There is still much to learn of Petra. It was somehow connected to Jesus and the early Christians. The Magi who visited the baby Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh may have been from Petra. It might have been the location of Jesus' desert fast and temptation by Satan. His positioning at the tip of the temple might well have been on one of the buildings carved from the cliffs of Petra. Furthermore, Petra was where the Christians of Jerusalem took refuge from the siege of Jerusalem by the Roman armies. It has been said that no Christians were killed in the destruction of Jerusalem when millions of Jews were killed by famine, plague, and warfare then. They had been warned by Jesus in the Olivette Discourse written about by Matthew, Mark, and Luke and expanded in the Revelation to John from Patmos. There were details of events leading up to and included in the three-and-a-half-year siege that gave them fair warning to flee from the destruction. The Revelation was written when Nero was still alive as well as many from the audience at the Mount of Olives discourse.
You're right, Jesse - there is so much still to learn. It's amazing to think that archaeologists have only excavated about 15% of Petra, even though they've been digging for decades. And they've only got started relatively recently on the Nabataean sites in Saudi Arabia. So plenty more to discover!
And a great story about that bloke, Arthur Flowerdew!
‘persons who were acquainted with the Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Latin, Armenian, Turkish, English, Illyrican, German and Bohemian languages’ is just another way of saying he's gott friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan, he speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom, he'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see him again. With any luck, he's got the Grail already.
There's an interesting theory that Petra is actually the "original" Mecca (and the current one in Saudi Arabia is the result of a bit of forceful narrative management after one of Islam's early civil wars). It's very much out there, with no mainstream academic support... but it's also the kind of theory it would be dangerous to investigate from a position of authority.
It's essentially the hobby theory of one man, Dan Gibson, a child of missionaries who grew up in Jordan, who has a deep passion for Arabic culture and the Nabataeans in particular. His intentions seem honest, his knowledge deep, and the circumstantial evidence he presents enough to make me wonder.
One unrelated gem on ancient Arabia from his site (nabataea.net): Ancient Arabian merchants apparently solved the problem of longitude over a millennium before the marine chronometer. How? Through poetry. As they walked, they recited massive poems, with a known number of verses, reciting one word per pace. Whenever they stopped, they could check which part of the poem they were on - i.e., word 5, verse 15,348 - determine the number of implied paces, multiply by the length of the average pace, and calculate exactly how far they had walked. As long as they walked in a straight line, took measure of when the line changed direction, and referenced the latitude via the stars, they could confidently walk across the entire desert without getting lost.
Again, no idea if that's actually true. But I want it to be.
My favourite reference to Petra is Agatha Christie's "Appointment with Death", which occurs in Petra. There is a passage as the protagonist, Dr Sarah King, arrives for the first time in the city, on donkey, through a cleft in the rock. Christie's writing here is masterful, and she fuses the awe in King as she takes in the setting with the growing dread she feels on catching sight of what she takes to be "some sort of idol" balefully glaring down from a cave mouth. It's not an idol, of course, but something much more malevolent. Wonderful book. The BBC/Enid Williams radio production from the 1990s, on Audible, is a great listen with a fantastic cast.
'It’s a curious story, and since Flowerdew died in 2002, we’ll never know what he knew.
You're very generous, Ed, and it is indeed a fascinating story, as all such stories are, precisely because they hold out hope that our leaden ideas or how the world actually works might not be so ironclad after all. And who wants to be called a closed-minded dogmatist? Not me! Also it's nice to imagine that there really might be a winter wonderland behind the wardrobe, little people could be living under the floorboards and death isn't really death but re-birth (usually from ancient Petra or Alexandria rather than 1920's Rochdale).
Still, my own jaded, joyless guess as to how much Flowerdew knew would be something close to zero, and I would have him down as a fantasist rather than a fraud, simply because most people are, as seen by the reaction of 'experts' to his claim. Or maybe they were just kindly people thinking, 'Ah, the poor old sod will be dead soon. Let him have a bit of glory'.
Of course, if it ever does turn out that there really are little people living under our floorboards, that is of no real long-term help to any of us. A week after their discovery, they would be no more interesting to us than the Pigmies of Africa. Narnia would quickly become just another place on our maps, easier to reach than Melbourne, and heaven would become just a guaranteed extension of life down here, but with everything somehow lighter and brighter. Like the seaside. Therefore best for all of us that such ideas remain in that limbo-land between reality and fantasy, neither proven nor disproven.
Some things can still fire my imagination. One minute we are happily playing in the trees with the other chimps and next minute we are using incense and myrrh, carving amazing (though ultimately pointless) facades in desert rock, securing the city's water supply and learning to juggle. Quite how we got from one state of affairs to the other isn't obvious to me - presumably because I can't imagine what 6 million years looks like.
There is still much to learn of Petra. It was somehow connected to Jesus and the early Christians. The Magi who visited the baby Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh may have been from Petra. It might have been the location of Jesus' desert fast and temptation by Satan. His positioning at the tip of the temple might well have been on one of the buildings carved from the cliffs of Petra. Furthermore, Petra was where the Christians of Jerusalem took refuge from the siege of Jerusalem by the Roman armies. It has been said that no Christians were killed in the destruction of Jerusalem when millions of Jews were killed by famine, plague, and warfare then. They had been warned by Jesus in the Olivette Discourse written about by Matthew, Mark, and Luke and expanded in the Revelation to John from Patmos. There were details of events leading up to and included in the three-and-a-half-year siege that gave them fair warning to flee from the destruction. The Revelation was written when Nero was still alive as well as many from the audience at the Mount of Olives discourse.
You're right, Jesse - there is so much still to learn. It's amazing to think that archaeologists have only excavated about 15% of Petra, even though they've been digging for decades. And they've only got started relatively recently on the Nabataean sites in Saudi Arabia. So plenty more to discover!
And a great story about that bloke, Arthur Flowerdew!
‘persons who were acquainted with the Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Latin, Armenian, Turkish, English, Illyrican, German and Bohemian languages’ is just another way of saying he's gott friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan, he speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom, he'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see him again. With any luck, he's got the Grail already.
hahaha. Wish I'd thought of that.
One of my favourite lines in any film.
Possibly written by Tom Stoppard, as he worked as a script doctor on the film.
Ah, Marcus....the C3PO of the Indiana Jones franchise.
The Cultural Tutor has a new thread on Baroque Architecture:
https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1789048016353030460
It's no wonder that Oswald Spengler considered this period the "Summer" of Western Civilization!
It's fascinating to think that Petra was still inhabited as late as the Rise of Islam.
Here is a recent book on the Aramaic language: https://books.google.ca/books?id=wuP9DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=aramaic+language&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=aramaic%20language&f=false
There's an interesting theory that Petra is actually the "original" Mecca (and the current one in Saudi Arabia is the result of a bit of forceful narrative management after one of Islam's early civil wars). It's very much out there, with no mainstream academic support... but it's also the kind of theory it would be dangerous to investigate from a position of authority.
It's essentially the hobby theory of one man, Dan Gibson, a child of missionaries who grew up in Jordan, who has a deep passion for Arabic culture and the Nabataeans in particular. His intentions seem honest, his knowledge deep, and the circumstantial evidence he presents enough to make me wonder.
One unrelated gem on ancient Arabia from his site (nabataea.net): Ancient Arabian merchants apparently solved the problem of longitude over a millennium before the marine chronometer. How? Through poetry. As they walked, they recited massive poems, with a known number of verses, reciting one word per pace. Whenever they stopped, they could check which part of the poem they were on - i.e., word 5, verse 15,348 - determine the number of implied paces, multiply by the length of the average pace, and calculate exactly how far they had walked. As long as they walked in a straight line, took measure of when the line changed direction, and referenced the latitude via the stars, they could confidently walk across the entire desert without getting lost.
Again, no idea if that's actually true. But I want it to be.
wow. It's a great story at any rate.
Tom Holland's book on Islam made some convincing arguments that Mecca was not the original birthplace.
My favourite reference to Petra is Agatha Christie's "Appointment with Death", which occurs in Petra. There is a passage as the protagonist, Dr Sarah King, arrives for the first time in the city, on donkey, through a cleft in the rock. Christie's writing here is masterful, and she fuses the awe in King as she takes in the setting with the growing dread she feels on catching sight of what she takes to be "some sort of idol" balefully glaring down from a cave mouth. It's not an idol, of course, but something much more malevolent. Wonderful book. The BBC/Enid Williams radio production from the 1990s, on Audible, is a great listen with a fantastic cast.
I've never read that, I should get out for my next holiday. Always enjoy reading Christie
Cannot understand writing ‘the most-well known’. Most-well = best! Would you write ‘most-badly known’ - or worst?
'It’s a curious story, and since Flowerdew died in 2002, we’ll never know what he knew.
You're very generous, Ed, and it is indeed a fascinating story, as all such stories are, precisely because they hold out hope that our leaden ideas or how the world actually works might not be so ironclad after all. And who wants to be called a closed-minded dogmatist? Not me! Also it's nice to imagine that there really might be a winter wonderland behind the wardrobe, little people could be living under the floorboards and death isn't really death but re-birth (usually from ancient Petra or Alexandria rather than 1920's Rochdale).
Still, my own jaded, joyless guess as to how much Flowerdew knew would be something close to zero, and I would have him down as a fantasist rather than a fraud, simply because most people are, as seen by the reaction of 'experts' to his claim. Or maybe they were just kindly people thinking, 'Ah, the poor old sod will be dead soon. Let him have a bit of glory'.
Of course, if it ever does turn out that there really are little people living under our floorboards, that is of no real long-term help to any of us. A week after their discovery, they would be no more interesting to us than the Pigmies of Africa. Narnia would quickly become just another place on our maps, easier to reach than Melbourne, and heaven would become just a guaranteed extension of life down here, but with everything somehow lighter and brighter. Like the seaside. Therefore best for all of us that such ideas remain in that limbo-land between reality and fantasy, neither proven nor disproven.
Some things can still fire my imagination. One minute we are happily playing in the trees with the other chimps and next minute we are using incense and myrrh, carving amazing (though ultimately pointless) facades in desert rock, securing the city's water supply and learning to juggle. Quite how we got from one state of affairs to the other isn't obvious to me - presumably because I can't imagine what 6 million years looks like.