Asia, Globe | Subterranean Sites
Built sometime around 1550-1292 B.C. as a capital city for the Nabataeans, an ancient Semetic peoples, Petra is perhaps one of the most astonishing wonders of the ancient world. It lay undiscovered to the modern western world until 1812.
But as high as the reputation of Petra is, the reality surpasses it. The great postcard images of the Treasury, the Monastery, the water channels in the Siq (approach canyon) do not convey the main events of the experience of visiting it, which are: the sequence of arrival, the overpowering geology (endless towering convoluted rocks), the enormous scale (hundreds of monumental-geological tombs going on for miles), and how manifestly yet to be discovered most of the city really is.
The approach to Petra takes almost an hour on foot. Before one enters the Siq (Siq translates to “shaft” and is the narrow gorge entrance to the city of Petra) a few scattered rock tombs introduce the terms of monumental Nabatean discourse — huge cubical forms cut out of vivid sandstone, cliff faces sculpted smooth and vertical with spare bas relief motifs of five ascending steps and Greek-column forms, and abyssal black tomb openings.
Thus prepped and taut with anticipation, one enters the Siq — as narrow, high, extravagant, and nervous-making as the slot canyons of the American southwest. One enters from its top, so the walk is gently downhill, easy and inviting. It it both a wild canyon and profoundly civilized. On each side of the narrow flood-sculpted passageway (sometimes 1 feet wide, 200 feet deep) is a waist-high ancient water channel, carved swervingly along the cliff curves. One was for agriculture, the other for people and animals.
It is conspicuously brilliant hydrology.
There begins to be architectural elements — carved niches almost worn away, bench forms, a watering trough for animals, and — recently discovered — the feet and legs of a realistically sculpted man leading two camels down the Siq, just larger than life size.
You keep anticipating the famous first glimpse of the Treasury framed at the end of the Siq. When it comes, your camera leaps into your hand. Okay! Consummation! Then the surprises begin.
The scale is all wrong. The Treasury is as beautifully shaped, well preserved, and sandy pink as expected, but it is not jewel-like at all. It towers WAY up over you and a day of awe induced neck-craning begins. Inside the large entrance is a vast, perfect cube of space inside the mountain. The ceiling is not arched but absolutely horizontal, 50 feet by 50 feet.
The Treasury is truly amazing, a revelation, but without the Siq leading down to it, it would be merely impressive. Once into Petra the city begins, first a lengthy necropolis of tombs in the widening canyon, then signs of the once-living metropolitan area of 30,000 people. The tombs vie with each other for massiveness, reaching far up the mountains on each side, crowding and overlapping — a teeming, almost overpopulated necropolis.
The fantastic natural rock landscape is so extensively carved, and so much of the carving is so eroded that it looks natural, your eyes can’t stop examining every rock surface near and far, parsing artificial from natural and delighting the more in both.
There are modern amenities in this ancient city, provided by resident Bedouin children and adults. Coffee, camel rides in the canyon, burro rides to the peaks, some books (purveyed by a New Zealand lady who married into the Petra Bedouin) are all available. Past ever grander tombs, a Roman colonnade, a Byzantine church (discovered in 1992), a huge free-standing temple, is lunch and a museum.
A few miles away and very much worth visiting is “Little Petra”, the fountainhead of the whole Nabatean complex — a hydrological masterpiece of water channels, stone stairways, huge echoing cisterns, and dwelling caves.
A hymn of water and rock, ancient and modern, the dead and the living, ultimately, Petra is indescribable.
In conjunction with the Long Now Foundation. Modified from original video and text by Stewart Brand at the Long Now Blog.
