Chapter 2: Petra – city of pink stone
You always come to Petra from the east, and you always come on foot – or perhaps on a camel. The road to Petra is too narrow for a car. For the last two kilometres, you travel through a mountain, and the road is only five metres across. But the walls on both sides of the road are hundreds of metres high. This is the entrance to Petra, and it is called the Siq.
When you visit Petra, you walk through the Siq. And when you come to the end of the Siq, you see the most beautiful building in the world. It is called the Khazneh (the Treasury). It is tall, and it is made of pink stone – but you can only see the front of the Khazneh. The rest of the building is inside the mountain. People made the building two thousand years ago, but they did not build it -they cut it into the mountain.
About 2,500 years ago, a group of Arab people called the Nabataeans moved to south Jordan. They made their capital city at Petra, in the mountains. It was a good place for a city. First, it was good place for a market. Petra was on the old road between Egypt and Arabia (to the south) and Syria, Greece, and Rome (to the north). Travellers came along this road with things to sell, like gold and spices. Second, it was a good place to defend. The mountains around Petra were stronger than any walls. And third, there was water. The Nabataeans were very good builders. They made dams to hold the water, and long canals to move it
around the city. Two thousand years ago, Petra was a rich and important city with strong, beautiful buildings, and thousands of people living there. Now no one lives there, and the city has gone. What happened?
The Nabataeans began to build Petra in about 400 BC. But then, in the year AD 363, there was a terrible earthquake, which destroyed much of the city. Two hundred years after that, in AD 551, there was another bad earthquake. People moved away from Petra, and they stopped using the road for business. They began to use ships – not camels – to carry their spices and gold. And the world forgot about Petra for more than a thousand years.
But Petra is still there. The earthquakes destroyed the buildings on the land, but they did not destroy the buildings in the mountains. Many of these beautiful buildings are tombs – places for dead bodies. They are empty now, but you can still visit more than 500 of them. At the far end of Petra is a tomb called the Monastery, which is 50 metres high. But it is the beautiful pink stone front of the Treasury that is in everybody’s photos of Petra. At the very top of the Treasury is a stone urn (like a large stone cup). For hundreds of years, people thought that there was treasure in the urn. They shot their guns at it, trying to get the treasure inside it. But of course there is no treasure in the Treasury or in the other tombs. The treasure of Petra is the city itself – the city of pink stone.