An ancient city in what is now southwestern Jordan.
The name “Petra” derives from the Greek petros, meaning rock, as many of the important sites are carved directly from surrounding canyons. Petra is referred to as Sela in the Bible (2 Kings 14:7) and is known in Arabic as Wadi Musa, after the stream that flows through it.
Petra has been occupied for thousands of years. The remains of villages have been unearthed nearby that extend back to the earliest settlement in the region, dating to approximately 6500 B.C.E. Access to the site could only be achieved through a winding, half-mile-long canyon. Its position, on a wide plain surrounded on most sides by mountains, made it an ideal location for defensible settlement.
Petra was an early center for the Edomites or Idumaeans, a West Semitic people closely related to the ancient Israelites, and served as an important transit point for caravans traveling between the Levantine coast, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The Edomites, who flourished during the first half of the first millennium B.C.E., established Petra as one of their primary military centers, though their capital was never located there.
The ancient city of Petra once served as an important transit point for caravans traveling between the Levantine coast, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. Today, the city is the foremost tourist attraction in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. (Library of Congress)
In the fourth century B.C.E., the Edomites were driven north by a new wave of Semitic invaders, the Nabataean Arabs. Along with the other Edomite centers, Petra fell to the Nabataeans, who made it their capital. The Nabataeans were a highly sophisticated people who became one of the major economic forces in the Near East. They were the primary trade intermediaries between Egypt and Arabia, and under them Petra became the focal point of a vast caravan trade network. Goods from as far away as China and India moved through the city on their way to markets in Asia Minor and North Africa. Myrrh, an Arabian product used in sacrificial incense through out the ancient world, was one of the most important of the Nabataean trade commodities. Arabs, Jews, Greeks, Egyptians, and Aramaeans, among other peoples, mingled in Petra, which became famous for its cosmopolitan and diverse population.
Between the fourth century B.C.E. and the first century C.E., the city was greatly expanded and many new monuments were built, including the Khasneh (the famous treasury and customs house, the facade of which is featured prominently in the popular movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). Many magnificent temples and other cultic centers were erected, as well as libraries, theaters, gymnasia, and an extensive complex of rich burial chambers, thousands of which have been unearthed. The city survived a brief occupation by Athenes, a general of the Greco-Macedonian war-lord Antigonus, in 312 B.C.E., expelling and massacring the invaders and resisting a second Macedonian incursion under Antigonus’s son, Demetrius, a few years later.
In 106 C.E., Petra was occupied by the Romans, who turned it into the capital of their new province of Arabia Petraea. During the course of the second and third centuries, trade routes shifted drastically and Tadmor (Palmyra) and other more conveniently located trade centers in Syria and Mesopotamia overshadowed Petra. However, Petra continued to hold an extremely high strategic importance. Its impregnability made it the perfect base for the Roman legions to deter attacks from Arabian nomads (the Roman fortress at Udruh can still be seen today).
Petra operated as an early center of Christianity. It was the episcopal see of Palaestina Tertia. As the city declined, monks and hermits inhabited many of the ruins and several monastic centers sprang up in and around Petra. Petra fell to the Muslim Arabs during the seventh century and steadily continued to deteriorate until its capture in the 1100s by the crusaders, who built a citadel there to protect the southern approaches to Oultre-Jordain (the region of the Kingdom of Jerusalem to the east of the Jordan River). With the end of the Crusades, however, the city again fell into obscurity.
Over time, Petra was abandoned. It remained forgotten until 1812, when Johann Burckhardt became the first European in centuries to stumble across its ruins. Excavations were carried out in a haphazard fashion in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Scholars from many different countries conducted more comprehensive archaeological digs during the 1950s and 1960s. Today, Petra is the foremost tourist attraction in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It is known as the “jewel of southern Jordan.” Over 800 surviving monuments, many of them carved directly from the multicolored sandstone of the surrounding cliffs, are considered by many to be among the most beautiful in the world. Tens of thousands of visitors from around the globe come annually to Petra to see sites ranging from the prebiblical sacrificial High Place to the Hellenistic temples and crusader fortresses.
Brian M. Gottesman
See also: Arabs; Roman Empire.
Auge, Christian, and Jean-Marie Dentzer. Petra: Lost City of the Ancient World. New York: Abrams, 2000.
Bowersock, Glen Warren. Roman Arabia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Kasher, Aryeh. Edom, Arav ve-Yisrael (Edom, Arabia and Israel). Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak ben-Tzvi, 1988.