The Rock That Traded the World

Three hundred twelve years before our era. A camel caravan winds through the Siq, a narrow gorge with two hundred metres of sheer rock rising on either side, packs loaded with pepper and myrrh. The air smells of hot sandstone. Ahead, a rose-coloured facade as tall as a ten-storey building rises straight out of the mountain. This wasn't built. It was carved out of solid rock — Corinthian columns, Egyptian eagles, Eastern ornament, all cut from a single block of stone.

Look closely at that facade. It isn't really about art — it's about money. The Nabataeans controlled the crossing point of two great Middle Eastern trade routes here: one running from the Red Sea to Damascus, the other from the Persian Gulf to Gaza, on the Mediterranean coast. Through Petra passed pepper from India, frankincense from Arabia, ivory from Africa, cloth from Egypt. The Nabataeans charged tolls, protected the merchants, and — this was the real trick — sold water in the middle of the desert. A system of channels, cut straight into the rock of the Siq, kept as many as twenty thousand people alive here.

But once, in the early centuries of our era, sea routes overtook the overland ones, the money moved to the ports, and Petra emptied out. For centuries the sands hid it, and local Bedouin kept strangers away with tales of cursed treasure. Then, in eighteen twelve, a Swiss traveller named Johann Burckhardt, disguised as a pilgrim, talked his guides into showing him "old tombs" — and Europeans laid eyes on a city they had thought was a legend.

Today only fifteen percent of the site has been excavated. The other eighty-five percent still lies underground. A city that once vanished completely hasn't fully come back yet.

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