The last crusade

Indian Jones goes flying past on a horse in an attempt to reach the Holy Grail before the Nazi’s do. His horse is going as fast as it can through narrow trails in the cliffs and he finally reaches his destination, a huge building carved out of the side of a mountain…

This huge building is the treasury at Petra, an ancient Nabataean City in the middle of Jordan. 2000 years ago Petra was the largest trading center in the Middle East. Travelers came from African, Europe, China, India, and the rest of Arabia to trade goods in the market places in this giant stone city. It’s believed that 30,000 people lived in Petra year round and that many hundreds of thousands more passed through each year. As you all may know the Middle East is a big desert, thus without a lot of planning large masses of people cannot live in one area because there is not enough water. This was not a problem in Petra because the Nabataeans carved massive rain troughs that lead to large cisterns out of the sand stone cliffs that the city was built in. This and some well-hidden natural springs provide enough water for the locals and all of the traders that came through. Despite the abundance of water visitors did not get it cheaply, the Nabataeans make as much profit from selling water as they did trade (this might not be true but they did make a lot off of water).


Around 100 AD Petra, like most of the rest of the known world, came under control of the Roman Empire. The Romans did not take it in battle but negotiated control of the city. Essentially they called it part of the Roman Empire and made profit off of the city but life did not change for the average citizen. In the forth century Petra was under control of the Byzantine Empire (The Roman/Catholic Empire) and in the 5th century a large Christian Church was built. The church is now known as the mosaic because of the tile mosaics on the floor of the church. The beginning of the end for the city of Petra was in 363 when a large earthquake destroyed a lot of the city. This combined with change in culture and trade caused the Petra to go from a metropolis to a ghost town unknown to the rest of the world for 1500 years.

The city of Petra is currently only about 25% excavated but in this 25% there are some very large very beautiful buildings. The whole city was carved out of the side of the mountain yet the artistry and architecture is still amazing. The inside of treasure room, along with all of the other large buildings, is perfectly square with all the corners at perfect 90 angles. What surprised me about these buildings is that most of them have only one room. They carve out one huge room and then that’s it. I don’t know if its because structure is less stable if more rooms or made, or if their culture didn’t need more than one room but either way I did not expect that.

When we entered Petra we had to walk for about a mile before we reached the treasury, which is the first building when you enter the city. As we continued from there were many large buildings. They largest building in the city is the temple. The temple area was where they had town meetings, held elections, and other things similar to that. The excavation of this site is being down by Brown University and the man in charge happened to be there when we were so he told us some of the details about what they have done. Around the edges of the temple there were large stone pillar with 4 elephant heads at the top. He told us that they have excavated 660 elephant heads so far. Overall the temple was very cool stop as we walked through the city.

From the temple we continued walking through the city until we reached the point where it became much more difficult to walk. From there we walked an hour uphill, at noon, in about 110 degree heat to reach a large temple on top of a mountain. I don’t know why such a remote place was chosen for a temple but it was a great site to see. After a short break 2 of us broke off from the rest of the group and went on our own adventure. We walked down the mountain to the mosaic, and then to the home of the 4th century bishop that lived in the city. The two of us had talked about how we wanted to find real treasure and adventure so we just wandered away from the main area and into the desert. We had learned that there were still lots of coins from when it was a trade center so we were hoping to find some. We didn’t find any coins but we did find lots of 2000-year-old pottery. This was really cool. The pottery was not just left sitting around, so what we think happened was at some point grave robbers had come searching for treasure and in the process broke a bunch of pottery and left it above the ground. To see artifacts from such an ancient civilization was truly amazing. From the desert we wandered back to the treasury and then walked back to the hotel, over all it was a 7 or 8 mile day.

Hope you enjoyed, the next one will be on marine biology!!!