Petra

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The way into Petra runs for the better part of a kilometer through near-darkness. The path is the Siq, a fault-split cleft in the sandstone that runs more than a thousand meters and narrows in places to three or four meters across, the cliffs leaning so close overhead that the sky becomes a ribbon. The stone is banded rose and ochre and violet, scored with the channels and the embedded clay pipes of an ancient aqueduct. Then the cleft turns, the walls part, and framed in the last slot of rock stands a building forty meters high — columns, pediment, a tholos crowned with an urn — carved not built, cut directly back into the cliff face as though a Greek temple had been pressed into the mountain and the mountain had kept the impression. The Bedouin who guarded the valley called it al-Khazneh, the Treasury, after a legend that a pharaoh had hidden gold in the stone urn at its summit; their rifles chipped the urn over generations, hunting for it. There was never any gold. The building is a tomb.

A kingdom in the rock

The people who made Petra called it Raqmu. They were the Nabataeans, an Arab people whose earliest securely datable appearance in the historical record is hostile and external: in 312 BCE, the successor-general Antigonus the One-Eyed sent two expeditions against them, and the eyewitness historian Hieronymus of Cardia — excerpted centuries later by Diodorus Siculus — described what the Greeks found. The Nabataeans then built no houses, sowed no grain, planted no fruit tree, and drank no wine; they were desert nomads of perhaps ten thousand fighting men who lived by the caravan trade and survived by knowing where water hid. In a waterless country, Diodorus reports, they dug cisterns in the rock, sealed them, and concealed the openings with marks only they could read, so that pursuers died of thirst in a land the Nabataeans crossed at ease. The detail is more than color. The mastery of hidden water is the seed of everything Petra became.

For the Nabataean territory was not random. It sat astride the overland incense road — the route by which frankincense and myrrh, the resin tears burned in temples from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia, traveled north out of southern Arabia. Caravans carried the aromatics from the kingdoms of what the Romans called Arabia Felix up the western edge of the peninsula to Petra, and from Petra westward to Gaza and the sea. Whoever held Petra taxed the trade and watered the camels. Over the third and second centuries BCE the nomads who had drunk no wine became the rulers of a city, and by the time the kingdom is fully visible in the sources it has kings: Aretas I, attested around 168 BCE; Aretas III Philhellene, who struck coins in the Greek manner and briefly held Damascus; and above all Aretas IV Philopatris, “lover of his people” (reigned c. 9 BCE – 40 CE), under whom Petra reached its monumental height. The wealth that the caravans brought was poured, almost literally, into the cliffs.

Al-Khazneh, the “Treasury,” a rock-cut tomb facade roughly forty meters high, framed by the last bend of the Siq. — Photo Graham Racher, edit MrPanyGoff, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How the nomads became the masters of this trade is not fully recorded, but the shape of it is clear. The earlier holders of the incense road had been other peoples — the Edomites who once occupied this same basin, the South Arabian kingdoms at the road’s far end. The Nabataeans seem to have moved up out of the Arabian desert, taken control of the watering points and the passes that the caravans could not avoid, and made themselves indispensable to a commerce that could not function without guides who knew where the wells were. From middlemen they became sovereigns; from a tax on passing goods grew a treasury, and from the treasury a city. The classical authors who describe them — Diodorus, and later the geographer Strabo, who knew a Nabataean envoy at Rome — register a people growing visibly richer and more settled across the Hellenistic centuries, exchanging tents for houses, abstinence for the imported luxuries the caravans carried, until the desert prohibition on building had been inverted into the most ambitious building program of the ancient Near East.

This was a Hellenized Arab kingdom, and Petra shows it in stone. Its facades borrow the vocabulary of the Greek world that the conquests of Alexander had spread across the Near East — columns, capitals, pediments, the round tholos — the same Hellenistic koine that shaped the art of Alexandria and the cities of Syria. But the Nabataean carvers did not copy. They quoted. The Khazneh’s facade splits its own pediment to let the central tholos rise through the gap, a “broken pediment” that no classical Greek architect would have built; its crowstep gables and its great square betyl-niches come from a Semitic and Mesopotamian world older than the columns. Egyptian elements appear too — the cavetto cornice, the lotus. The result is not a hybrid that fails to choose. It is a deliberate Nabataean idiom that takes the prestige forms of three civilizations and arranges them into something only Petra ever made.

The high places and the god in the stone

Petra is a necropolis as much as a city. More than six hundred tombs honeycomb its cliffs, their facades ranging from a single carved doorway to the towered, multi-storied “royal tombs” along the eastern wall. The Khazneh, most likely the mausoleum of Aretas IV, and the even larger al-Deir — the “Monastery,” nearly fifty meters wide, cut high in the mountains above the city and probably a temple or a monument to the deified king Obodas — are the summits of an art that treated death as the occasion for the kingdom’s grandest building. The living city of houses and markets, built rather than carved, has largely washed away; the tombs, cut into the rock itself, remain.

Ad-Deir, the largest of Petra’s rock-cut monuments, some forty-five meters tall, reached by a long stair above the city. — Photo Gary Jones, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Above the tombs, on the flattened summits of the ridges, are the high places. The greatest, al-Madhbah on the crest of Jabal al-Madbah, is reached by a long rock-cut stairway; at the top, the living stone has been dressed into a level court with a raised altar, a basin, and channels cut to carry liquid away — the apparatus of sacrifice, set as near the sky as the mountain allowed. The Nabataeans worshipped on heights, in the open, before their god.

That god was Dushara — Dhu al-Shara, “He of the Shara,” the mountains east of Petra — and the way he was shown is the key to Nabataean religion. He was not given a human face. In the older and deeper stratum of the cult he was present as a betyl: from the Semitic bayt-il, “house of god,” a block or pillar of stone, often a plain rectangle set upright in a niche, sometimes marked with the barest schematic eyes and nose and never a mouth. The divine did not need a portrait. It was in the stone, or rather the dressed stone was the place where it could be met — an aniconic theology in which the holiest image was the one that refused to be an image. Beside Dushara stood the goddesses: al-Uzza, “the Mighty,” identified by the Nabataeans’ neighbors with Venus the morning star and with Aphrodite and Isis; Allat; and Manat, the goddess of fate and apportionment, called as a curse-witness in the tomb inscriptions to guard the dead against the violation of their graves. Here, frame to frame, lies the deep matter of the cult: a god who was a stone, worshipped on a mountaintop, in a city whose dead were sealed behind facades that imitated the temples of peoples who carved their gods as men. The Nabataeans took the column and the pediment and left the holy of holies empty but for a block. Only after Rome came did anthropomorphic images of the gods begin to appear in any number — the human face arriving with the empire, not before it.

Some of the sanctuaries seem to have watched the sky as well. Studies of the orientation of Petra’s monuments argue that certain of the great cut spaces were aligned to the sun: that at the winter solstice the light falls through the upper part of al-Deir to strike the betyl of its inner niche, and that the Urn Tomb and other monuments key to solstice and equinox — readings consistent with a Dushara bound to the sun and an al-Uzza bound to Venus. The summits, on this account, were not only altars but instruments, the calendar of the cult cut into the rock alongside its dead.

Water, the hidden art

A city of perhaps twenty thousand people stood in a basin that receives only a few inches of rain a year, in a desert where the rain, when it comes, comes as flash flood roaring down the wadis. Petra existed because the Nabataeans had turned the desert nomad’s knowledge of hidden water into civil engineering at a scale the ancient world rarely matched. The same Siq that admits the visitor is a watercourse; a flash flood funneling down it would scour the city’s entrance and drown the crowds. So the engineers built a dam across the mouth of the Siq and cut a tunnel through solid rock to divert the floodwater into an adjacent wadi, taking the danger and channeling it away. Along the Siq’s walls they ran paired conduits — an open channel on one side, a pipeline of jointed terracotta pipe on the other — and across the whole basin they laid a redundant network of pipelines, reservoirs, and several hundred cisterns. The terracotta pipes were laid to a calculated gradient that held the flow just short of the turbulence that erodes and silts a line, so that a maximum of water arrived with a minimum of damage. The Nabataeans never built a Roman aqueduct on arches striding over a valley. Their hydraulic genius was the opposite: to catch every drop the rare storm gave, hide it, move it without losing it, and let the desert keep its secret. The rose-red monuments are what the world remembers; the waterworks are why the monuments had a city around them.

The Siq, more than a kilometer of fault-cleft sandstone; the rock-cut channel for the city’s water runs along the wall at right. — Photo Dick Osseman, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Rome, ruin, and a goat for Aaron

The kingdom’s independence ended without a recorded battle. In 106 CE, in the reign of Trajan and under the governor of Syria Aulus Cornelius Palma Frontonianus, the Nabataean realm was absorbed into the Roman Empire as the province of Arabia Petraea. Petra kept its standing — it was granted the title of metropolis and adorned with a colonnaded street and other Roman building — but the center of gravity shifted; the provincial capital settled at Bostra, and the incense trade that had made Petra rich was draining away as Rome’s merchants learned to run the monsoon-driven sea route up the Red Sea and around Arabia, leaving the overland caravans, and the city that taxed them, slowly behind. Petra became a fine provincial town rather than the hinge of a continent’s commerce.

Then the ground moved. A great earthquake on 19 May 363 CE wrecked many of the city’s buildings and crippled the water system on which everything depended; later shocks compounded the loss. Christianity came — one of the royal tombs and the great hall of al-Deir were pressed into use by the new faith, and crosses were cut into the Monastery’s back wall, the mark that won it its Bedouin name. A bishopric is recorded. But the city was contracting. By the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century Petra had dwindled to a village among ruins, and over the following centuries the carved valley passed out of the wider world’s knowledge, kept only by the Bedouin who lived among the tombs and watered their flocks at the ancient cisterns. The crusaders raised a fort nearby and then withdrew. For most of a millennium, to read about Petra one read the Romans; to see it, one had to be a herdsman in a remote corner of Ottoman Syria.

Its return to outside knowledge came by a small deception. In 1812 a Swiss traveler, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, exploring the region in Arab dress and under the name Sheikh Ibrahim, heard the local people speak of magnificent ruins hidden in the mountains near the tomb of the prophet Aaron — Jabal Harun, the peak above Petra that Muslim and Jewish tradition holds to be the burial place of Moses’ brother. Burckhardt could not announce a European’s interest in antiquities without arousing suspicion, so he told his guide he had vowed to sacrifice a goat at Aaron’s tomb, and on that pretext was led down through the Siq. He glimpsed the Khazneh and the facades, recognized that he had found the lost Nabataean capital known from the classical authors, and wrote it down. He could not linger or sketch; a foreigner studying the ruins too closely risked his life. But his account reached Europe, and Petra reentered the map of the known world.

The detail of the goat is not incidental. Petra’s afterlife in the centuries of its obscurity was bound up with the prophet Aaron, whose traditional tomb crowns the highest peak above the valley and gave the whole site a sanctity that long outlived the Nabataean gods; pilgrims climbed Jabal Harun when no one remembered Dushara. It was that living holiness, attached to a figure shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, that gave Burckhardt his cover story and that had, in a sense, kept the place from being wholly forgotten. The Treasury and the tombs were a marvel the local people lived among without claiming; the mountain of Aaron was a shrine they still visited. The European rediscoverer reached the dead kingdom by way of the one sacred thing in the valley that was still alive.

What followed was a long age of drawing, surveying, photographing, and at last excavating; the painter David Roberts’s lithographs of the 1830s fixed the rose-red facades in the European imagination, and the science of the site has continued ever since, much of Petra still unexcavated beneath the sand. On 6 December 1985 the carved valley was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Bedouin who had guarded the tombs were resettled from the caves they had lived in, and the necropolis of a vanished caravan kingdom became one of the most visited places on earth — the empty stone urn at the summit of the Treasury still pocked with the bullet holes of treasure-hunters who shot at a legend the rock had never held.

The Nabataeans wrote their language in a cursive Aramaic script that, over the centuries after their kingdom fell, would develop into the alphabet in which the Arabic language is still written today — so that the letters of a fifth of the world’s people descend in part from the dedications a caravan kingdom carved beside its tombs. The kingdom drank no wine and built no houses, and then carved a city out of a mountain and hid a desert’s water in the rock. Both are true, and both are Petra. To grasp the place is to hold the trader’s pragmatism and the worshipper’s blank holy stone in a single thought: the same people who could read a cistern’s hidden mark in a cliff could stand on a summit before a dressed block and call it the house of god.

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