Petra

Jordan
Petra (the name means rock) in southern Jordan lies about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of the Dead Sea on the border of the mountainous Wadi Araba Desert. Although there is evidence of earlier occupation of the site, the city was founded around the sixth century b.c. as the practically inaccessible capital of the Nabataean Arabs who dominated the region and controlled international trade routes between Asia, southern Arabia, and the markets of the Mediterranean basin. Wealthy and powerful Petra was partly built, partly carved from the beautiful pink sandstone of its mountain fastness. Its remarkable buildings, representing the hybridization of several cultural sources over almost a millennium, make it one of the great architectural achievements of history. When it was added to UNESCOs World Heritage List in 1985, it was acclaimed as one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world, where ancient Eastern traditions blend with Hellenistic architecture. Added to that distinction must be the Nabataeans hydraulic engineering achievements, comprising extensive water-conservation systems and sophisticated measures to avoid flooding of their city. Following unsuccessful attempts by the Seleucid Antiochus and the Judean Herod the Great to absorb Petra into their kingdoms, in 64 and 63 b.c. the Roman general Pompey conquered Nabataea. It remained independent (but taxed), a neutral zone between the desert nomads and Romes territory. Petra burgeoned over the next century. The city was wholly Romanized under Trajan in a.d. 106, when Nabataea became Arabia Petraea. Twenty-five years later, Hadrian renamed the capital Hadriane Petra and installed Sextius Florentinus as governor. Early in the fourth century, great changes swept the Roman Empire: Christianity was recognized by the state and in 330 Constantine moved his capital to Byzantium, renaming it New Rome (now Istanbul). Petra, while devastated by earthquake in the mid-fourth century, flourished until late antiquity, after which it began to decline. Its last contact with the Western world until the nineteenth century was in the 1100s, when Crusaders built and briefly occupied a small fortress there. In 1812 the Swiss orientalist Johann Ludwig Burckhardt learned of Petra from local Bedouins, and in the years that followed many Europeans visited and recorded it. The romance of the place was irresistible, as the theologian Dean John W. Burgon wrote in 1845: Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime. A rose-red city