The mystery and magic of Petra

The Nabateans built a city by a rock. They chose wisely

Born in 1906, Arthur Flowerdew had lived in Norfolk his entire life and, well into old age, had only been abroad once, on a holiday to France. Yet for many years, and since adolescence, he had been plagued by recurring dreams where he was in a desert city carved in rock. He could never understand these visions until, one day, he happened upon a BBC documentary about the city of Petra in Jordan. With a chilling certainty, Flowerdew understood that he had been there before.

Flowerdew’s case would become one of the most-well known examples of westerners claiming to have memories of past lives, an occurrence commonplace in cultures which accept reincarnation, but unusual among those from Abrahamic traditions.

So convinced was Flowerdew by his visions that he contacted the BBC, which ran a piece about him. Someone from the Jordanian government heard about this and, intrigued, they flew him out to the ancient city.

According to some accounts, when Flowerdew arrived in Petra, he is said to have described it with incredible accuracy, identifying both excavated and unexcavated structures, and apparently helping experts explain the use of certain tools. One archaeologist was reported to have said: ‘He’s filled in details and a lot of it is very consistent with known archeological and historical facts, and it would require a mind very different from his to be able to sustain a fabric of deception on the scale of his memories — at least those he’s reported to me.’

It’s a curious story, and since Flowerdew died in 2002, we’ll never know what he knew. If the old East Anglian was a fraud or a fantasist, then he chose the right city: Petra is an ancient wonder still mysterious enough to intrigue, and there is something ghostly about it. Their papyrus long destroyed by the elements, we know little about the Nabataeans who built this great city, a literate mercantile people who fascinated many travellers at the time.

Today it is the number one tourist attraction for Jordan, and in his memoirs Uneasy Lies the Head, the late King Hussein wrote how ‘I never tire of taking this excursion’ to the ‘rose-red city of Petra’.

Many will know it best from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where the hero walks into its iconic Treasury building to find the grail and foil the Nazis. In reality the Treasury is little more than a façade and just a couple of metres deep, although relatively recently a basement has been dug out by archaeologists.

Petra is large and there is much to see, and one can only imagine the marvel felt by the first European visitors who rediscovered this hidden city in the 19th century, a story told in Paul Cooper’s Fall of Civilizations podcast. Before travelling to Jordan, I also read Jane Taylor’s Petra and the Lost Kingdom of the Nabataeans, and learned how for a thousand years this civilization was essentially lost. Then in 1722 a Franciscan friar from Cairo travelled through the region and wrote about ‘Hebel al Mokatab’ (the inscribed mountain) and the strange writing he’d seen etched in rock.

He was accompanied by ‘persons who were acquainted with the Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Latin, Armenian, Turkish, English, Illyrican, German and Bohemian languages’ but they were all baffled. He guessed it was the work of the Chaldeans ‘or some other persons long before the coming of Christ’.

The inscriptions found in the desert came to fascinate the few western visitors who dared visit this inhospitable region. Two Irish Protestant clergymen visited in the late 18^th century and one proposed an expedition to go and look at the ‘Sinaitic inscriptions’. Then came the Swiss orientalist Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who in 1812 was travelling through this dangerous region where he followed rumours of a desert city and became the first modern westerner to visit Petra itself.

In 1840 Eduard Beer, professor of palaeography at Leipzig University, published a paper which correctly identified the Sinai inscriptions as the work of ‘that people vulgarly known to the Greeks and Romans under the name of Nabatheaan’. He identified most of the surviving inscriptions as being Arabic names, and concluded it was a form of Aramaic, though with ‘a few Arabisms’. 

After almost two further centuries of discovery, there is still much we don’t know about these mysterious people. The Semitic name for them is nbyt, and they probably came from the Arabian Peninsula, perhaps modern-day Yemen, although their written language comes from Syria.

The Nabataeans were literate, but almost everything they wrote is lost to us, and we must rely on Greek and Roman sources, many of whom admired their fiery sense of independence. In the 1^st century BC, Diodorus of Sicily wrote of them that ‘neither the Assyrians of old, nor the kings of the Medes and Persians, nor yet those of the Macedonians have been able to enslave them.’

He noted that they ‘range over a country which is partly desert and partly waterless, though a small section of it is fruitful… They live in the open air, claiming as native land a wilderness that has neither rivers nor abundant springs… It is their custom neither to plant grain, set out any fruit-bearing-tree, use wine, nor construct any house; and if anyone is found acting contrary to this, death is his penalty’.

This surely cannot have been entirely true, since by his time the Nabateans were already quite wealthy from the incense trade, in particular frankincense and myrrh but also balsan and ladanum. As the Greek and later Roman world expanded, their demand for pleasant smells would put the Nabatean kingdom, around the borders of modern-day Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia, in a fruitful position.

Incense was used for a number of purposes, including religious rites; Akkadian and Sumerian epics mention the ‘smell of incense’ in the worship of gods in Mesopotamia. From the 6^th century BC the Greeks started purchasing it in large quantities from the Near East, using it for the preservation of food, to keep insects away, mask smells and for the cure of all sorts of ailments. The Nabateans harvested balsam from groves in the Jordan Valley near Jericho for its use in medicine, as well as something called bitumen from the Dead Sea, which they sold to Egyptians for embalming. This apparently foul-smelling substance would appear each year as a huge floating mass which the Nabateans would take a raft to and hack out.

The Nabateans wrote in Aramaic, then the lingua franca of the region. In the 11^th or 10th century BC the Aramean people had adopted Phoenician alphabet, and unlike the cumbersome cuneiform used by the Akkadian, which involved carving a stylus onto damp clay, this new script only required a pen and ink on papyrus. During the eighth century the Arameans evolved their own script, and their language become widespread even as their own power faded; famously the mother tongue of Jesus Christ, it was displaced in the region first by Greek and then Arabic and today Aramaic survives in small pockets of Iraq and Syria, such as the Christian village of Maaloula.

Under the Persian Empire Aramaic became widely adopted by elites in the Near East, although with its collapse the language began to develop regional differences. The Nabateans used Aramaic to write, meaning they could communicate with officials across vast swathes of territory, ‘yet in their everyday lives it appears that they continued to speak Arabic among themselves,’ Taylor writes. Diodorus of Sicily reports that in 312BC they wrote to the Macedonian general, Antigonus the One-Eyed, in ‘Syrian characters’, by which he meant Aramaic.

In the 4th century BC Hieronymus of Cardia portrayed them as herders and nomads but they had later come to settle down, having grown rich from trade, and established themselves on a rock, or Petra, which was impregnable because there was only one route to the top.

This made them hard to conquer. A Greek army led by Antigonus’s son Demetrius, ‘besieger of cities’, attacked the city in the hope of plunder, to which the defenders gave a staunch reply:

‘King Demetrius, what do you want, or who compels you to make war against us? We live in the desert and in a land that has neither water nor grain nor wine, nor anything that is counted as a necessity of life among you… We have chosen a life in the desert… causing you no harm at all. We therefore beg both you and your father not to harm us but, after accepting our gifts, to withdraw your army and from now on to regard the Nabataeans as your friends. Even if you want to, you cannot stay here for many days since you lack water and all other necessities.’

The Greeks attacked, but the Nabateans won, and later came to control northern Arabia and the region from the Nile Delta to the Syrian desert. In 129 BC,  a Greek writer called Moschion includes ‘Petra in Arabia’ among the diplomatic visits made by his city’s representatives, and so ‘The Nabataeans were by now significant figures on the world stage’.

Their may have spread far further, and Chinese explorer and diplomat Chang Ch’ien mentions a gift from the king of ‘jugglers from Li-Kan’, which could be Rekem, the ancient Semitic name for Petra. (Apparently the Chinese were fascinated with juggling and Syria, now under Nabataean control, was known for its jugglers.)

The Nabatean king Aretas II, who ruled from 103 to 96 BC, was described by Jewish historian Josephus as ‘a person then very illustrious’ and he minted his own coins, an assertion of Nabataean independence. The same source also says he fathered 700 sons, so he must have been doing something right. His successor, Obodas I, achieved even greater feats in both defeating the Syrians and becoming deified, the only one of their kings we know to be included among the gods.

There is an inscription from around 100 AD in Aramic describing a statue dedicated to ‘Obodas the god’ and ‘it contains two lines which may be the earliest known poetry in the Arabic language, though written in Nabataean character’. It reads: ‘he [Obodas] acts neither for benefit nor favour; and if death claims us, let me not be claimed, and if a wound festers let us not die.’

By the mid 1st century BC the Nabateans were dominant in the region, their king Aretas III minting coins in Damascus in the style of the Hellenistic Seleucid dynasty and even calling himself Philhellene, an indiction of the growing Greek influence.

This brought them into conflict with Judea, where the two sides met in battle near Philadelphia, today’s Amman, with the Judeans victorious. None of this really mattered, however, since around the same time Octavian had won at Actium and everything was going to change.

The Romans thought they would make friends with the Arabian peoples whose lands provided the incense they desired but ‘should this armed charm offensive fail, the Roman army would have to conquer them’. The contemporary Greek geographer Strabo wrote that Augustus expected ‘either to deal with wealthy friends or to master wealthy enemies’. Yet Roman attempts at incursions into the area were initially unsuccessful, with the army brought down ‘by hunger and fatigue and diseases… the result of the native water and herbs’.

This was the high point of Nabatean glory. Strabo had spent time in the Petra of Obodas III, along with his friend, the Stoic philosopher Athenodorus, and described a cosmopolitan city where ‘many Romans and many other foreigners’ lived.

Strabo was notably impressed that they didn’t indulge in litigation: ‘The natives in every way kept peace with one another’ because they were ‘exceedingly well governed’ by the king who had ‘as Administrator one of his companions, who is called “brother”’.’

The Nabateans held feasts where 13 people drank wine and were entertained by two girl singers. The king’s feasts, Strabo said, were done ‘in magnificent style, but no one drinks more than 11 cupfulls, each time using a different golden cup’ (what Strabo’s idea of a decent drinking session we can only guess at).

Taylor remarks that ‘in this remarkably equal society, even the king was so democratic that, in addition to serving himself, he sometimes even serves the rest himself in his turn’. He also had to give ‘account of hs kingship in the popular assembly… a practice that would have found little sympathy or understanding with Obodas III’s autocratic contemporaries, Herod the Great and the Emperor Augustine.’

What is most notable to modern observers is their approach to slavery. ‘For all their new materialism, Strabo tells us that slaves, so common in the Roman world, were noticeably few among the Nabateans.’ This despite all the many great construction projects, which seemed to be largely built by free residents.

Most of these infrastructure projects concerned water, the preservation of which was essential to their survival, although flash floods could be as dangerous as drought. Taylor writes: 

No detail escaped the scrutiny, decision-making and action of these gifted engineers. First they cut a tunnel through a rocky hill near the entrance to the Siq [gorge]; then they built a dam so that in future flood water would be directed along a subsidiary watercourse that skirts the mountain now known as Jabal al-Khubtha. The main body of this diverted water emerged at the north-east corner of the mountain and, turning west, followed the course of Wadi Mataha which then veered south between high cliffs shortly before reaching the paved street. Here the water was held in a reservoir formed by the construction of a damn wall across the end of the cliffs. At this point beside the street the Nabataeans built their nymphaeum, a fountain house decorated with statues of nymphs that was a basic requirement of all Graeco-Roman cities and was adopted in the oriental world – according to the volume of water in the nymphaeum so the status of a city was stressed.

The Nabateans also seemed to be religiously tolerant, although our understanding is vague. They were fond of non-figurative art but under Alexandrian influence, human images appear, and Taylor speculates that ‘While conservative members of Petra’s population may have disturbed by the wholesale abandonment of their ancient non-figurative tradition, it does not appear to have been an infringement of Nabataean religious laws.’’

Of their own gods we aren’t entirely clear. They seemed to have worshipped a rectangular block, or betyl, as was common among early Semitic peoples. Herodotus wrote that the Arabs had two gods, Orotalt and Alidat, which corresponded with Dionysus and Aphrodite, although Orotalt was a Greek mangling of Ruda, supreme Arab god, pronounced Rudl or Rutl. These two deities were associated respectively with Mercury and Venus, the morning and evening stars, day and night, ‘and these ancient Arabs would certainly have included the nomadic tribe that was soon to become known as the Nabataeans’.

The city still contains two carved reliefs of Isis enthroned, the goddess being identified with the shadowy Nabataean deity al-‘Uzza, one of three prominent goddesses beside Allat and Manat.

It was during this civilisational peak that the Nabateans appear in both Roman and Christian history. John the Baptist’s untimely end had come about because Herod Antipas had grown infatuated with a much younger woman and so discarded his Nabatean wife, outraging her father Aretas. It also scandalised John, not because the new woman on the scene was the king’s niece, which was fine, but because she had previously been married to his brother, a violation of religious rules.

Roman conquest of Judea, including the key port of Gaza from which Nabataean frankincense and myrrh went to Europe, only made the people of Petra richer, something we can guess at as some 80% of all know Nabataean coins are from reign of Aretas IV.

The Romans, predictably, built a new road, the 400km Via Nova Traiana, along the route of the ancient King’s Highway, which stopped on the city between Bostra and Aela (now Aqaba). Meanwhile, the Nabatean royal army was absorbed into the Roman military with six ‘Petraean cohorts’ comprising up to 6,000 men in total.

Such was the Petran skill with water management that even the Romans couldn’t surpass them, and imperial attempts to build new dams met with failure. ‘It was not in the most promising agricultural terrain and the local Nabateans, with their knowledge of the land and expertise in water control, must have laughed silently as they watched the Romans building a series of three great damns in the wadi beside the new town.’

Yet their golden age was already fated to end. Back in 20BC Hippalus, an exceptionally daring Greek merchant, concluded that the varying wind patterns in the Indian Ocean would allow him to sail directly from the mouth of the Red Sea and all the way to India if he chose the right time of year. This would allow traders to source spices from further afield and bypass the slower and more dangerous land routes of Arabia.

During the following centuries Petra had acquired a Christian minority, despite attempts by the local prefect Maximus to have them sent to copper mines. Being remote, however, ‘Petra seems to have acquired a bizarre kind of popularity as a place of exile – for heretics when orthodoxy or another form of heresy ruled, or for charlatans’. Yet the rise of Christianity was another blow to the city, because the early Christians disapproved of incense, although in later centuries this fashion would change.

Petra’s economic position had declined, but the Nabateans had also integrated so much that they ceased to exist as a recognisable people. Their new liturgy was in Greek, and that language replaced Aramaic among its elites, who became indistinguishable from the rest of the empire’s population. ‘The Nabataeans had not so much disappeared as baptized themselves out of recognition, becoming assimilated with the many other ethnic groups who inhabited the old Nabatean Kingdom’.

By the time of the Muslim conquest the city was long in decline, with wealthier and more dynamic residents leaving for better climes. There seemed to be no compulsion to convert, and new churches were even constructed: ‘At Sobata a mosque was built next to the south church, its design carefully adjusted so as not to damage the church, and Muslim and Christian forms of worship were performed side by side in apparent harmony’.

There seemed to be no resistance to Islam, and the author speculates that to many Nabateans, the Muslims of the Hejaz ‘may have felt closer both ethnically and linguistically than their Byzantine masters… Better those Muslim brothers, they may have reasoned, than the divided Byzantines with whom they had no ties of blood and few of culture’.

With its absorption into the caliphate, so in other parts of the Byzantine Empire ‘Nabatean’ now became a pejorative to mean peasant, boor or bastard, perhaps because the Byzantines blamed them for their defeat by the Arabs. ‘It was a tragic degradation for one of the ancient world’s most gifted, magnificent and tolerant people,’ Taylor laments.

Petra was now a shadow of its former self, its water system now defunct, perhaps only able to support a few hundred people. Eventually most of the graves were robbed, and on the Treasury building one can see marks where down the years people have taken pot shots at adornments which they hoped were full of gold (they weren’t). 

There are no references to Petra between the 6^th and 10^th centuries, and from the crusades to the arrival of Burckhardt, ‘Petra appears to have dropped out of western minds and maps’, their written legacy mostly lost to sun and sand, and many of its formerly urban people now semi-nomadic and illiterate.

‘Through these people and their descendants the ancient place names in the area would have been preserved,’ she writes: ‘But as far as the outside world was concerned, a profound silence descended on the ancient capital of the Nabataeans’.