What is Petra?

 

We learned that Petra was the ancient capital of the Nabateans, a group of people who strangely seemed to prefer their city built amidst giant mountains of bare rock.  They were not militaristic, but became rich by being a part of trade routes linking the southern Arabian peninsula (and east Africa) with the Mediterranean world.  Most of the signs around Petra dated the buildings imprecisely between 200 BC and 200 AD. 

Although the majority is still unexcavated, the guidebooks are clear that there were very, very few houses in Petra- everyone lived in tents, and they only built temples and (mostly) tombs.  Almost everything we saw was a tomb, which consisted of a façade carved into the face of a mountain and a square, plain room behind. 

I was surprised at how classical everything looked.  The Nabateans were independent until conquered by the Romans in the second century AD, but architecturally, they seemed pretty Hellenized to me.  They even had their own kind of capital, which I will make sure is added to my mental list:

(Nabatean)

The mountains were all very soft sandstone, and the people dug into them to make tombs everywhere.  Many of the mountains looked as though they were cakes with frosting dripping out from between every layer, an effect I think is caused by water rearranging the little bits of sand which make up the mountain.

One of the places we hiked was the “High Place of Sacrifice,” a mountain in roughly the center of Petra with an altar on the top (below right).   We were able to see the cisterns and gutters that they used to catch rainwater, along with considerably smaller ones for the blood of the sacrifices. 

Petra remained inhabited as a Roman, then Byzantine city long after the Nabateans, and Bedouin have been living there since.  A guide told us that they kicked all the locals out when they started to get tourists in the 1970’s… but it was clear that there were still plenty of people living there, almost completely in old tombs.  The park was arranged so that most of the tourists were funneled down the main path, but when we went elsewhere we saw laundry, and tombs turned into stables.  It was strange, walking out with the rest of the tourists the first day and seeing school-age kids walking in.