Petra

Petra is the ruin of an ancient city in southern Jordan, hidden in a basin surrounded by jagged sandstone mountains. Its name is Greek and simply means “rock”; its ancient name was Raqmu. The Greek geographer Strabo, writing around the turn of the era, described it as the metropolis of the Nabataeans, a site enclosed by rock with abundant springs inside. The modern town of Wadi Musa, “the Valley of Moses”, lies just outside the main entrance.

What makes Petra famous is the way its builders used the landscape. Instead of putting up buildings from blocks, they often carved them directly into the cliffs. Hundreds of rock-cut façades line the valley walls: tombs, halls for ritual meals, shrines and houses. Down on the valley floor there were also free-standing buildings of cut stone, including temples, a colonnaded street, markets and baths, most of which are now collapsed.

Petra was the centre of the Nabataean kingdom, a state that grew rich at the crossroads of caravan routes linking South Arabia, India and even China with the Mediterranean world, and which at various times included lands in modern Jordan, Syria, northern Arabia, Sinai and the Negev. The Metropolitan Museum of Art estimates its population under Aretas IV at at least 25,000 — an estimate, not a surviving census figure.

Petra was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985. The protected property, which coincides with the Petra archaeological park, covers about 26,171 hectares (some 260 square kilometres) and contains much more than the famous monuments near the main path, from prehistoric villages to copper mines. The site authority estimates that only about 20 per cent of Petra has been explored archaeologically.

Petra is best understood as a journey. Visitors begin at Bab al-Siq, “the Gate of the Siq”, where the first large tombs and big stone blocks called djinn blocks stand beside the path. Then the path enters the Siq itself: a narrow, winding gorge just over a kilometre long, in places only a few metres wide, with walls towering far above. The Siq was not cut by people; it is a natural cleft formed when the mountain split apart. The Nabataeans paved it, cut water channels along both sides and carved niches for sacred stones (baetyls). Excavations in 1997 revealed, roughly halfway along, two large reliefs of drovers leading camels — among Petra’s earliest surviving sculptures and a reminder of what made the city rich.

At the end of the Siq the gorge opens suddenly onto al-Khazneh, “the Treasury”. The contrast between the dark, narrow passage and the glowing façade is almost theatrical; whether the effect was deliberately planned is an interpretation rather than an established fact. The Treasury is 39.5 m high. Its two storeys are covered with Corinthian columns, a broken pediment, a round kiosk-like structure called a tholos, and relief figures: horsemen usually identified as the twins Castor and Pollux below, dancing Amazons with axes above, and a female figure at the centre often identified with Isis or the goddess al-Uzza. Inside there are only plain, undecorated rooms.

Beyond the Treasury, the valley widens into the so-called Street of Façades, lined with tombs whose tops are decorated with rows of steps (the “crow-step” motif). Next comes the Theatre, whose seating was carved into the hillside, probably in the early 1st century AD; its builders cut away earlier tombs to make room for it, and a constructed stage wall was added later. Estimates of its capacity vary, and the site authority gives up to 6,000 spectators. On the eastern cliff opposite rise the Royal Tombs — the Urn Tomb, the Silk Tomb, the Corinthian Tomb and the Palace Tomb — a giant row of façades, some with bands of pink, yellow and white stone running through them like marbled silk.

The path then turns west along the Colonnaded Street, the city’s main avenue in its Roman form, past the Great Temple complex and a garden-and-pool complex, to Qasr al-Bint, Petra’s principal free-standing temple, built of masonry on a podium and about 23 m high. From there a path of some 800 rock-cut steps climbs into the mountains to ad-Deir, “the Monastery”, one of Petra’s largest façades, 48.3 m high and 46.77 m wide. Along the way and on nearby summits are ‘high places’: open-air sanctuaries where the Nabataeans performed sacrifices and rituals.

Reading Petra means noticing three things: walking through the site reveals changing views, most dramatically when the Siq opens onto the Treasury; tombs, temples and dining halls were mixed together, so the dead and the gods were part of urban life; and the architecture blends local traditions with Greek, Egyptian and Near Eastern ideas.

Petra’s rock is sandstone, which is soft enough to cut with iron tools but strong enough to hold its shape. Unfinished façades at Petra and at Hegra in Saudi Arabia indicate that carving generally proceeded from the top down: the stonecutters smoothed the cliff face, carved the highest details first and then worked downward, removing rock as they went. Exactly how they reached and worked the upper parts — for example from rock-cut ledges or with wooden scaffolding — is less certain.

This method means that mistakes were hard to fix. A wrongly cut capital could not simply be replaced. It also means that the columns on a façade support nothing: they are sculpture, not structure. Behind many grand façades lie simple rectangular rooms, sometimes with burial niches (loculi) cut into the walls.

The façades we see today are bare stone, but they did not always look this way. The Nabataeans protected the fragile sandstone of some monuments by covering the exteriors with layers of plaster and paint, and excavators found a villa on az-Zantur with polychrome trompe-l’oeil wall paintings of the early 1st century AD. Free-standing buildings such as Qasr al-Bint used dressed stone blocks; its façade columns were covered with stucco.

Nabataean craftsmen also developed their own plain version of the classical column capital, often called the Nabataean capital. At the Great Temple complex, excavators found imported limestone capitals decorated with elephant heads, a striking sign of how widely the Nabataeans borrowed and adapted exotic symbols of power.

Petra receives very little rain, and much of it falls in short, violent storms. The problem for its inhabitants was twofold: to store enough water for the dry months, and to protect the city from flash floods that could rush down the narrow valleys with enormous force. Already in 312 BC, according to Diodorus, the Nabataeans kept hidden underground reservoirs lined with stucco in the desert. At Petra they built a network of diversion dams, tunnels, terraces, channels, pipes and cisterns which, as UNESCO notes, allowed extensive settlement of an essentially arid area.

The most visible part of the system is in the Siq, where water channels run along both rock walls toward the city centre; Strabo noted that the site had abundant springs. At the entrance, the Nabataeans built a dam and cut a tunnel 88 m long through the rock to divert the floodwaters of the Wadi Musa away from the Siq into neighbouring valleys. When maintenance stopped, the dam decayed and floods again entered the Siq; the modern dam, built in 1964 over the ancient one after a deadly flash flood, follows the same logic.

Across the whole site, cisterns and reservoirs — some open basins, others roofed underground chambers — stored rainwater that ran off the bare rock, and terrace walls in the side valleys slowed runoff and allowed farming. In the city centre, Leigh-Ann Bedal identified in 1998 that an area long thought to be a marketplace was in fact a garden with a large pool and an island pavilion. Comparable gardens in the Hellenistic and Roman world were linked with royal complexes, and its excavators interpret it as a display of wealth, power and prestige in a desert city.

Water management explains both Petra’s rise and its vulnerability. When the channels were maintained, the city could support a large population and impressive public spaces. When earthquakes struck, as in AD 363, which toppled the colonnades of the main street, and when there was less money and labour for repairs, life in the city became harder. UNESCO warns that the Siq remains vulnerable to flash floods if the Nabataean flood-diversion system is not continually monitored, repaired and maintained.

The Nabataeans were an Arab people who appear in written history in the late 4th century BC. The Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, writing in the 1st century BC but drawing on an earlier source, describes them in the context of events in 312 BC. In his account they lived in the open desert, planted no grain, built no houses, and grew rich by bringing frankincense, myrrh and spices from southern Arabia down to the sea. That year Antigonus I, one of the generals who divided Alexander the Great’s empire, sent his officer Athenaeus with 4,000 foot soldiers and 600 horsemen to raid them at a “rock” where they had left their property, old men, women and children while the men attended a gathering. The raiders seized incense, myrrh and about 500 talents of silver, but the Nabataeans pursued them, killed all the foot soldiers in a night attack, and only about fifty horsemen escaped, most of them wounded. Whether this “rock” was Petra itself is debated: Robert Wenning, for example, dates the campaigns to 311 BC and identifies the rock with Khirbet es-Selaʿ, while noting that the name was later attached to the Nabataean centre at Raqmu.

Over the next two centuries the Nabataeans became settled, wealthy and organized as a kingdom, and Petra became the seat of the tribe and its kings, probably in the second half of the 2nd century BC; the oldest dated Nabataean inscription at Petra, from 96 BC, mentions Dushara. 2 Maccabees mentions an Arab ruler named Aretas around 169–168 BC, conventionally identified as Aretas I, the first Nabataean king known by name. According to Josephus, a king Obodas defeated the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus in an ambush in Gilead. Aretas III (r. 86–62 BC) briefly ruled Damascus, and Aretas IV (r. 9 BC–AD 40) had a long reign during which Petra was at its height. The last king, Rabbel II, died in 106.

Their wealth came from trade. Petra stood at the crossroads of caravan routes that brought frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia, and spices and other luxury goods from India, to Gaza on the Mediterranean, to Damascus and to Egypt. The Nabataeans supplied water, guides, security and markets along the way, and they collected tolls. Their kingdom included towns such as Bosra in the Hauran, Hegra (Mada’in Salih) in the Hijaz, and settlements in the Negev such as Avdat and Mamshit. Strabo reports that many Romans and other foreigners lived in Petra.

Nabataean society was multilingual. Nabataean inscriptions were commonly written in Aramaic, the international language of the Near East, and contain many Arabic loanwords. This was long taken to mean that Aramaic was only written while Arabic was spoken, but recent linguistic research argues that both Arabic and Aramaic were in spoken use in the Nabataean kingdom. The Nabataean Aramaic script developed a distinctive cursive form, from which the Arabic script is generally thought to have developed. According to Strabo, the king governed with the help of an administrator called “brother”, and the city was admired for being well governed.

Relations with Rome were long and complex. Roman legions under Pompey halted the kingdom’s northward expansion in 64 BC. In 62 BC the Roman commander Marcus Aemilius Scaurus led an expedition against Petra and burned the country around it; according to Josephus, Aretas III ended the war by paying him 300 talents. From then on the kingdom was a client state under Roman influence, often entangled in the politics of neighbouring Judaea.

The chief Nabataean god was Dushara (often written Dushares in Greek), whose name is usually understood as “the one of the Shara”, the mountain range around Petra. He enjoyed special royal patronage. Female deities were also important, especially al-Uzza, often linked with the Greek Aphrodite or the Egyptian Isis, and Allat. The Nabataeans often represented their gods by plain standing stones or blocks, sometimes with only simple eyes or none at all. These stones, called baetyls, can still be seen in niches along the Siq and elsewhere. Human-shaped images of gods were also made, and the two forms existed side by side; Robert Wenning notes that the dating of the baetyls at Petra is itself uncertain.

Worship took place in many settings: open-air high places on mountain tops, such as those on Jebel Madbah and al-Habis, with altars and basins; niches and shrines along roads; and large temples in the city centre, such as Qasr al-Bint, Petra’s principal temple, where only priests entered the sanctuary while worshippers gathered in the open courtyard for rituals such as sacrifices. Qasr al-Bint is often thought to have been dedicated to Dushara, but no dedicatory inscription found nearby can be definitively connected to the temple, and its chronology is contested; the site authority dates it to the first half of the 1st century AD.

Death was also a central part of religious life. Most of Petra’s rock-cut façades are tombs, and many tomb complexes included courtyards, cisterns and dining rooms (triclinia or biclinia) with benches cut into the rock. Families and associations seem to have gathered there for ritual meals in honour of the dead and the gods. Ad-Deir, despite its later name, was probably not a tomb: its interior has benches and an altar, and it probably served as a meeting hall for religious associations. The site authority links it with the cult of the deified king Obodas, citing an inscription found nearby. A god called Obodas was indeed worshipped — a bronze object from Wadi Musa of the reign of Rabbel II is dedicated to “Obodas the god” — but the inscriptions themselves do not show which, if any, Nabataean king this god was.

In AD 106, after the death of King Rabbel II, the Nabataean kingdom was incorporated into the Roman Empire under the emperor Trajan. Cassius Dio records only that Palma, the governor of Syria, “subdued the part of Arabia around Petra and made it subject to the Romans”; whether there was fighting is uncertain. The new province of Arabia, often called Arabia Petraea, had Bosra as its capital, and the Via Nova Traiana was built from Bosra in the north to the port of Aila (Aqaba) in the south.

Petra did not collapse under Rome. It received the title “metropolis of Arabia”, and after the emperor Hadrian’s visit around 130 it was named Hadriane Petra. The Romans rebuilt the main street as a colonnaded avenue in the 2nd century and added monuments such as the Tomb of Sextius Florentinus. But Bosra became the main seat of provincial government, and over time trade routes changed.

A major earthquake in 363 destroyed many buildings, toppling the colonnades and shops of the main street. Yet the city lived on. Under Byzantine rule Petra was the seat of a bishop: an inscription records that the hall of the Urn Tomb was converted into a church by Bishop Jason in 446/447. In the early 1990s the American Center of Oriental Research excavated a Byzantine church with fine floor mosaics, now called the Petra Church, and in December 1993 a side room revealed papyrus scrolls carbonized in the fire that destroyed the church early in the 7th century. Some 140 scrolls have been identified. Written in Greek in the 6th century, the Petra papyri belong to the archive of the family of Theodoros son of Obodianos, a deacon and later archdeacon, and deal with dowries, divisions of estates, property boundaries and loans. They show that Petra was still an active town in the 500s, where laws issued by Justinian in Constantinople took effect almost within the year.

After the Muslim Arabs arrived in the 630s, Petra appears only rarely in written sources, and by the middle of the 7th century the city centre seems to have been largely deserted, although surveys have found Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk and Ottoman villages and buildings in the surrounding region. In the 12th century the Crusaders held fortresses at al-Wuʿayra near Wadi Musa and on the summit of al-Habis inside Petra. Al-Wuʿayra fell to Saladin’s forces in 1188; only minor Ayyubid modifications and additions are attested there. Petra was never forgotten locally: Bedouin lived among the monuments and knew them well, although European scholars had no first-hand knowledge of the site until the early 19th century.

Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784–1817), born in Lausanne, was a traveller in the service of the African Association in London, which hoped he would eventually cross the Sahara. He studied Arabic and Islam in Syria and travelled under the name Sheikh Ibrahim. In August 1812, travelling from Syria towards Egypt, he wanted to see the ruins said to lie in the Wadi Musa, but leaving his route out of mere curiosity would have looked suspicious. So, as he wrote, he “pretended to have made a vow to slaughter a goat in honour of Haroun (Aaron)”, whose tomb stands on a nearby mountain, and on 22 August his guide led him through the valley. He saw the Treasury, which the local people called Kasr Faraoun, “Pharaoh’s castle”, and other monuments, but could not linger or take notes openly. His account was published after his death in Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1822).

Burckhardt opened the way for others. In 1818 William John Bankes and his companions spent time at Petra, making the first drawings of some of the monuments, plans with detailed measurements and copies of inscriptions; Bankes noted that an inscription in the Urn Tomb “proves the establishment of Christianity at Petra”. Léon de Laborde and Louis-Maurice-Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds followed in 1828, and the Scottish painter David Roberts visited in 1839; his lithographs made Petra’s rose-red cliffs famous in Europe. According to the site authority, more than twenty films feature scenes filmed in Petra, among them Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), which made the Treasury one of the most recognizable ancient façades in the world.

Scientific archaeology began slowly. The first formal excavation at Petra was led by the British archaeologists Agnes Conway and George Horsfield, who began digging there in 1929; Horsfield was then chief inspector of antiquities in Transjordan. Since then the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and many foreign teams have taken up the work: the site authority lists more than twenty projects, including Brown University’s excavation of the Great Temple under Martha Sharp Joukowsky (from 1993), the American Center of Oriental Research at the Petra Church and the Temple of the Winged Lions, French work at Qasr al-Bint, Swiss excavations on az-Zantur and a Finnish project on Jabal Harun.

Discoveries continue. In 2003 archaeologists of Jordan’s Department of Antiquities, excavating in front of the Treasury, found Nabataean tombs dating to the end of the 1st century BC cut below the present ground level, which showed that the façade once stood higher above the valley floor and supported a funerary reading of the monument. Surveys using satellite images and drones keep locating structures that are invisible from the ground.

Very few of Petra’s monuments carry dated inscriptions, so their chronology depends on stylistic comparison, stratigraphy and occasional scientific dates. The Treasury is the classic example. Many scholars now place it in the reign of Aretas IV, around the turn of the era, and the site authority describes it as a mausoleum; but others place it earlier — Robert Wenning, following Stephan Schmid, dates this almost purely Alexandrian-style façade to the third quarter of the 1st century BC — and proposals over the past two centuries have ranged from the 1st century BC to the Roman period of the 2nd century AD. Judith McKenzie’s The Architecture of Petra (1990) was an influential attempt to build a relative sequence of façades by analysing their classical ornament and comparing it with dated architecture in Alexandria and elsewhere; her framework is widely used but not universally accepted, and new excavations continue to refine it.

Function is just as contested. Was the Treasury a royal tomb, a temple, or a monument combining both roles? Its plain interior rooms and the tombs found beneath it support a funerary reading, but its sculpture — gods, Amazons, the central female figure — suggests broader religious meaning. The so-called Great Temple, by far Petra’s largest building complex, contains a small theatre with semicircular tiered seating. Its excavator Martha Joukowsky maintained that it was a temple, at least in the Nabataean period; others have argued for a purely administrative function, and the site authority now describes it as mainly civic. The current state of research does not allow a conclusive verdict. Ad-Deir, probably carved in the early 2nd century AD under Rabbel II, points to communal ritual, but its exact role is still discussed.

A broader debate concerns the nature of Nabataean culture itself. Earlier writers sometimes described Petra as a Hellenized or Romanized city, imitating Mediterranean fashions. More recent research emphasizes Nabataean agency: local patrons chose Greek, Egyptian and Mesopotamian elements and combined them with Arabian traditions such as baetyls, crow-step façades and feasting halls, creating something new. The same debate affects the history of writing, since the Nabataean script is a key link in the development of the Arabic alphabet.

Finally, there is the question of what the city as a whole looked like. The tourist route passes mainly through the monumental centre, but surveys show a much larger landscape of houses, farms, quarries and water installations, and the site authority estimates that only about a fifth of Petra has been explored. Population figures, such as the Metropolitan Museum’s estimate of at least 25,000, are rough and depend on assumptions about housing density and water supply.

Petra’s beauty is also its weakness. Sandstone is porous and soft. UNESCO notes that the monuments are subject to ongoing erosion by wind and rain, made worse in the past by windblown sand where grazing animals had reduced the ground cover, and that the natural decay of the sandstone threatens the site’s authenticity in the long term. Flash floods along the Wadi Musa, earthquakes, and the infrastructure needs of local communities and visitors add further risks.

Tourism has increased greatly since inscription: the site authority counted 1,174,137 visitors in 2023, although numbers fall sharply in years of regional conflict or, as in 2020, the pandemic. Tourism supports many jobs in Wadi Musa and nearby villages, but UNESCO identifies congestion points such as the Siq and proposed new infrastructure inside the boundary as pressures on the property. Jordan’s Department of Antiquities, the Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority and international partners have restored monuments, maintained the flood-control system and developed plans to manage visitor access.

The most sensitive question concerns the Bdul (also spelled Bedul or Bdoul), a Bedouin clan who lived in Petra’s caves and tents, herding, farming and, increasingly, working in tourism. Their origin traditions vary: some accounts link them to the ancient Nabataeans, others to different ancestors. Plans to relocate the Bdul were discussed as early as 1968. Construction of concrete houses at Umm Sayhun, a new village on a terrace at the northern rim of the Petra valley, began around 1980, and the relocation began in 1984 — before Petra’s inscription on the World Heritage List in 1985, which came with a recommendation that its Bedouin residents be relocated. The process continued over many years. Christopher Angel’s 2011 study describes a village planned for about 100 families, with the support of UNESCO, the World Bank and the Jordanian government, that had grown to around 3,000 residents. UNESCO states that the resettlement was aimed in part at arresting erosion caused by grazing.

Assessments of the relocation differ. The move brought a school, piped water, electricity and basic health care, and supporters argue that it protected the monuments. But Christopher Angel describes the Bdul as having been forced to abandon their nomadic life, and notes that they now face unsustainable tourism, rapid village growth, changing identities and regulations imposed by local and national authorities. Some families have continued to live in caves in the Petra area, and in 2025 Human Rights Watch reported that Jordanian authorities were pressing ahead with evictions and relocations of Bdul residents and urged them to halt the relocations and consult the community. Petra is now often discussed in heritage studies as an example of the tension between protecting monuments and respecting the rights and knowledge of the people who live with them.