Petra

The Petra region has been inhabited since the Neolithic: villages such as Beidha, north of the site, are among the oldest permanent settlements ever identified. In the Iron Age, the Edomites occupied locations such as the Umm al-Biyara plateau. The Nabataeans made Petra a trading hub around the 4th century BC, and the city flourished as the capital of their kingdom from the 1st century BC.

In 106 AD, Emperor Trajan incorporated the Nabataean kingdom into the Roman Empire as the province of Arabia. Petra retained its importance: it received the title “Metropolis of Arabia” in 114 AD and a visit from Emperor Hadrian in 131 AD, and gained new works such as the 2nd-century Colonnaded Street. A major earthquake in 363 AD destroyed much of the city, which went into decline as trade routes shifted.

In the Byzantine period, churches were built over Nabataean structures—one of them inside the Urn Tomb. By the mid-7th century, Petra was virtually abandoned and came to be known only to the region’s Bedouin; traces of Crusader-era fortifications survive at Al-Habis and Al-Wu’ayra.

In 1812, the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, dressed as an Arab, reached the city and introduced it to the West. Petra was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985 and, on July 7, 2007, was announced in Lisbon as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.

Petra’s architecture fuses Hellenistic-inspired facades with the Nabataean tradition of rock-cut temples and tombs—a meeting of East and West at the dawn of the first millennium AD, according to UNESCO. Equally remarkable is its hydraulic engineering: dams, channels, tunnels, cisterns, and reservoirs captured and conserved seasonal rains, allowing extensive settlement in an essentially arid region.

Petra is also a sacred landscape. The Nabataeans built high places of worship on mountains such as Jabal al-Madhbah, and Jabal Harun is traditionally held to be the burial place of the prophet Aaron, brother of Moses, whose memory is honored at a shrine that has been maintained for centuries.

Petra’s living heritage resides in its Bedouin communities. Tribes such as the Bdul, the Ammarin, and the Sa’idiyyin still use Nabataean cisterns and caves and pass down poetry, stories, and knowledge of flora, fauna, and camel breeding through oral tradition. In 2008, UNESCO inscribed the “Cultural space of the Bedu in Petra and Wadi Rum” on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.