Reclining on a rooftop carved two millennia ago, a Bedouin surveys the realm of the Nabataeans, whose ancient capital beckons from the sands of southern Jordan. Forgotten for centuries, Petra still echoes with mysteries of the past; this immense building, Al Deir (the Monastery), was probably a Nabataean shrine.
—From “Petra: Ancient City of Stone,” December 1998, National Geographic magazine
A crossroads for the caravan trade, Petra prospered and built a modest empire. By A.D. 106, when Rome annexed it and expanded a Nabataean theater carved from its cliffs, 30,000 lived in the city.
—From “Petra: Ancient City of Stone,” December 1998, National Geographic magazine
Petra’s heyday ended when the Romans rerouted trade in the second century A.D., sending the city into a long decline. In a fifth-century Byzantine church archaeologists found detailed mosaics.
—From “Petra: Ancient City of Stone,” December 1998, National Geographic magazine
Imhiylah al-Bedoul prepares a meal in the Petra backcountry, where her family spends the summer tending goats, using water from a Nabataean cistern. A lifelong resident of Petra, she raised six of her ten children in a cave near the city center. But after the city was made a World Heritage site in 1985, the government moved the thousand-member Bedoul tribe to Umm Sayhun, a village of cinder-block houses.
—From “Petra: Ancient City of Stone,” December 1998, National Geographic magazine
Lookouts on a ledge, Bedouins watch as a group of tourists admire Al Khazneh (the Treasury), whose function in Nabataean times is still unknown. Spurred by Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel, tourism to Petra is up tenfold since 1991, boosting the economy but raising concerns about preservation.
—From “Petra: Ancient City of Stone,” December 1998, National Geographic magazine
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