Petra

The most interesting thing about Petran religion is a contradiction the Nabataeans appear to have been entirely comfortable with.

The architecture is Hellenistic. The Khazneh, the Ad-Deir monastery and the tomb facades carry columns, pediments, capitals, urns and figures in a vocabulary borrowed from the Greek east and rendered at enormous scale into the rock face. It is showy, cosmopolitan, and legible to any Mediterranean visitor, which was largely the point, since Petra's wealth came from long-distance trade and its clients came from everywhere.

The gods are not. The characteristic Nabataean cult object is the betyl, from a Semitic root meaning house of god, a plain rectangular block, sometimes with schematic eyes and a nose, most often with nothing at all. Dushara, the principal god, was worshipped in this form. Hundreds of betyls are cut into niches across the site, on the processional routes and at the High Place of Sacrifice on Jebel Madbah. Al-Uzza and Allat were also venerated.

So a people who could commission the Khazneh chose, for their gods, an uncarved block. This was not a failure of skill or a lack of exposure. It was a deliberate aniconism held alongside an enthusiastic adoption of foreign decorative style, and it makes Petra a useful corrective to the assumption that religious and artistic borrowing travel together. The Nabataeans took the architecture and declined the images.

Two later things belong to the entry. Rome annexed the kingdom in AD 106, an earthquake in 363 did serious damage, and the city faded. Johann Ludwig Burckhardt reached it in 1812 by presenting himself as a Muslim traveller wishing to sacrifice at the tomb of Aaron, which is how Petra entered European awareness.

And the Bdoul, a Bedouin community, lived in the caves and tombs for generations. On the site's inscription as a World Heritage property in 1985 they were relocated to a purpose-built village at Umm Sayhoun. What was promised in exchange, and whether it was delivered, remains disputed within the community, which still works in the site as guides, traders and cameleers. The removal of a living population in order to preserve a monument is a recurring heritage problem, and Petra is one of its standard examples.

Petra survived in the desert partly because its builders solved a water problem most desert cities never fully crack, and it survived in Western awareness only after a Swiss traveller pretended to be someone he was not.

Water in a place that should not have enough

The Nabataeans built an extensive system of channels, cisterns, dams and terracotta pipes to capture, store and distribute seasonal flash flood water and natural springs, engineering sophisticated enough to sustain a large urban population in an otherwise arid environment, a practical achievement that made the settlement viable in the first place, well before the elaborate rock-cut facades most visitors now associate with the site.

Rediscovered by disguise

The site had never actually been lost to the local Bedouin population, but it was unknown to European scholarship until the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt visited in 1812, travelling in disguise as a Muslim pilgrim in order to gain access to an area otherwise closed to outside visitors, and his published account is generally credited with introducing Petra to Western audiences.

As this entry's companion article covers

The betyls, or god-blocks, carved as abstract representations of Nabataean deities and found behind and alongside the site's more famous Hellenistic and Roman-style classical facades, are addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.