Justified and Ancient

Camels rest in front of Al Khazneh in Jordan's ancient city of Petra. Photo Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images.

If you visit Jordan’s ancient city of Petra, travel by night, in darkness and in silence. During my trip, my group hikes out after sunset on a 1,200-metre walk through the Siq, the city’s harrowing entranceway, a crack in the armour of mountain ranges that hid Petra from the outside world for six centuries. The passage takes 40 minutes to traverse and cuts narrowly through epic 300-metre-tall sandstone cliffs. It’s a supernatural introduction to the city T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) praised for its beauty, the seat of a once-thriving Nabataean empire — and the focus of a current exhibition at Canada’s Museum of Civilization.

The Nabataeans were desert traders and nomads who settled in Petra in 200 BC, transforming themselves from sandy nomads into urban sophisticates. They won control of lucrative trade routes that reached as far as India and Egypt, profiting from frankincense, textiles and ivory. But Petra received only 15 centimetres of annual rainfall. To survive, the Nabataeans developed complex water systems — dams and cisterns, reservoirs lined with stucco — and accessed freshwater springs.

Little has changed in the Siq in the millennia since, and the contemporary experience is so much about what’s not here: no plasma screens, no neon signs, no tourist shops, no cellphone jingles, no “You’ve got mail.” The near blackness reveals only vague, monstrous rock formations brushed by wind. The tilting 2,000-year-old stone floor is lit by a glowing tail of candles disappearing round a bend in the dim passage. No one talks. Single file. Follow the flames.

Thoreau would have enjoyed this, the kind of stroll where you fall in love, or decide to quit your desk job, or forget about where you come from, where you are going — or, catching your shadow flicker on the rippling rock walls, are stunned into existential bewilderment. Crane your neck up: slivers of desert stars wink from the jaws of converging cliffs. Ten minutes deeper and the soft stone of the Siq feels more like a birth canal. Then, just when you feel like you’re about to hit geological womb tissue, the walls open into a wide canyon where hundreds of candles burn on a field of red sand, partially illuminating Al Khazneh, a massive treasury made famous by Indiana Jones’s Last Crusade. Al Khazneh’s hulking stone pillars melt from the dusty night, an architectural phantom haunting a mountainside. Blink. It can’t be real.

After, sitting cross-legged on sand, hot tea is passed around in plastic cups. Our grizzled Bedouin guide informs us that he can’t possibly relay the history of Petra tonight; it’s too short a visit, too long a story. “You cannot know Petra in one or two days,” he warns. It’s a friendly invitation; come back again soon and wander the sprawling 40-square-kilometre metropolis, which at its zenith was 20,000 strong with Nabataeans, and is now, at least for the moment, all ours.

A tourist examines carvings on a wall inside a tomb at Petra. Photo Chris Hondros/Getty Images.

Ten hours later, arid Jordanian sunlight reveals the alien splendor of the looming Khazneh, 300 metres high and chiseled by Nabataean hands out of a sandstone cliffside. The craftsman worked from the top down, like Greek gods, their exquisite labour enduring the twin perils of tomb raiders and erosion. I spend the day exploring just a few of the more than 3,000 tombs, temples, halls and chambers scattered inside Petra — raw spaces that weren’t built out or on, but sculpted into, or out of. Every few minutes I spy a stone-carved staircase half-hidden behind boulders, which, like Escher’s surrealist drawings, seem to vanish absurdly into the oblivion of pink mountains.

But a 10-minute vertical hike is rewarding, leading to the Royal Tombs. Inside, the caverns are stripped of furniture or ornaments, but the walls and ceilings are profound — swirling oranges, pinks, blues and reds that feel primordial. Another stairway twists farther up, through a neverland of pink, brown and amber cliffs, to the High Place of Sacrifice. Halfway there I pass two dizzy tourists drenched in sweat, clutching their water bottles, no Starbucks in sight.

Our guide sold me on the climb this way: “It’s approximately 700 stairs.” Except in unbroken sunlight it feels more like 7,000; each step is unique, some gigantic, most crooked. Near the peak my calves feel proud but conquered. Still, the skullcap of the barren mountain — in arms’ reach of blue sky — is where a dehydrated, starving man feels that he might meet Dushara, the ancient Nabataean storm god who once ruled this rock.

Instead, a Bedouin woman wrapped in a black headdress dances past me, skipping across a treacherous pile of loose rocks. She’s balancing a wide basket on her head and carrying a hefty bag over one shoulder. I follow behind, tripping on the rocky range towards the guide’s promised destination — a panoramic view of Petra, to die for. Minutes later, from the edge of the cliff I see a stunning array of red, pink and golden mountains pockmarked with dark caves and temples. I also get a clear look at the woman’s face, rough as the rock formations below, her smile littered with dark squares once filled by teeth. She unzips her bag. Inside, a Bedouin baby peeks at me calmly. The woman and I both gaze down at the city, swarming with tourists. I wonder — does anyone down there have a spare toothbrush?

Back at the base of the cliffs, amidst the artistry, mysticism and visitors’ Nike hiking gear, Petra is a carnival of Bedouin marketplaces hocking daggers, necklaces and earrings. Sunburned jockeys command whining donkeys or lazy-eyed camels, offering less athletically inclined sightseers express trips up tricky mountain paths or quick exits out of the Siq. The Bedouin lived here for centuries until the government ejected them, to better preserve the Unesco World Heritage site (they were partying in the temples). Many Bedouin have relocated to new housing just a few kilometres away, but they still take ownership of this ancient empire during business hours, still eke out a living beneath the frying sun. A young donkey rider storms near, smiling coyly from atop his beast of burden. “You like a ride in my air-conditioned Ferrari?” he shouts. No thanks, I’m good to walk. But I ask the donkey’s name. “Jack Daniels,” he says, already galloping towards an obese American.

Later, an old Bedouin sidles up beside me and opens a rough fist to reveal his found treasure. “You buy Roman coin?” The Romans absorbed Petra in AD 106, and so far, only one per cent of the site’s antiquities have been unearthed by archaeologists. The man offers me the coin for 10 Dinar (the equivalent of $16). It’s tempting, but unnecessary: for the rest of 2006, I can see better souvenirs from this fertile pink sand back home in Canada, at the Museum of Civilization’s exhibition Petra: Lost City of Stone.

Detail of monumental Roman marble vase with panther-shaped handles, the only example of its kind ever found. From the Canadian Museum of Civilization's exhibition, Petra: Lost City of Stone. Photo Peter John Gates/Cincinnati Art Museum/Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Two weeks later at the exhibit’s opening, it seems fantastic to watch video footage of Al Khazneh spread across three large screens inside a climate-controlled room. Or to examine intricately carved elephant and lion heads resting on steel bases rather than towering high atop pillars in the desert. Or to find scratched stone tablets etched with Nabataean inscriptions encased behind glass, with tidy labels and translations. There are hazy watercolours, and moody ink-and-pencil sketches by William Bartlett and David Roberts from the 1840s, and an exquisite reproduction of Al Khazneh viewed from the Siq by Frederic Edwin Church. These artists were lured to the city only after Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt rediscovered Petra in 1812, although it was never lost to the Bedouin. The exhibition provides a solid introduction to a complicated history, and a sublime reality. Here, on even carpets and under halogen lights, Petra’s chaotic cityscape is neatly wrapped by museological order and explanation. The centerpiece is a huge marble Roman vase with panther-shaped handles, reconstructed from excavated shards, a misty cream with veins of ash grey.

At its peak Petra was impenetrable to conquering armies thanks to the Siq’s narrowness, and its citizens grew rich. But a cataclysmic force hit the stone metropolis, causing its mighty civilization to evaporate. Some scholars point to an earthquake around AD 360 that could have knocked out precious water systems and prevented rebuilding. Like many questions surrounding the mysterious city, the reasons for its evacuation are still unclear, although it’s safe to assume its ruling class could never have dreamed that the material possessions filling their mansions, whole pieces of temples where they prayed for rainstorms, could find their way across the Atlantic Ocean to the bank of the Rideau Canal, where it’s raining tonight.

Petra: Lost City of Stone is on display at the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que., until Jan. 2, 2007.

Joshua Knelman is the associate editor of The Walrus.

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