49 Fun Facts About Petra

Petra lies in the south of which modern country?

Jordan. Petra stood where the caravan roads from Arabia met those to Gaza and Damascus, which is how a desert people grew rich enough to carve it.

What does the Greek word Petra mean?

Rock. The name fits a city that was carved more than it was built: its great tombs and halls were cut straight out of the cliffs.

What did the Nabataeans themselves call Petra?

Raqmu. Josephus, writing in the first century, said the whole Arabian nation still used that name, Arecem in his spelling, after the king who was supposed to have built the city.

Petra is called the Rose City for the colour of which stone, the cliffs it is carved from?

Sandstone. Flash floods and salt are steadily wearing the carved façades away, and so are visitors: at Al-Khazneh the surface has receded where hands touch and lean on the walls.

Whose successors sent an army to plunder the Nabataeans' desert stronghold?

Alexander. In 312 BC one of his successors, Antigonus, sent an army to plunder the Nabataeans' mountain stronghold; they chased the raiders down and all but wiped them out.

Which crime novelist set Appointment with Death among the ruins of Petra?

Agatha Christie. She knew the Middle East at first hand from travelling with her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, and sent her victim to die on a tourist trip to Petra.

Al-Khazneh may be the tomb of Aretas IV, whose governor tried to seize which apostle?

Paul. He wrote that the governor under King Aretas had Damascus watched in order to arrest him, and that he was let down in a basket through a window in the wall.

Al-Khazneh is known in English by what name?

The Treasury. Bedouin legend said the stone urn on its façade hid a pharaoh's gold, and the bullet scars left by hopeful treasure hunters can still be seen.

What is the name of the narrow gorge that leads into Petra, meaning 'shaft'?

The Siq. It was torn open by movements of the earth, not cut by a river: a cleft 1.2 kilometres long and in places only three or four metres wide.

From which body of water did the Nabataeans gather bitumen to sell to Egypt?

The Dead Sea. Lumps of asphalt floated to its surface, and Egypt bought it for embalming; when a Greek army came to take over the harvest, Arab archers on reed rafts shot it to pieces.

How did archaeologists in 2016 find a huge, unknown monumental platform just south of Petra's centre?

With satellite images. The platform, some 56 metres long, lay less than a kilometre from the centre of the site; the paper announcing it was titled "Hiding in Plain Sight".

Which twin Greek gods, protectors of travellers, appear near the bottom of the Al-Khazneh façade?

Castor and Pollux. The twins were said to live by turns on Olympus and in the underworld, which suits a façade whose other figures, eagles and axe-wielding Amazons among them, belong to the afterlife.

Which of Petra's giant façades stands at the top of a climb of about 800 steps?

The Monastery. An inscription found nearby names "Obodat the god", which may tie the hall to the cult of a deified Nabataean king, and crosses cut inside suggest that Christians later used it as a church.

In which language, the common written tongue of the ancient Near East, are Petra's tomb inscriptions carved?

Aramaic. Many of the epitaphs double as legal notices, listing who may be buried inside and threatening anyone else with fines or curses.

How did the Nabataeans of Petra first picture their gods?

As plain blocks. Featureless blocks and pillars of stone stood for the gods at first; only later, under Greek and Roman influence, did they take on human faces.

Excavations showed that the supposed market in the middle of Petra was really what?

A pool and garden. A swimming pool with a pavilion on an island in the middle was a deliberate show of wealth in a desert city where every drop of water counted.

How did the Nabataeans keep the desert city of Petra supplied with water?

Channels and cisterns. Engineers piped in springs from outside the city and caught the rare rains behind dams, turning the flash floods that threatened Petra into its reserve.

Which Roman emperor, who annexed Nabataea in 106, built a new highway through Petra to the Red Sea?

Trajan. His new road followed the old Nabataean caravan track from the Syrian border to the Red Sea, and Roman traffic along it revived the trade.

Which Roman emperor visited Petra in 130 and gave the city his own name as a title?

Hadrian. Petra styled itself Hadriane from then on, but unlike Jerash, where his visit set off a wave of building, it gained little beyond the name.

Which rival caravan city drew the Arab trade away from Petra in the 2nd and 3rd centuries?

Palmyra. As caravans swung north through the Syrian oasis and more cargo went by ship up the Red Sea, Petra's tolls dried up, and it lingered on mainly as a religious centre.

What natural disaster in 363 destroyed many buildings and crippled Petra's water system?

An earthquake. The same shocks damaged towns as far off as Galilee; Petra struggled on, but after another quake centuries later its people moved away to settlements nearer the springs.

What find in a Petra church showed the city was still thriving in the 6th century?

A cache of charred scrolls. A fire that should have destroyed some 140 papyri carbonised and preserved them: the marriage, inheritance and property papers of one well-off family.

Which two deities were the chief gods of Petra?

Dushara and al-Uzza. A 4th-century bishop, Epiphanius, recorded that the people of Petra still kept a feast for Dushara, born, they said, of a virgin mother.

Which traveller rediscovered Petra for the West in 1812?

Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Alone and, as he wrote, without protection where no traveller had been seen before, he did not dare linger, and was led through the ruins in a single day.

How did Petra's rediscoverer pass safely among the Bedouin in 1812?

As a Muslim pilgrim. Calling himself Sheikh Ibrahim, he told his guide he had vowed to sacrifice a goat at a tomb on a nearby mountain, which gave him a reason to be led past the ruins.

The man who rediscovered Petra in 1812 was on his way to explore which African river?

The Niger. A British society had hired him to reach it overland from Cairo; his years in the Middle East were meant as practice, and he died in Cairo still waiting for the caravan.

Which Scottish painter visited Petra in 1839 and published sketches of the Holy Land and Egypt?

David Roberts. He had started out as a house painter's apprentice and then painted scenery for a circus and the Edinburgh theatres before his eastern sketches, turned into lithographs, made his name.

A Victorian prize poem famously called Petra "a rose-red city half as old as" what?

Time. John William Burgon won Oxford's Newdigate Prize with the poem, lifted its closing phrase from an older poet, Samuel Rogers, and had never set eyes on Petra.

Which film used Petra's Al-Khazneh as the temple hiding the Holy Grail?

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Only the façade is real: behind the doorway is a plain, empty chamber, so the Grail temple's interior was built at a studio in England.

Petra's caravan road ran south to a port on which gulf?

The Gulf of Aqaba. Its port, about 100 kilometres to the south, was the Nabataeans' door to the sea, and the Roman highway that later replaced their camel track ended there too.

Where in Petra did the Bedul Bedouin live until the 1980s?

In its caves. Most of the tribe was moved from the ancient caves and tombs to a newly built village as Petra was being listed as a World Heritage Site, and many now work among the ruins in tourism.

Which nearby town, whose name means 'Valley of Moses', hosts most of Petra's hotels?

Local folklore says Moses struck a stone here to bring forth water.

Whose tomb, according to tradition, sits on a mountain above Petra?

Aaron, brother of Moses. The belief kept the peak holy long after the city below was forgotten: Byzantine Christians built a church there, and a white-domed Mamluk shrine crowns it today.

Little Petra, a Nabataean suburb north of the city, keeps the finest surviving example of Nabataean what?

Painted frescoes. Vines, flowers, birds and cupids cover the ceiling of a dining room cut into the cliff, probably in honour of Dionysus and his wine; conservators finished cleaning them in 2010.

Beidha, a village just north of Petra, held some of the earliest known what, by 7000 BC?

Farmers. Beidha's villagers were building in stone and raising crops some 9,000 years ago, in a Stone Age culture that had not yet begun to make pottery.

Which people occupied the Petra area in the Iron Age before the Nabataeans?

The Edomites. Pushed west into southern Judah, they became the Idumaeans of Greek and Roman times, while the Nabataeans built a kingdom in the land they had left.

Aretas IV of Petra went to war with which ruler of Galilee, who had divorced his daughter?

Herod Antipas. He cast off the Nabataean princess to marry Herodias; John the Baptist lost his head for denouncing the match, and Aretas marched in and routed Herod's army.

Which modern script emerged from the Nabataeans' cursive alphabet?

Arabic. Nabataean scribes joined their letters with loops and ligatures, probably to write faster, and in the centuries after the kingdom fell that running hand grew into the Arabic alphabet.

Hegra, the Nabataeans' second city, with more than 100 tombs cut like Petra's, lies in which modern country?

Saudi Arabia. Now called Mada'in Salih, the site long had a name as a cursed place: the Quran tells of a people there destroyed for idolatry after rejecting the prophet Salih.

Which goods from southern Arabia made the Nabataeans rich as caravan traders?

Frankincense, myrrh and spices. A Greek historian noted that a people barely ten thousand strong had grown richer than all their neighbours simply by carrying them to the Mediterranean.

Who built castles at Petra in the 12th century, only to abandon them before the century was out?

The Crusaders. King Baldwin I of Jerusalem took the valley soon after the First Crusade; the forts were lost by 1189, and when the sultan Baibars rode through a century later he found only ruins.

Which magazine published Archibald Forder's photographs of Petra in December 1909?

National Geographic. It was in an issue of the same magazine that Hergé saw the Al-Khazneh façade he copied for the emir's hideaway in the Tintin adventure The Red Sea Sharks.

Queen Rania campaigned for Petra in a 2007 worldwide poll that named it one of what?

The New 7 Wonders of the World. Petra was voted in beside the Taj Mahal and Machu Picchu in a global phone and internet poll, though nothing stopped people voting as often as they liked.

What did Brown University's excavators find at the heart of Petra's Great Temple?

A small theatre. Some 600 seats fill the space where a shrine ought to be, which has left scholars arguing over whether the "temple" was a council hall or a temple at all.

Which emperor raised Petra to the rank of Roman colony early in the 3rd century?

Elagabalus. The Syrian-born teenager handed out the honour during his four-year reign, yet within a generation Petra had stopped minting coins and carving grand tombs.

The explorer who rediscovered Petra went on, months later, to find which Egyptian temple half buried in sand?

Abu Simbel. He could not dig out the entrance himself, but he told the Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni about it, and Belzoni cleared the sand and got inside four years later.

Rome's new road through Petra followed a far older route, known by what name in the Book of Numbers?

The King's Highway. In Numbers the Israelites promise to keep to it, touching no field, vineyard or well, and are still refused passage; a modern Jordanian highway on the same line still carries the name.

Which biblical name did an old theory try to identify with Petra?

Sela. The Hebrew word means the same as the Greek name, which is why the match tempted scholars; others place the biblical Sela at a crag elsewhere in the same hills, near Tafila.

Which of Petra's Royal Tombs was turned into a church in the 5th century?

The Urn Tomb. A Greek inscription in red paint on the wall of its great chamber records the day Bishop Jason consecrated it, turning a Nabataean tomb into a church.