic peoples that would seek shelter in the old Nabatean infrastructure. But by the 12th century, Petra had been converted to a Crusader outpost.

Once the Crusaders had moved on, the city was still used by the occasional Nomadic people for shelter, but was almost entirely unknown to the Western World, until a Swiss traveller wandered past rediscovering the city under some perilous conditions in 1812.

The Rediscovery

Petra had been living in darkness forgotten by the world. Not really, just forgotten by the Western World, which as we all know is the only important part. It wasn’t until the year of 1812, that Petra emerged from the shadows of the Middle East to once again take its place as a world wonder.

Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, originally from Switzerland was travelling throughout the Ottoman Empire at the time, improving his multilingual skills when he came across a story of a fellow European traveller who had met a grisly end while searching for the Lost City of Petra.

As dangerous as it was to be Christian in the middle of an Islamic empire, our young Swiss had to disguise himself as a local in order to infiltrate the depths of this mysterious country.

For Burckhardt this wasn’t a rush job, he used the name Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah in order to hide his true identity and after spending a couple of years in Aleppo, most likely collecting all the information he could without making his real intentions too obvious, felt confident to make the trip to find this mysterious city.

Whilst along his travels he heard stories about the lost city and managed to convince his guide that he wanted to sacrifice his goat and to take him to the tombs near Petra where he could show his respect.

Here’s what Burkhardt had to say about what he saw for the first time:

An excavated mausoleum came in view, the situation and beauty of which are calculated to make an extraordinary impression upon the traveller, after having traversed for nearly half an hour such a gloomy and almost subterraneous passage as I have described.

After Burkhardt’s magnificent discovery what else was there to do, but to visit the place yourself, and soon architects and scholars alike were wandering through to see the architectural marvels for themselves.

It wasn’t until 1929 came along that two British Archaeologists, Agnes Conway and George Horsfield, and two scholars, Tawfiq Canaan and Ditlef Nielsen, decided they wanted to team up and as a foursome excavate and survey the great city of Petra.

And excavate and survey they did. And from 1958 onwards, all excavations were undertaken on behalf of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, which later changed to the American Centre of Oriental Research.

And the excavations haven't really stopped either. One of the most influential finds was a stash of Greek scrolls that were dated to the Byzantine era which were discovered in 1993. And a bit more recently satellite imaging shows evidence of a possible structure hiding buried underneath the sand. How exciting!

Even though Petra became a tourist hotspot and a destination for eager archaeologists, historians and scholars of all types, there is still so much of Petra that remains hidden under so much sand. And there is still so much that historians believe to have been present, but where zero evidence has been found, such as the marketplaces that must have existed for the amount of trade believed to have taken place.

All this shows is just how little we know about the original occupants of the city of Petra. As one of the student archaeologists working on the site puts it:

We really know next to nothing about the Nabateans.

Right when the city was rediscovered through to the 1980s, Petra didn’t stand empty. The Bedouins, a local tribespeople, had moved into the vacant city, and actually made it their home for about a century.

But with the increase interest by tourists, the Jordanian government moved the tribe out of the homes they had made for themselves within the city and into a concrete settlement that was outside of the city. All so that there would be more room for tourists to walk around.

The City of Petra

So now that we know what little we do about the inhabitants of the city and its possible origins. Let’s have a good look at some of the features of Petra that you can see if you were to find yourself wandering around the city.

The valley in which Petra finds itself located is surrounded by sandstone cliffs that love a good shade of red, sometimes they are as dark as purple or as light as yellow. But it’s this sandstone colour that prompted John William Burgon, an English biblical scholar who was around during the 19th century, to call Petra

A rose-red city half as old as Time.

If you were to visit Petra through it’s ‘front door’ you would find yourself walking along a narrow gorge that is known as the Siq. It’s over a kilometre long and narrows down to about two camels wide. Created by a natural ravine between two rocks, the Nabateans were brilliant in their usage of this passageway for the movement of their water. They had an irrigation channel that ran the length of the Siq ending in an underground cistern allowing for water management throughout drier seasons. Pretty impressive for the time. As you reach the end of the twisting ravine you enter a wide area with the Treasury filling your field of view.

So the Treasury is pretty recognisable, it’s used in all the photos and even had a starring role in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. But while for Indie the Treasury led to a pretty big amount of space, in reality, these elaborate exteriors are really nothing more than facades for small caves. Known in the local tongue as ‘Al Khazneh, the Treasury was actually used as a tomb. So why is it called the Treasury then? Well, it’s actually a story of misunderstanding. So the façade is made up of a series of quite elaborate carvings into the red rock. In these you can see the Hellenistic influences that I spoke of earlier. Among these carvings is a massive urn that sits above the entrance. The legend goes that the rich Nabateans hid the treasure of the occupier of the tomb (some believe it to be a king or queen) in the urn, and so Bedouin tribespeople would often fire their rifles at the urn, hoping to open it up and shower the treasure down onto themselves. Unfortunately it’s actually made of solid stone, but you can still the many, many bullet marks on the stone.

Another well-known façade found in Petra is what is known as the Monastery, or Al-Dayr. It is an unfinished tomb, that was being used as a church throughout the Byzantine era, hence ‘the Monastery’. Again you can see the classic Hellenistic influence. And while the Monastery and the Treasury look quite similar, the Monastery is actually quite a bit bigger and thanks to the people occupying Petra at the time of the Byzantine Empire, there are also crosses carved into the walls. The Monastery is in fact, said to be an excellent example of traditional Nabatean architecture, with not quite as many Greek and Roman flourishes as the Treasury.

Little Petra, or Siq Al Baris meaning ‘Cold Canyon’ is not quite within Petra proper, but is believed to have been an agricultural centre, proving useful as a place to resupply those camel caravans.

The Nabateans weren’t stupid, they knew that with a large population comes an extended need for fresh water. And so they set to work, creating extensive hydro systems which included cisterns, dams, channels carved into the rock and even ceramic piping. And as desert-dwellers, they knew how hard it can be to go without water for long periods of time. So it’s pretty amazing that they discovered this method of storing and distributing water to use year round. It’s shocking to think so little is known about them.

One of the leading archaeologists of Petra is Martha Sharp Joukowsky, she has spent 15 years excavating the site, particularly the Great Temple. Believed to have been just a pile of rocks by those that came before her, Joukowsky reckons that the theatre within the Great Temple was partially restored for meetings that could accommodate hundreds of citizens. Now the primary use of the Great Temple isn’t known, but we do know that it was constructed between the first century BC and the first century AD, it had a theatre with 600 seats (that’s what Joukowsky’s talking about), it had an enormous courtyard with vaulted rooms underneath and a triple colonnade. And some artefacts have even been found at the Great Temple. Some coins, believed to have been used by the Nabateans and numerous bits of statues. So I think we can safely entertain the idea that the Great Temple could have been a civic centre of some sort.

Petra Today

So because Petra is basically just a tourist destination these days, the very modern town of Wadi Mūsā serves the tourists in food and accommodation.

And those tourist numbers have been climbing ever since UNESCO added the site to their World Heritage list in 1985. They had this to say about the place:

The varied archaeological remains and architectural monuments from prehistoric times to the medieval periods bears exceptional testimony to the now lost civilisations which succeeded each other at the site.

Real excavations started back in 1993, which revealed more temples and monuments that gave credence to the political, social and religious facets that would have been happening in the city throughout the ancient times. Archaeologists even found evidence of lush gardens, fountains and even Roman-style villas. Not bad for nomads.

And the brilliant construction of their water supply system meant that there was enough water for not only drinking and bathing, but for growing crops, such as wheat, fruit, wine and probably even trees for nothing else but for shade.

And it’s these very excavations that have given scholars and historians the idea that Petra could possibly have been thriving a good thousand years longer than they first thought.

Petra is currently the top tourist destination in Jordan, with hundreds of thousands visiting every year. Well maybe not this year, or last year. But before that, definitely. In fact, 2019 recorded 1 million tourists. And with the release of a certain Indiana Jones film in 1989, all of a sudden the whole world knew about Petra. And the 1994 peace treaty between Jordan and Israel allowed mass tourism to pass on through.

2007 was another big year, with Petra included as part of the New Seven Wonders of the World. Quite the honour.

As popular as Petra is, it's very similar to Pompeii and Herculaneum in the sense that less than half of the site has been excavated. But with the aid of satellite images, in 2016 a pretty big structure is believed to be buried under the sand. Nothings been uncovered, so something exciting for future archaeologists.

While the Bedouins might not be able to live within the city the way they did before the tourists, they still make a living off the city as tourist guides and souvenir sellers.

Now if you’re keen, you could do Petra in a day, but it’s not recommended. It’s about a three hour drive from Amman and two from the Aqaba, the port at the Red Sea. There are buses that do the route every day, but you can also do an organised tour or even take a taxi.

But once you’re in the city, the best way to get around is on your own two feet. There’s plenty to see and even a series of good hikes. And staying overnight means that you can catch ‘Petra by Night’. It’s a pretty popular night tour that came about after an increase in requests to see the city in the glow of the moon.

There’s no right or wrong time to visit Petra, it’s open year round and each season has its perks. Spring and autumn are the most temperate with some pretty good light for all those instagrammers; Summer can be nice, but can get hot as the desert is wont to do; and winter is obviously the coldest, with the odd bit of water falling from the sky. But if you’re really after for a good pic, then sunrise or sunset is when you want to be there. Much like the Taj Mahal, you’ll see Petra in the wonder of changing colours.

So when you get around to visiting Petra have a good look, take your time and just enjoy every single bit of the history of the place.

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