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Mysterious marvels in Jordan's ancient city of Petra
By BETSY HIEL
TOLEDO BLADE
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Near dusk, she sings an Arabic folk song. Her soulful chants reverberate off the rose-colored sandstone face as tourists huff and puff up the ancient stairs to El-Deir. Called the Monastery, for its use during the Byzantine Christian period, this elaborate structure 145 feet high and 160 feet wide glows in a golden shadow cast by the setting sun.
Opposite the Monastery, I sit looking 3,000 feet below to the desert hills of Wadi Araba that stretch from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba. A local bedouin guide, Khalil El-Bodoul, wearing a traditional long white robe and red-and-white checked headdress, joins the handful of tourists who silently take in the sunset.
Suddenly the loud ring of a cell phone breaks the tranquility. El-Bodoul grins and reaches under his robe for the ubiquitous late-20th-century device to answer the call, as tourists laugh at the situation.
"Modernity meets antiquity," one visitor says.
The city of Petra in the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan is one of the marvels of the ancient world. It's arguably the premier tourist site in the Middle East. Petra also is one of the least-known jewels in a region packed with archaeological and religious treasures.
Since the 1994 peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, the number of tourists visiting Petra has surged. The increased attention has also led to the creation of numerous excavations delving into Petra's ancient history. On my third visit here in a dozen years, this vestige of ages long passed still captivates the imagination.
The rose-red city, so-called by the 19th-century British cleric Dean Burgen in his evocative poem, "Petra," is a two- to three-hour drive from Jordan's modern-day capital, Amman. Petra was founded by a nomadic Arab tribe known as the Nabataeans, who settled on the edges of the mountainous desert of Wadi Araba several centuries before Christ's birth.
Nestled in the mountains, the city hand-carved by the Nabataeans offered natural protection against rogue invaders. Petra's location at the crossroads of ancient trade routes allowed the city -- with a population of anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 -- to flourish as a commercial center.
Frankincense and incense from the Arabian peninsula and spices such as pepper from India were transported by camel caravans through Petra's trading post to the coastal emporium in Gaza or farther north to the bazaars in Damascus and Aleppo, and on to Antioch.
The Nabataeans, pagans who had brought their religion, culture and engineering genius from what is today's Arabian peninsula, spoke a distinctive Semitic language that may form the base for modern-day Arabic.
They held off outside conquests for hundreds of years, until Roman legions of the Emperor Trajan finally overcame both geological and social military barriers to occupy the city in 106 A.D.
Then for a few centuries more, Petra became a Roman town complete with baths and colonnaded streets.
The rise of an alternate trade route in Palmyra, Syria, led to Petra's decline as a focal point for commerce by the fourth century A.D.
Somewhere in the recent past, bedouins took up residence in the cavelike ruins, until the Jordanian government forcibly relocated them to a village nearby.
Little was known about its history from that point, until recent archaeological finds, including a Byzantine church complete with an archive of papyrus scrolls, opened a new page on Petra's life.
These latest findings show that the city continued to survive into the fifth and sixth centuries.
But by the seventh century A.D., and the advent of Islam, a veil inexplicably fell over Petra, only to be partially raised in the 12th century by Crusaders who built a fortress here.
Petra, which means "rock" in Greek, was rediscovered in 1812 by the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Hearing rumors of fantastic ruins from the bedouins, Burckhardt disguised himself as a Muslim sheik and ventured into Petra with a suspicious local guide who, along with others, wanted to keep the ruins' location hidden.
Burckhardt nonetheless saw parts of the city and spread the news of what he discovered.
The entryway to the city center is known as the Siq (pronounced seek). This winding narrow cleft in the mountain forms a dusty, milelong hike to the most impressive of sites, the El-Khazneh (treasury).
The path narrows to 20 feet in width at times and the walls are several hundred feet tall. Waves of color swirling through the rock face in the Siq, as in all of Petra, range from pale gold and white to shades of pinks and rich reds to chocolate brown.
Petra's position as a trading post depended on the availability of water, and Nabataean traders were expert hydraulic engineers.
"The Nabataeans saved every last drop of water," says Erika Schluntz, assistant director of Brown University's Great Temple Excavation in Petra.
Catchment basins for water runoff, underground channels, as well as cisterns to house water are found all over the site, and canals carrying water from nearby springs in terra-cotta pipes are carved into the sides of the Siq.
In Roman times, the great gorge's path was paved with stone. Some parts recently uncovered by excavations remain visible today. Carved indentations in the walls served as altars to the Nabataean's chief deity, Dushara.
Also along the way are four blocks of carved stones, some rising 20 feet high, called blocks (djinn in Arabic means "spirits").
"They are probably abstract representations of Dushara or other Nabataean deities. Surely they are religious in nature," Schluntz says.
Just when it seems as if the Siq will never end, you catch a glimpse of the most amazing site of Petra through an opening as wide as two horsemen abreast. The salmon-colored edifice stands 120 feet high, a stunning example of Hellenistic architecture with graceful Corinthian columns.
Although used as a royal tomb, the structure is called the Treasury. Legend has it that the 10-foot-high middle urn on the second level contains treasures of Egyptian pharaohs, says Schluntz. It is pockmarked from attempts to break open the solid stone urn with gunfire.
Of course, Indiana Jones fans will remember the famous facade from final scenes in the film "Indiana Jones and the Final Crusade." Burckhardt described his view of the Treasury as such:
"On the side of the perpendicular rock directly opposite to the issue of the main valley, an excavated mausoleum came in view, the situation and beauty of which are calculated to make an extraordinary impression upon the traveler."
That impression is seconded by the oohs and ahhs of today's visitors. The path continues to the right with smaller tombs studding the sandstone walls. Many of these feature the Nabataean characteristic of a crow-step decoration. What looks like a staircase is carved into the second floor of the facade. A little farther is the 8,000-seat amphitheater hewn from multicolored stone.
A stroll down the stone-paved, colonnaded main street of Roman Petra past ancient debris of what was once a marketplace leads to the courtyard of the Temple of Dushara. The only free-standing building in Petra, it is composed of large yellow sandstone blocks and is popularly known as the Qasr el-Bint Firaun (the castle of Pharaoh's daughter).
It is in this area that there was a garden, perhaps a swimming pool, and an entertainment hall for lavish banquets held by the Nabataean king. The classical writer Strabo, who received firsthand information from Athenodorus, the tutor to Augustus, described some of the activities here in the first century B.C.
"They form companies of 13 men each and two musicians to each company. The king in his great house holds many companies."
Settled today in front of the temple are the local bedouins some say may be descendants of the Nabataeans. They offer camel rides for tourists who squeal with surprise as the desert beasts struggle to their feet, jolting the rider forward and then backward.
Across the way is a recently excavated fifth-century Byzantine church, which helps archaeologists and historians learn more about the Byzantine chapter of Petra and the region.
"This is a very unique find, probably the best preserved church in southern Jordan," says Zbigniew Fiema, field director of the Petra Church Project. "It is magnificently decorated, telling us something of the economic standing of the people of the time."
The church is a basilica, divided into a nave and two side aisles with three inscribed semicircular recesses and three entrances on its western wall. The church complex includes a stone-paved courtyard and a baptistry. The baptismal font is sunk in a large square platform made of stones.
"This baptistry . . . certainly is one of the best preserved early-Christian baptistries in the Near East," says Fiema, now a fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington, D.C.
Perhaps the most impressive sight in the church is the preserved mosaic floors found on both aisles. Their style dates the floor patterns to the late fifth and early sixth centuries, Fiema says.
Three parallel rows of colorful disk-shaped mosaics depict native and exotic animals such as fish, birds and lions. The center mosaic panels represent human personifications of the Four Seasons, the Ocean, Earth and Wisdom.
Papyrus scrolls found in the church were carbonized in a fire and are the largest grouping of ancient texts ever found in Jordan. The texts that date to the sixth century are being deciphered by a joint project of the University of Michigan and the Finnish Academy.
"There are thousands of fragments. It's like a big jigsaw puzzle," says Traianos Gagos, a Michigan classical-studies professor. Some of the legible script shows aspects of daily life such as contractual agreements dealing with loans, land sales, inheritance and taxes.
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