Petra

A city carved from a canyon

Petra sits in a narrow valley in southern Jordan, accessible only through the Siq — a 1.2-kilometre slot canyon between sheer rose-pink sandstone walls 80 metres high and at points only three metres apart.

The Nabataeans, an Arab people who came to control the incense trade between southern Arabia and the Mediterranean, established their capital here around the fourth century BC. By the first century AD, when Al-Khazneh was carved, Petra had a population of perhaps twenty thousand and controlled a trading network that extended from Yemen to Damascus.

The "Treasury" is not a treasury

The 40-metre Al-Khazneh facade at the end of the Siq is the most photographed building in Jordan. Its purpose has been argued for a century.

The name "Khazneh" (treasury) comes from a much later Bedouin legend that the Pharaoh of the Exodus had hidden his treasure in the urn carved at the top of the facade. Bedouin hunters tried for centuries to shoot it open, and the urn is still pockmarked with bullet holes.

The modern consensus is that Al-Khazneh is a royal tomb. Almost certainly that of King Aretas IV (reigned 9 BC to AD 40), the Nabataean king who built most of monumental Petra and who appears in the New Testament (2 Corinthians 11:32) as the king whose deputy tried to arrest the apostle Paul in Damascus.

Built by water, lost by water

The Nabataeans were master hydraulic engineers. They controlled the desert by controlling its water.

Cisterns hewn into the canyon walls, dams across the wadis, terraced overflow channels along the Siq that stored every drop of seasonal flash-flood water. Petra supported its twenty thousand inhabitants on rainfall that today would not sustain two thousand.

The end of the city came not from conquest but from earthquake. A major event in AD 363 collapsed the water system. A second in AD 551 finished the destruction. By the time the Byzantine Christian empire withdrew from the region in the seventh century, Petra had been almost entirely abandoned.

A single careful paragraph

Western knowledge of Petra was effectively lost after the Crusades. Bedouin tribes occupied the canyon and discouraged outsiders.

In August 1812, a 27-year-old Swiss explorer named Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, travelling in Arab disguise on his way to Mecca, persuaded a Bedouin guide to lead him to the "ruined city in the mountains" rumoured among Arab tribes.

Burckhardt rode through the Siq, saw Al-Khazneh, wrote a single careful paragraph of description in his diary, and continued on to Mecca. He died of dysentery five years later without ever returning. His paragraph reached Europe through his published diaries in 1822 and opened the next two centuries of European archaeology in Petra.