Posted on 01/14/2004 11:09:07 AM PST by blam
A city carved in stone
WONDERS OF THE WORLD--THE SEVEN WONDERS OF MAN
Petra Location: Southwestern Jordan, between the Red Sea on the south and the Dead Sea on the north.
Size: About 40 square miles, but main sights are in a compact area.
Population: Petra is no longer officially populated. A separate town has been built for natives who used to occupy the surrounding caves.
Geography: Sandstone hills and broad desert plateaus, cleft by valleys.
Ancient name for Nabateans: Arabians.
By Robert Cross
Chicago Tribune staff reporter
Originally published January 11, 2004
WADI MUSA, Jordan -- First, one should understand that Wadi means valley and Musa means Moses and Petra means rock. To grasp those little bits helps us weather the frustration. So much of Petra is shrouded in mystery and perhaps unknowable, lost to the memory-erosion of centuries, obscured by conflicting theories and volumes of scholarly footnotes. We do know, at least, that this is part of the Holy Land and that Moses was certainly around.
And Wadi Musa is the modern municipality that lies just outside Petra, a town where people stop on their way to see Petra's collection of incredible tombs carved into the rocks of southern Jordan hundreds of years ago.
So the next thing after the first things is the experience of coming upon Petra and feeling its hidden magnificence suddenly overwhelm you. That's the draw attracting people from all over the world to witness Jordan's most dramatic site.
Ibrahim Abdelhaq, our Jordanian guide, led the way. We took a short walk from the Movenpick Hotel in Wadi Musa through a small bazaar with souvenirs for sale, then past a gate and a stop at the ticket window. We took a longer walk along a road, while next to us horsemen on a separate bridle path offered us a ride to the entrance of the Siq.
We hiked instead. The Siq has a meaning too. It's another kind of valley, narrow and dark with sandstone walls rising more than 30 stories on either side. Before we got there, Ibrahim pointed out monuments called the Djinn Blocks and a giant tomb marked by four massive obelisks -- they were hewn from the very cliffs that lined our path. "You can spend more time with those on the way back, if you want," he said.
I didn't want to examine the structures just then, because I knew that Petra, the magnificent remains of an ancient city, would be appreciated best without foreshadowing of any kind.
Just let it hit.
The Siq closed in, too small for any beasts of burden, except the ponies pulling an occasional cart reserved for those physically unable to make the trek. During the 3/4-mile of passageway, Ibrahim and I occasionally had to walk single-file. My wife, Juju, fell far behind, taking pictures and exposing videotape.
She caught up just in time to see a remarkable fragment of bas-relief on the pale-yellow wall -- a man's boots standing in front of a set of camel's hooves, slightly larger than life-size. Also, a curve of camel hump, a portion of camel belly. All quite realistic, even though the rest of the picture had eroded away. Ibrahim said that particular artistic effort had been covered by water until after a major flood in 1996 forced officials to reconfigure part of the passageway. "Before that, nobody knew it was here."
We heard voices as we rounded a bend. Ibrahim walked ahead and yelled back to us, "Get ready!"
Just as the rocky, rough Siq closed in, narrower than ever, we could see an expanse of daylight and then part of a totally anomalous entity -- an elaborate facade, orange/pink in the late-morning sun, with two tiers of Corinthian columns, exquisite ornamentation, plus sculptures depicting gods, goddesses and figures from mythology.
It was an exquisite Hellenistic edifice somehow dropped from a distant Acropolis onto a Near Eastern valley cut through a vast, rough and barren desert plateau.
Except it wasn't dropped. The temple face and the shallow room behind it had been carved directly into the side of a massive sandstone formation, nestled within a nearly perfect rectangular frame, also chipped from rock. People who posed for pictures in front of the columns looked tiny in comparison. I learned later that the structure was 98 feet wide and 131 feet high.
A small crowd clustered at the end of the Siq, and all of us took turns shooting the classic picture of that facade -- known as the Treasury: Half of its highly decorated, almost delicate face framed by the jagged, shadowy near-tunnel from whence we came.
"This is called the Treasury, but it never was a treasury," Ibrahim said. "The locals in the old times, more than 100 years ago, they used to shoot at it because they thought there was gold or treasure in that urn near the roof. There's nothing in the urn. It is a solid piece."
I could make out the bullet holes. But the elements had done most of what little damage there was, softening the features on the spear-bearing statues of mythological warriors, the equestrians Castor and Pollux (sons of Zeus); marring the symbol of the Egyptian goddess Isis that crowns the pediment; and dulling the once-sharp detail of the Corinthian columns. Still, the overall effect remains stunning: a gorgeous thing carved by hand with incredible precision -- and a wonderful example of the Hellenistic influences that spread across a large portion of the Arabian Peninsula during the adventures of Alexander the Great, around 312 B.C.
Ibrahim pointed out the vertical rows of tiny squares along both sides. They were used to anchor some kind of scaffolding, he told me. Craftsmen started at the top and worked their way down.
"Basically it's a tomb that is dated at the 1st Century B.C.," Ibrahim said.
Some experts differ and say it may have been a shrine. The full name of the building is Khaznat Far'oun, or Pharaoh's Treasury, derived from the ancient belief that a powerful sorcerer cum pharaoh created Petra's beautiful structures and then used the urn as a cache for his treasure.
The Bedouins who shot at the urn certainly were mistaken, but later generations have gleaned treasure from the tourists who come and buy their souvenirs and pay for rides on their camels, horses and donkeys. I had half expected some kind of reverence or serenity in Petra, but it was noisy with salesmanship and, even on this slow day, bustling with visitors.
It did feel like a city, although Ibrahim insisted that the portions we would see, at least, had become an elaborate necropolis. In the upper portions, he said, were places "for doing the weirdest rituals ever heard of in the history of mankind. We're not quite sure if they buried the dead bodies or they cremated. And most believe they did both. It was a different civilization."
At the Treasury, our guide pointed out a channel leading from a basin. "That was not for water drainage," he said ominously. "That was for blood. There may have been sacrifices -- human or animal, I don't know." Again, some experts take a more sanguine view -- in the sense of optimistic or cheerful -- and guess that it might be the tomb of a king named Aretas III, who reigned from 85-62 B.C.
Most of what's left of Petra for people to see is a sort of "downtown" dotted mostly with facades carved into the stone walls that once flanked the Wadi Musa stream, a now-extinct waterway. Some of the tombs are so shallow that their occupants were interred standing up.
The craftsmanship all over Petra reflects the Hellenistic influences that traveled with Arabian traders as they made their way back and forth to and from ancient Greece through the Arabian Peninsula. Caravans loaded with frankincense, myrrh and other precious commodities passed near Petra, and the city's founders, the Nabateans, were said to have exacted great wealth by levying tolls and taxes on those shipments.
(Excerpt) Read more at sunspot.net ...
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Actually, a wadi is a place where water still runs (at least intermittently).
The very soul of our much vaunted free enterprise system. Why is it this upsets us when foreigners from backward countries practice it in spades?
Main Entry: wa·di
Pronunciation: 'wä-dE
Function: noun
Etymology: Arabic wAdiy
Date: 1839
1 : the bed or valley of a stream in regions of southwestern Asia and northern Africa that is usually dry except during the rainy season and that often forms an oasis : GULLY, WASH
2 : a shallow usually sharply defined depression in a desert region
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