Concept in Definition ABC

Petra is a monumental city of the ancient world. In it there are no buildings, since the tombs that were found were excavated in sandstone cliffs. In its heyday, this city was the center of an extensive trading network for myrrh, silk and frankincense and was inhabited by over 30,000 people.

Petra, located in the current desert of Jordan, it is a place where it hardly rains, but this limitation it was solved by who were probably its settlers, the Nabataeans, with an ingenious system of pipes.

The discovery of the lost city

For centuries the remains of Petra remained hidden from Westerners and its secret was jealously guarded by the Bedouins. The situation changed in 1812, when a Swiss explorer, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, entered an immense canyon and at the end of it he met Petra, a city carved in stone and built two thousand years behind. In it there is a temple with majestic columns with capitals with decorative motifs, statues of mythological characters and an ostentatious urn that crowns its roof. Very close to the main

building there is an amphitheater with 6000 seats carved in sandstone rock, a great avenue flanked with structures that appear to be temples and some monuments excavated near the mountains.

The territory of the Nabataeans

It is not known with absolute certainty who built Petra. However, it is very likely that they were the Nabataeans, an enigmatic desert tribe that became enriched by the Commerce with other peoples and decided to build the city of Petra as a sign of his power. Nabataean engineers mastered stone and also knew the most advanced techniques for supplying stone. Water.

Petra is considered to have been built as a funerary compound that at the same time was a metropolis with thousands of inhabitants. To sculpt the monumental facades, a great knowledge of the properties of sandstone was necessary, a type of rock suitable for ornamental carving. The technique used to work the stone is based on the use of iron chisels blueprints, pointers and toothed.

The facades of Petra seem typical of other places, such as Egypt, Greece or Rome

This style eclectic makes think to the archaeologists that the inhabitants of this city were in contact with other peoples and surely this link was related to commercial activity. It must be remembered that already in the 1st century AD. C Pliny the Elder referred to the Nabataeans as the wealthiest nomadic tribe in the ancient world. Petra was a crossroads in the desert, so it is plausible that the Nabataeans used architectural styles from other cultures.

Photos: Fotolia - Pakhnyushchyy / Snaptitude

Themes in Petra