The Story of Petra
A Kingdom of Traders
The Nabataeans appear in historical records as early as the 4th century BC, when a Greek account of an attempted Macedonian raid describes them as nomadic Arabs living in a rocky stronghold, resistant to conquest, and already engaged in trade. Within two centuries they had built one of the ancient world's most sophisticated commercial states, controlling the caravan routes that carried frankincense and myrrh from the Arabian Peninsula, spices from India, silk from China, and grain from the Hauran to markets across the Mediterranean. Petra, their capital, grew from a defensible hilltop in the sandstone canyons of what is now southern Jordan into a city of perhaps 20,000 people at its height.
The Nabataean genius was hydraulic as much as architectural. Petra sits in an arid canyon environment that receives only about 150 millimetres of rain annually, but the Nabataeans engineered an extraordinary system of water management — rock-cut channels, ceramic pipes, cisterns, dams, and settling tanks — that captured every drop of seasonal rainfall and flash flood and channelled it to the city. Archaeological surveys have identified hundreds of cisterns in the Petra region. This mastery of water in a waterless landscape was what made the city possible, and what distinguished Nabataean urbanism from any reasonable assumption about where a desert people would build.
The Architecture of Rock
The monuments that define Petra's image are the rock-cut facades carved into the rose-red, cream, and purple-banded sandstone cliffs of the site. The most famous, known as the Khazneh or Treasury, rises about 40 metres from the canyon floor at the end of the Siq — the narrow slot canyon that forms the main ceremonial approach to the city centre. The Khazneh's facade combines Greek architectural orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) with typically Nabataean decorative elements, a synthesis that reflects the kingdom's position at the intersection of Hellenistic and Arabian cultural worlds. It was probably a royal tomb, possibly for the king Aretas III in the 1st century BC.
The Khazneh is spectacular but not unique. Petra contains hundreds of rock-cut tombs of varying size and elaboration, cut into the canyon walls over several centuries. The Monastery (Ad-Deir), reached by a climb of some 800 steps cut into the rock, is even larger than the Khazneh and commands views over the Jordan Rift Valley. The Royal Tombs — a sequence of imposing facades overlooking the main valley — include the Urn Tomb, whose interior chamber was large enough to be converted into a Byzantine church in 447 AD.
Beneath and around the carved facades, Petra had a functioning city of freestanding architecture: a colonnaded street, a nymphaeum, temples, a market, bathhouses, and residential quarters. The Great Temple, excavated by Brown University teams since the 1990s, covered roughly 7,500 square metres and incorporated an unusual theatre-like structure within its upper precinct. Much of this freestanding architecture is poorly preserved — stone robbed for later construction, walls collapsed — which is why the rock-cut monuments command the imagination in a way that Petra's urban fabric does not.
Roman Annexation and Its Aftermath
In 106 AD, the Roman emperor Trajan annexed the Nabataean kingdom without significant military resistance, creating the province of Arabia Petraea. Petra became the provincial capital, and the Romans left their own architectural mark: a cardo maximus (colonnaded main street) was laid out along the course of the Wadi Musa, a monumental arch was erected at the city's western entrance, and a large temple — possibly dedicated to the Winged Lions, possibly to Allat — was built at the city's core.
The 2nd and 3rd centuries AD were a period of continued prosperity under Roman rule, but the shift of trade routes — partly as a result of the growing importance of Palmyra as a caravan hub, partly due to increasing use of sea routes through the Red Sea — gradually diminished Petra's commercial centrality. A severe earthquake in 363 AD destroyed much of the city's freestanding architecture, including portions of the colonnaded street. The Byzantine period saw continued occupation on a reduced scale, with several Nabataean religious structures converted to churches, and a bishop of Petra is attested in late antique sources.
By the early Islamic period, Petra's population had declined to a fraction of its classical peak. The Crusaders built a small castle on one of the high ridges in the 12th century. After that, the city effectively vanished from Western knowledge, though the local Bedouin — the Bdoul tribe, whose ancestors had lived in the rock-cut chambers for generations — never lost it.
Burckhardt's Rediscovery
The moment that returned Petra to Western awareness came in August 1812, when the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, travelling in Arab disguise and under the name Ibrahim ibn Abdullah, persuaded a local guide to take him to what he suspected was the site of the ancient city. Burckhardt had no way to visit as an overt European traveller without arousing suspicion; he invented a pretext of wishing to sacrifice a goat at the tomb of the Prophet Aaron, venerated on one of Petra's high peaks.
He passed through the Siq and saw the Khazneh, took mental notes he could not record openly without breaking his disguise, and emerged with enough detail to publish a report identifying the site as the ancient Petra. He did not linger — the political conditions were too uncertain — and he died of dysentery in Cairo in 1817, never returning. His account, published posthumously, ignited European curiosity, and expeditions by Léon de Laborde and others followed in the 1820s, producing the first detailed illustrations of the facades that became iconic across Europe.
Petra Today
Petra was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985. It receives around a million visitors in a normal year, making it Jordan's most important tourist attraction and a significant economic resource. The management of that volume of visitors within a site of fragile sandstone and limited infrastructure has been a persistent challenge: foot traffic erodes the rock-cut surfaces, flash floods periodically damage archaeological deposits, and the tension between commercial tourism and conservation is ongoing.
The Bdoul Bedouin, who had inhabited the caves and rock-cut chambers of Petra for generations, were relocated to the modern village of Umm Sayhoun in the 1980s, a process that remains a source of grievance for some community members. They continue to work as guides, camel handlers, and souvenir sellers within the site, maintaining a presence that adds human complexity to a landscape that otherwise risks becoming a pure spectacle.
New excavation and survey work continues to refine understanding of Petra's ancient urban fabric. Ground-penetrating radar surveys in 2016 revealed a large monumental structure buried beneath the sand south of the colonnaded street — possibly a civic building of substantial scale. The city's full extent and the complexity of its hydraulic system continue to yield surprises. Open the map to locate Petra within the wider landscape of ancient Jordan and explore the remarkable concentration of Nabataean, Roman, and Byzantine heritage that surrounds it.