Just the name Petra alone evokes magic, like Xanadu, Shangri-La, or Timbuktu. It's the boutonniere of the Middle East, a shimmering, illusory place, carved out of salmon-colored mountains.
~Bruce Feiler, Walking the Bible
It's hard to talk about Petra, Jordan's most visited tourist attraction, without indulging in an over-abundance of adjectives and figurative language. It is, quite simply, indescribable, but it is so compelling that we visitors all try to convey our awe anyway.
It starts out like most tourist spots in the area, with the customary gauntlet of tourist shops, but even here the mysterious calm of the place permeates, and no shopkeepers jump out of the recesses to hawk their wares.
It's too bad that our time was so limited. I would have enjoyed a little shopping without someone in my face the whole time.
Our hike into the canyon began with interesting but not unusual scenery that included a shepherd and his grazing sheep:
We could see gaping maws carved into the rock, orifices evoking silent screams, but then we noticed that some of them were rimmed by intricate carving, as the one in the center of the photo below:
Petra was created and inhabited by the Nabateans, a wandering Arabic tribe, beginning as early as the 5th century BC. They became the ancient equivalent of our modern-day millionaires by controlling the transport of frankincense and myrrh (yep, same stuff the wisemen had--dried up sap used in perfumes and incense) from Southern Arabia through "their" desert to Gaza via what is now called the Incense Road. Some scholars say that in the 1st century, the Nabateans were the richest race on earth. It's no wonder that Petra, their capital city, is so ostentatious.
In
Walking the Bible, Feiler describes the transition the Nabateans made from nomads to landowners:
First the tribe of shepherds became traders, then they began to see how much money they could make trading, then they began to travel for months at a time across the desert, then they realized the need to protect their trade routes, then they decided they needed a central power to organize their riches. "Sure enough, in a few years the Nabateans had a king," [Feiler's guide Avner] said, "and suddenly a society that was built around equal tribes, with people helping one another, now became a stratified society, with nobles, merchants, administrators, and so on. It became like an urban society. That is the same change that the Israelites went through when they came to the Holy Land."
The first structure we came upon, if you can call it a structure because it is not
built but rather
carved into the rocky hillside, was the 1st century Obelisk Tomb and Bab el-Siq Triclinium:
The Obelisk Tomb on the upper level consists of four elongated pyramids and a cavern where five bodies were once placed for burial. (They are gone now.) What makes the structure especially interesting is the Triclinium, or dining room, on the lower level. Annual celebrations to remember the dead were held in the large, bench-lined room, a custom borrowed from the Romans. This structure dates to 25-70 AD, or about the time of the crucifixion of Christ.
The story is that in a fit of post-war patriotism, Kansas City residents raised $2 million for a war memorial in less than two weeks, an astonishing sum in those days. When construction was completed in 1926, the museum was dedicated by President Calvin Coolidge. All five Allied Forces generals attended the dedication.
