Petra: A Brief History

By David W. Tschanz

Petra: A Brief History is an easy to read, popular history of Petra, “the rose red city, half as old as time” and the mysterious Nabataeans who carved into from the living rock.

The author, with a dramatic flair, explains how geography and geology made the eventual site of Petra the most attractive real estate in the Middle East. He then tells the story of how the Nabataeans, coming from Arabia, moved into the region and established their capital there in the fifth century BCE. Within a few decades, Petra was the headquarters of vast commercial empire that controlled the East-West trade in incense, myrrh, spices, and silk, from borderland between Syria and Arabia, and the Euphrates to the Red Sea. Incredibly wealthy they were best known to their contemporaries for their hydraulic engineering, pottery and monumental buildings. Looking to guard their fortunes they foiled Antony and Cleopatra’s escape, opposed the Herods and built a southern capital, Madain Salih, in Saudi Arabia. How they came to be, what they achieved and what happened to them, is a tale worth reading.

Petra: A Brief History is not another guidebook. It is a journey to understanding the whys, wherefores and hows of these fabled people based on present day scholarship.

This new title is published during the 200th anniversary "rediscovery" of Petra by the Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt” It is unique because it provides popular account of the two major Nabataean sites: Petra in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as well as its important sister city of Madain Salih in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Both are UNESCO World Heritage sites the author, who has spent 23 years in the Middle East, knows intimately.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David W. Tschanz
• Release date: Jun 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476229485

David W. Tschanz

David W. Tschanz is an historian, epidemiologist and travel writer who lived in the Middle East from 1989-2012 where he worked for an oil company, taught, researched, wrote and learned. Convinced that "specialization is for insects," he has advanced degrees in history, public health and archaeology, as well as 9 computer certifications including an MCSE, MCDBA, and CIW. He has written over 1000 published articles on a wide variety of topics including infectious disease control, military affairs, demography, patch management, Kerberos security, product review, history, Middle East affairs and travel. He has authored or co-authored eight books, including Designing an Exchange Server 2007 Infrastructure: A Business Oriented Approach which was published by John Wiley & Sons. His work has appeared in Ahlan Wasahlan; Against the Odds; Aramco World; Archaeology; Battle Flag; C3i; California Liberty; Caravan; Cert Cities; Command; Desert Rambler; Dimensions; Gaya; Golden Falcon; Herbs for Health; Islam on Line; Line of Departure; Mensa Bulletin; MCP Magazine; Military History; Al Muftah; Odyssey; Redmond Magazine; Relevance; Sojourn; Sons of Texas Journal; Strategy & Tactics; StrategyPage; TCP Magazine, White Star Burma and Wild West. He also serves as editor of several international publications as well as the military history journal Cry "Havoc!" and the Journal of Islamic Medical History. He is also author of many IT industry white papers. He served as president and on the board of the Arabian Natural History Association for 18 years, as well as national historian of China Post 1 (American Legion) and Coordinator of the Military History Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. A well regarded speaker he has been the Anne Nicholson Guest Lecturer at Pinewood College; a speaker at the Croft Institute for International Studies at the University of Mississippi as well as other venues.

Book preview

Petra

A Brief History

David W. Tschanz

Copyright 2012 David W. Tschanz

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of the author.

For the Nabataeans, wherever they may be

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER ONE

Through a Glass Darkly

CHAPTER TWO

The Rise of the Nabataeans

CHAPTER THREE

Decline and Rediscovery

CHAPTER FOUR

Nabataean Commerce and Industry

CHAPTER FIVE

Nabataean Life and Death

CHAPTER SIX

Nabataean Religion

CHAPTER SEVEN

Madain Salih

APPENDIX A

A Glossary of Architectural Terms

APPENDIX B

Bulls From the Sea

Afterword

Sources

Photo Credits

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Preface

This book is not intended as a substitute for any of the commercially available guidebooks on Petra. Instead it is meant to help the reader understand the whys, wherefores and whens of the city half as old as time and the people who built it.

Petra and its history have been the subject of a number of articles, booklets and photo essays since its discovery in 1812. Frequently these were written more in tune with the romance of the place than with a great deal of attention paid to fact. Burgon’s famous description of Petra as a rose-red city, for example, was penned from his armchair in England. He had never visited the place. The poem and its lyrical description of the Nabataean ruins gained wide circulation almost as soon as the ink had dried. Much later, when Burgon finally visited Petra, he viewed the ruins and commented It’s not rose-red, it’s salmon pink! But legend and romance die hard. No one has ever heard of the salmon pink city ‘half as old as time’

A number of inaccuracies continue to crop up about Petra. The Siq, for example, was immediately assumed to be the city’s great line of defense, something that persists in modern accounts, even though military men pointed out that the Siq made Petra incredibly vulnerable to siege. All an attacker had to do was place a small force at its opening and block the water channels flowing in to cut the city off. Similarly some early archaeologists wrote about a Roman military conquest of the city but later evidence shows that there was none. At least the early notion, based on the original inability to find evidence of a city for the living inside Petra, that the place was a great necropolis reserved only for the dead, has finally been laid to rest.

This book hopes to relate Petra’s story in terms of present day scholarship. The problem with Nabataean history is that they left no records of their own. Hence, historians are forced to rely on contemporary third party sources, some of whom may have had their own axes to grind, for some idea of what happened. Even these are not always helpful. In some cases, such as Plutarch and Strabo’s account of Pompey’s expedition against the Nabataeans, there are direct contradictions which cannot be resolved since a third account does not exist. The other source for Petra’s history is based on interpreting the evidence uncovered by excavations. But this is notoriously unreliable since much of this history is based on interpretation of indirect and partial evidence and archaeologists are not immune to having their pet theories that they insist on even in the face of contrary evidence and logic.

Regardless there is enough that is known, surmised and speculated on to make this brief history a tale well worth telling.

David W. Tschanz

June 2012

It seems no work of Man’s creative hand,

By labor wrought as wavering fancy planned;

But from the rock as if by magic grown,

Eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!

Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,

Were erst Athena held her rites divine;

Not saintly-grey, like many a minister fane,

That crowns the hill and consecrates the plain;

But rose-red as if the blush of dawn

that first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;

The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,

Which Man deemed old two thousand years ago.

Match me such a marvel save in Eastern clime,

A rose-red city half as old as time.

— John William Burgon

Dean of Chichester

Chapter One

Through A Glass, Darkly

Petra is one of the marvels of the world. Like the Grand Canyon, it cannot be described, only experienced and like the Grand Canyon, it never disappoints. This ancient city is home to the most spectacular collection of monuments ever created by the hand of man. From the Hellenistic elegance of the Khazneh, to the simple Assyrian crowsteps that overlook its streets, the city holds over 800 facades carved into the face of its sentinel mountains. Because of the natural coloration of the sandstone, these massive structures radiate hues of tan, salmon, peach, vermilion, blue, purple and other colors that defy classification. Dean Burgon, in his Newdigate Prize winning poem, called it the rose red city half as old as time. No one has ever described it better.

Petra did not arise in a vacuum, nor is it merely a collection of stone monuments built on a whim. It was the result of a complex interaction between geography, geology, politics, commerce and the innate peculiarities of the human spirit. Petra’s builders, the Nabataeans, were living, breathing persons, perhaps more talented and a bit luckier than their contemporaries, but in many ways not very different from them, or us. With their wealth sought after by neighboring states, they used guile, bribery and force of arms to maintain an empire that survived for 500 years before crashing on the rock of Roman imperialism. Petra, and its monuments carved from the living rock, is their claim on immortality. How this place came to be is a story worth telling.

Geography

It all began thousands of kilometers away, at a place with the innocuous name of the Great Rift Valley.

The valley begins some 30 kilometers east of Nairobi where the high plateau is broken apart and surrounded by steep cliff walls on both sides. From the bottom Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya sizzled up in volcanic eruptions to their glacier-covered heights. Here on the floor of the valley are the gorges where the Leakeys found the oldest remains of Homo erectus. This was the evolutionary Garden of Eden where human apes first stood upright.

As it traverses northward, the Great Rift Valley splits apart the mountain stronghold of Ethiopia. There archaeologists found the first quasi-complete skeleton of the human ape they named Lucy. Still further north there is the great fracture filled with water called the Gulf of Aqaba, then the Dead Sea (whose greatest depth at 1312 feet below sea level is the lowest point on the earth’s surface) and on to the Sea of Galilee, modern Lake Tiberias. But between the Gulf of Aqaba and the Dead Sea a tectonic compression gradually lifted great strata of sandstone and porphyry and finally blocked the Jordan River, and the life that once teemed in the Dead Sea was choked by ever-increasing concentrations of bromine, magnesium, iodine and salt. Some 60 miles south of the Dead Sea the surface now rose in mountains as high as 3000 feet.

In what was destined to be called Edom, just south of this high point, an earthquake 30 million years ago split the rock in a serpentine fissure. Over the eons countless flash floods through the Wadi Musa carved this fissure to a width of 5 to 10 feet between vertical walls 300–600 feet high, revealing swirling strata of rock, some but a fraction of an inch thick, tinted in astonishing alternations of ochres, reds, blacks, purples, blues. Whorls of rock perforated with inner channels mark the succeeding generations of flash floods. It is here that a city, called Rekem by its builders, and known today as Petra, would eventually rise. It was the perfect location.

The eventual Nabataean Kingdom was located on the edge of the great Arabian deserts. This crescent shaped area was defined by three distinctive geological barriers.

On the southern border of Nabataea a great cliff extended far out into the desert. Along this cliff, ancient civilizations successively built large fortresses to protect their villages in the hills from the wild tribesmen of the Hishma desert to the south. This desert is among the wildest, most beautiful deserts of the world, with great mountains rising out of the sandy desert floor and home to Wadi Rum.

The western border of Nabataea was also marked by great cliffs and rugged bare rock mountains. Just beyond these mountains Wadi Araba drops to below sea level, making the western mountains of Nabataea seem just that much higher and imposing. Due to the scarcity of water in Wadi Araba, the imposing mountains, and the limited passes, only a few scattered fortresses were needed to protect this frontier from anyone who might want to invade. It was among these imposing mountains that the Nabataeans would build Petra.

Along the northern border of Nabataea a deep gorge, known as Wadi Hasa protected the land from invasion from the north. This gorge drops from the Edomite mountains down to deep depths, well below sea level. Along this border, a series of forts and lookout towers protected the Nabataeans from an attack from the north.

The eastern border was formed by a small wall that may have predated the Nabataeans, stretching from Wadi Hasa in the north to the Naqab escarpment in the south. Along this wall, forts, towers, and fortified towns were connected to protect the region from an eastern attack. This wall is one of the least known archaeological wonders in Jordan.

The Petra Basin

Petra lies hidden in the mountains overlooking the eastern side of the Wadi Araba, the Grand Canyon of the Middle East. The Dead Sea forced trade to travel up both sides of the Wadi. Since there were more freshwater springs on the eastern flank, a route became established on that side, now known as the King’s Highway.

From the alluvial flats of the Tigris and Euphrates valley, which the Greeks called Mesopotamia, the land rises slowly westward until it nears the eastern edge of the Wadi Araba. Then it suddenly sweeps upward from its average 3,000 foot height to approximately 5,000 feet, forming the long, high ridge that dominates the miles of desert stretching back towards the east.

There is, in this mountainous ridge, an intrusion of two smaller parallel ridges. The Porphyry Ridge runs from just west of Petra southwards to flank the sea on the eastern side of the Gulf of Aqaba. Between this granite ridge and the limitless sand and pebble desert that leads towards Mesopotamia is a second ridge composed of soft, dramatically colored Nubian sandstone. Beginning as surface stone just south of the Dead Sea, it soon becomes the succession of wind-swept, lofty hills that line the current Desert Highway.

These twin, frequently interlocking, ridges formed a major obstacle along the lines of trade and communication between the great riparian civilizations in the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates valleys. Contact between them required a convenient and practical route over or through the barrier. Such a route was found near where the Wadi Musa corkscrewed through an ancient fault in the rock barrier before releasing itself into the Wadi Araba — the eventual site of Petra.

The Petra region’s prominence was due to its easily defended position, abundant water resources, rich agricultural and grazing lands, and most importantly because of its geographically strategic position through the formidable natural obstacles of mountains, inland seas, swamps and deserts that acted as a barrier between the eastern and western parts of the ancient Middle East.

Geography had placed the Petra region at the junction of two of the ancient world’s most important trade routes. The silk and spice routes that linked China, India and Southern Arabia with the Mediterranean world passed less than twenty kilometers to the east. Another land route, via the Wadi Araba, Gaza, and the north Sinai coast, allowed men and goods to pass westwards to Egypt.

Besides its strategic location, the Petra region was also blessed with excellent water resources and rich agricultural lands. These attracted more trade and increased the region’s wealth. The area was rich in other products essential to life in the ancient and classical world. The Wadi Araba is liberally dotted with ancient copper slag heaps denoting extensive mining and working of the metal long before the appearance of the Nabataeans. The Khirbet Nahas site in particular, which in Arabic means ‘Copper Ruin’, was a great mining and smelting complex. Bitumen, essential to the Egyptian embalming process, was readily available along the shores of the Dead Sea.

Such an area was not going to remain empty for very long.

Early Settlers

The area around Petra was inhabited during the Stone Age by persons who exploited its natural vegetation and wildlife.

Approximately eight kilometers outside of Petra lies the ancient village of Beidha, settled during the very early Neolithic Age, before the invention of pottery. This period is considered important because it holds the key to the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers, the beginnings of agriculture and the emergence of community life. Beidha was first occupied as a semi-permanent camp in the Early Natufian Period, about 9000 years ago. Based on bones found the community lived off ibex and goat, the latter apparently from herd, not hunting. Beidha was reoccupied circa 7000 BCE by a Pre-Pottery Neolithic A [PPNA] group who lived in a planned village of roughly circular semi-subterranean houses arranged in clusters.

The Natufians lived in communities, some considerably larger than Beidha, at permanent sites located near water sources and stands of wild grain. A wall at least one meter high ran along the southeast side of the village and acted as a terrace wall to support the buildings of the village which stood on the sandy deposits of the earlier levels. A stairway in the wall gave easy access from the outside up into the village.

The change in climate occurring during this period would have made the region ideal for the growth of wild grains and for gazelles. More food meant an increase in population. Also from this time period, Beidha has provided the first evidence of the deliberate tending (cultivation) of stands of wild grains, particularly wheat and barley. Hence Beidha’s residents were among the world’s first farmers. The main meat food came from domesticated goats, but gazelles were hunted as well.

Natufian technology was still based on the use of flaked stone tools. Flint was used for spear and arrowheads or as sickle blades, mounted in hafts made of wood or bone. Heavy-duty tools were made from stone. Bone was also used for sickles and fish hooks.

Burial practices included both primary burials in a typically contracted position, and disarticulated secondary burials. Such secondary burials may represent individuals who died at seasonal hunting sites. Individuals were buried with jewelry often made of dentalia shells, bone, and stone. Burials were sometimes found immediately below house floors.

Beidha was first excavated by the British archaeologist, Diana Kirkbride, in the 1960s and 1980s but at the time no steps were taken to conserve or present the site. University of Edinburgh archaeologist Samantha Dennis has been involved in a series of experimental reconstructions of Neolithic structures at Beidha in southern Jordan since 2003.

Between the time of these Stone Age villages and the arrival of the Nabataeans, a series of peoples inhabited the area. Very little is known about them. A reasonable supposition is that the region’s trade, agriculture and water acted like a magnet to attract nomadic tribes from the south.

Edomites

Later settlers came to know the region as Edom (which means red). While settled, the Edomites were apparently not urbanized and showed little interest in occupying the Petra basin. Most of what is known about them comes from the fact that they were conquered by the Israelites, who left a record of them.

Biblical tradition holds that the Edomites were the descendants of Esau. The Edomites' original country, according to the Tanakh, stretched from the Sinai Peninsula as far as Kadesh Barnea. Southward it reached as far as Eilat, which was the seaport of Edom. On the north was the territory of Moab, the boundary being the Wadi Zered. The ancient capital of Edom was Bosra. In the time of Amaziah (838 BCE), Selah, which would later be incorrectly identified at Petra, was its principal stronghold.

Conquered by the Israelites, the Edomites would be relegated to a minor role until the seventh century BCE when another Semitic people would come from the south and push them out of Edom.

Israelites

The establishment of a Judean kingdom by Saul created a stable, albeit short lived, empire in the hinterland of the Fertile Crescent following the dislocations caused by the Sea Peoples migrations of ca. 1200 BCE. The new kingdom, under David and Solomon, readily grasped that the mineral wealth of the Wadi Araba and the proceeds from trade would be an invaluable asset to their economy.

Once Solomon controlled Edom and its trade, he went all out to develop it to its maximum capacity. The whole Mediterranean basin at this time was waking up to the comfortable side of civilization. Luxury items for the sweet life were a high priority and in considerable demand. The Queen of Sheba brought gifts of gold, spices and costly stones. Hiram’s navy arrived with costly stones and almug trees while