Petra Trivia
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49 free Petra trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Petra was lost to the West for six centuries until a Swiss traveller talked his way in with a goat, and its most famous façade is a tomb that legend turned into a treasury. This quiz covers the rock city from the Neolithic farmers of Beidha and the Edomites through the Nabataeans who called it Raqmu, their incense trade, cisterns and dams, Aretas IV, the Siq, the Treasury's Castor and Pollux, the 800 steps to the Monastery, the theatre and the garden pool. It then follows Rome and after: the annexation of 106, Trajan's road, Hadrian's coins, Palmyra's rise, the earthquake of 363, the Byzantine papyri, Crusaders and Baibars, Burckhardt's disguise, David Roberts, Burgon's rose-red line, National Geographic, UNESCO, the Bedul, Little Petra, Hegra and the Indiana Jones Grail temple. Easy questions suit anyone who has seen the Treasury on a screen; the expert tier asks for emperors, sultans and step counts. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Petra, the Nabataeans and the site's monuments, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Jordan and on the Seven Wonders.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Petra lies in the south of which modern country?
Jordan
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.
Q 02What does the Greek word Petra mean?
Rock
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.
Q 03What did the Nabataeans themselves call Petra?
Raqmu
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.
Q 04Petra is called the Rose City for the colour of which stone, the cliffs it is carved from?
Sandstone
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.
Q 05Whose successors sent an army to plunder the Nabataeans' desert stronghold?
Alexander
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.
Q 06Which crime novelist set Appointment with Death among the ruins of Petra?
Agatha Christie
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.
Q 07Al-Khazneh may be the tomb of Aretas IV, whose governor tried to seize which apostle?
Paul
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.
Q 08Al-Khazneh is known in English by what name?
The Treasury
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.
Q 09What is the name of the narrow gorge that leads into Petra, meaning 'shaft'?
The Siq
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.
Q 10From which body of water did the Nabataeans gather bitumen to sell to Egypt?
The Dead Sea
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.
Q 11How did archaeologists in 2016 find a huge, unknown monumental platform just south of Petra's centre?
With satellite images
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".
Q 12Which twin Greek gods, protectors of travellers, appear near the bottom of the Al-Khazneh façade?
Castor and Pollux
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.
Q 13Which of Petra's giant façades stands at the top of a climb of about 800 steps?
Q 21What natural disaster in 363 destroyed many buildings and crippled Petra's water system?
An earthquake
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.
Q 22What find in a Petra church showed the city was still thriving in the 6th century?
A cache of charred scrolls
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.
Q 23Which two deities were the chief gods of Petra?
Dushara and al-Uzza
The Monastery
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.
Q 14In which language, the common written tongue of the ancient Near East, are Petra's tomb inscriptions carved?
Aramaic
Aramaic. Many of the epitaphs double as legal notices, listing who may be buried inside and threatening anyone else with fines or curses.
Q 15How did the Nabataeans of Petra first picture their gods?
As plain blocks
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.
Q 16Excavations showed that the supposed market in the middle of Petra was really what?
A pool and garden
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.
Q 17How did the Nabataeans keep the desert city of Petra supplied with water?
Channels and cisterns
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.
Q 18Which Roman emperor, who annexed Nabataea in 106, built a new highway through Petra to the Red Sea?
Trajan
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.
Q 19Which Roman emperor visited Petra in 130 and gave the city his own name as a title?
Hadrian
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.
Q 20Which rival caravan city drew the Arab trade away from Petra in the 2nd and 3rd centuries?
Palmyra
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.
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.
Q 24Which traveller rediscovered Petra for the West in 1812?
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt
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.
Q 25How did Petra's rediscoverer pass safely among the Bedouin in 1812?
As a Muslim pilgrim
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.
Q 26The man who rediscovered Petra in 1812 was on his way to explore which African river?
The Niger
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.
Q 27Which Scottish painter visited Petra in 1839 and published sketches of the Holy Land and Egypt?
David Roberts
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.
Q 28A Victorian prize poem famously called Petra "a rose-red city half as old as" what?
Time
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.
Q 29Which film used Petra's Al-Khazneh as the temple hiding the Holy Grail?
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
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.
Q 30Petra's caravan road ran south to a port on which gulf?
The Gulf of Aqaba
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.