Petra

The Bedouin who lived among the tombs had a theory about the urn. High on the facade of the building they called the Treasury, carved from the same rose sandstone as everything else, sits a stone vessel about three metres tall. For generations, the story went that a pharaoh had hidden his gold inside it while chasing the Israelites across the desert. So they shot at it. Rifle fire chipped the urn and pocked the columns around it, and the scars are still there if you look up. The urn is solid rock. There was never anything inside, and the building behind the facade is a handful of bare rooms. But the name stuck, and so the world's most photographed tomb is still called a treasury.

Merchants Who Sold Water

Petra belonged to the Nabataeans, an Arabic-speaking people who had started out as nomads and ended up running one of the richest trading networks of the ancient world. Frankincense and myrrh came north from southern Arabia by camel; whoever controlled the water along the way controlled the trade. The Nabataeans made that their specialty. Around Petra they cut channels into cliffs, built dams across wadis and dug cisterns that caught the few rains of the year and held them for months. Ceramic pipes still run along the wall of the Siq, the narrow gorge that leads into the city. A desert people had turned a dry valley into a place where caravans could stop, drink, pay and move on.

Most of what visitors see today was carved between the first century BC and the first century AD, when the kingdom was at its peak. The Treasury, roughly forty metres high, was probably the tomb of King Aretas IV. It was not built; it was subtracted, cut from the top down out of the living cliff. Its decoration is a merchant's collage: Greek columns, an Egyptian goddess, local eagles and sphinxes, all on one face. The Nabataeans took something from everyone they traded with and called it their own style.

Rome, Earthquake, Silence

In 106 AD Rome absorbed the kingdom without a fight and made Petra part of a province called Arabia Petraea. The city kept growing for a while, with a colonnaded street, a theatre and a vast temple complex. But sea routes were slowly making the caravan roads redundant, and the commercial centre of gravity shifted north to Bosra. Then, in 363, an earthquake brought down a large part of the city and wrecked the water system. Petra never fully recovered. People still lived there in the Byzantine period; a church excavated in the 1990s turned up superb mosaics and a cache of scorched papyrus scrolls that had survived a fire. Crusaders built small forts in the valley in the twelfth century. After that, Western records go quiet for six hundred years.

They were not quiet for the Bdoul Bedouin, who went on living in the rock-cut chambers, grazing goats on the steps of the theatre and, as noted, shooting at the urn. The man who brought Petra back onto European maps was a Swiss traveller named Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who in 1812 passed himself off as a Muslim scholar, claimed he wanted to sacrifice a goat at the tomb of the prophet Aaron on the mountain above, and persuaded a nervous guide to take him through the Siq. He could not take notes or stare too long without raising suspicion. A few lines written that evening were enough. Burckhardt never reached his real goal, the Niger River; he died in Cairo in 1817, still preparing for the journey.

The City Under The City

The detail that changes how you look at Petra is this: almost everything that survives above ground is a tomb. The facades were for the dead. The living had houses, markets and workshops built as free-standing structures, and those have mostly collapsed and been buried. Archaeologists estimate that only a small fraction of the city has been excavated. In 2003, digging in the plaza in front of the Treasury, they found older tombs several metres below the surface. The famous view, the one people stand on for photographs, is not the ground the Nabataeans walked on. The real base of the Treasury is beneath your feet.

Today

Petra became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985, the same year the Bdoul were moved out of the caves into a purpose-built village at Umm Sayhoun. The site is run by the Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority and is the backbone of Jordan's tourism economy. Its problems are old ones, moving faster. The sandstone is soft, and wind, salt and rain are slowly erasing the carved details; reliefs that were sharp in nineteenth-century drawings are blurred now. Flash floods, the enemy the Nabataeans tamed with dams, still come: in 1963 a flood swept through the Siq and killed more than twenty tourists. And the crowds themselves, with their donkeys and camels, wear down the same stone steps every day. The Nabataeans built a city to profit from people passing through. It is still doing that, and it is costing the city something each time.