Petra-fied!

Our hotel, the Movenpick Petra, was right across the street from the entrance to Petra, so it took nearly two minutes to walk there from the hotel.  It was a cold and windy gray sky morning, but at least it wasn’t raining yet.  

(The hotel is pronunced Moe-vin-pick, but it’s far more fun to call it a “Moving pick” hotel, which is a basketball term meaning “the University of North Carolina never gets whistled for their plethora of moving picks.”  Seriously, Google “moving pick” – that definition mentioning UNC is right at the top. Doug Heye is furiously muttering whilst he pounds it into his keyboard to argue that I’m wrong.)

I had heard what turned out to be two falsehoods about Petra.  The first is that there is nothing to see until you get to the famed Treasury (when I first saw the Treasury featured in the movie “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” I thought is was a creative Hollywood set – had no idea it was a real place).  The second falsehood is that there isn’t much past the Treasury.  

I had hopes that neither falsehood is true, and those hopes were borne out.  The 1.5 mile walk down to the Treasury, most of it through a slot canyon is fascinating.  Then, the area past the Treasury is a treasure.

Approximately one-third of the trail down to the Treasury is more open, even though the trail is surrounded by hills, tombs, and caves carved out of the rocks.  The highlight is the Djinn Blocks, which are squared monuments/tombs.  Carved in the first century AD, it features four pyramids and a bas relief statue in a niche, all to honor the five people who were buried there. 

Underneath is a banquet hall carved into the lower part of the rock where the family would gather annually to honor the dead.

The second two-thirds is a passageway through a dramatic slot canyon known as The Siq.  

Editor: Is there a slot canyon that is not dramatic?  Writer: Chastened, hangs head.

Prior to the canyon is a dam built by the Nabataeans to divert the flash floods of Wadu Musa.  “Musa” is Arabic for “drawn out of water,” and is Arabic for Moses, as he and the rest of his people wandered in this area before Petra was built.  When you connect the dots on how many places Moses went in the Middle East before ending up in Israel, it starts to look like this:

The Nabataeans also cut a major tunnel through a rock to allow the water diverted by the dam to flow.  The tunnel is nearly a football field long.  Cut through rock.  With tools from nearly 2500 years ago.  Think it’s not a big deal, then you do it!

In the slot canyon, there are shrines to gods of the Nabataeans who built Petra and lived there undefeated from 400 BC to 106 AD.  There’s also an aqueduct carved right into the side of the canyon walls, so water would flow to Petra even in the case of a siege.  There are carved steps leading up to tombs, and also what is left of a statue of a trader and his camel.  Most importantly, there are stunning views all throughout the slot canyon.  The photos are okay, but don’t do it full justice.

Evidence of human settlement and land use in Petra has been traced back 10,000 years.  The city grew rich as the capital of the Nabataean (Not making excused, but I gotta say that spelling that word multiple times is a grind) Empire in 1st Century BC when it became a major trade crossroads.  

In 363 AD, a major earthquake destroyed much of the city (not the tombs, but the housing stock and shops) which caused the city to fade away.  There is evidence that by the middle of the 7th Century the city was largely abandoned, except for the occasional Bedouin tribes passing through.  

Petra was “discovered” by the west when a Swiss explorer, Johannes Burckhadt, dressed as an Arab, convinced his Bedouin guide to take him to the lost city.  Really an interesting history.