Petra

Petra is an ancient city in southern Jordan, set in a basin of rose-coloured sandstone mountains on the eastern side of the Arabah valley between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. Known to its own people as Raqmu, it was the capital of the Nabataeans, an Arab people who grew rich on the caravan trade in incense and other goods and carved tombs and temples with elaborate Hellenistic facades directly into the cliffs. Their mastery of water, through dams, cisterns and channels, made a desert city possible.

People were farming at Beidha, just north of Petra, by about 7000 BCE. In the Iron Age the area belonged to the Edomites, who built a settlement on top of the mountain of Umm el-Biyara no earlier than the seventh century BCE. The Nabataeans, a northern Arabian tribe of herders, settled there in the fourth century BCE. When the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus described the campaign that Antigonus, one of Alexander's successors, sent against them in 312 BCE, they were still nomads sheltering on a rock refuge, and there seems to have been no town yet.

By the second century BCE Petra had become the capital of the Nabataean Kingdom. It controlled routes running to Gaza on the Mediterranean, north to Bosra and Damascus, south to the Red Sea and east across the desert to the Persian Gulf. The Nabataeans worshipped Arab deities such as Dushara, al-Uzza, Allat and Manat, and deified some of their kings. The city reached its height in the first century CE, when its population may have reached around 20,000. The famous Treasury (al-Khazneh), 37 metres tall and possibly the tomb of King Aretas IV, dates from this time, as does the Temple of the Winged Lions; the even larger Monastery (ad-Deir), about 45 metres high, was carved in the first century BCE.

In 106 CE the kingdom was annexed by the Roman Empire as the province of Arabia Petraea. Petra kept prospering for a time: Trajan ran a new road through it to the Red Sea between 111 and 114, and Hadrian visited in 130 and gave it the title of metropolis. Later it was made a Roman colony. But Palmyra drew caravan trade away, and growing sea trade further weakened it. An earthquake in 363 brought down many buildings and wrecked the water system. Under the Byzantine Empire Petra became the seat of a bishop and capital of the province of Palaestina III; the Urn Tomb was turned into a church in the fifth century, and some 140 papyri found in a Byzantine church show the town was still active in the sixth. The last written mention dates from the early seventh century.

Petra does not appear in accounts of the Muslim conquest of the region in 629–632 or in early Islamic records, and it dwindled to a place used by a few nomads. After the First Crusade, King Baldwin I of the Kingdom of Jerusalem took the area, and the Crusaders built castles at al-Wu'ayra and on el-Habis, holding them until 1189. Later the Mamluk sultan Baibars visited the ruins towards the end of the thirteenth century. Local tradition linked the valley to Moses, giving it the name Wadi Musa, and placed the tomb of his brother Aaron on a nearby peak.

The Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, disguised as a local pilgrim, became the first European to describe Petra, in 1812. Artists including David Roberts made it famous, and serious archaeological work began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1985 the Jordanian government moved the Bedul Bedouin, who had lived in the caves, to a new village at Umm Sayhoun, and in the same year UNESCO made Petra a World Heritage site. Today it is managed by the Petra Archaeological Park. Threats include flash floods, salt weathering, collapsing structures, poor restoration and fast-growing tourism, which brought about 1.2 million visitors in 2019; the welfare of animals used to carry tourists has also drawn criticism.