The History of Petra

Everything a guided day shows you sits on top of roughly two thousand years of use, abandonment and rediscovery. The dates below are the ones the site's own custodian and UNESCO publish, in order, ending on the line the authority states about its own city: most of it has never been dug up.

1st century BC — the caravan capital

The Nabataeans built Petra at a crossroads between Arabia, Egypt and Syria-Phoenicia. The city prospered as the capital of the Nabataean Empire from the 1st century BC, on the frankincense, myrrh and spice caravans that crossed it. The rock-cut facades along the Siq and the Street of Facades belong to this period: a wealthy trading capital carving its tombs and temples into the sandstone rather than building them from it.

AD 106 — Rome takes the province

In AD 106 the emperor Trajan incorporated the Nabataean Kingdom into the Roman Empire and renamed it the Arabian Provincia. Petra kept much of its wealth under Roman rule — the Colonnaded Street and the Great Temple both carry the mark of that period. But the caravan trade that had built the city was no longer the city's alone to tax.

AD 363 — the earthquake

A large earthquake struck in AD 363 and destroyed much of the city. It damaged the water system the Nabataeans had built to carry it through the desert, and hastened a decline that trade routes moving elsewhere had already begun. Petra did not vanish overnight, but the city that later travellers found was a fraction of the one Trajan had annexed.

The long silence

For over a thousand years afterwards, Petra was known chiefly to the Bedouin who lived among its monuments, not to the outside world that had once traded through it. No date in the official record marks this period, because nothing was recorded. That silence is itself the fact: the crossroads that once carried three continents' trade fell out of every account read here.

1812 — Burckhardt

The Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt reached the site in 1812, travelling in disguise and asking his guide to lead him to a ruin he had heard described. His account brought Petra back onto the map the rest of the world was drawing, over a thousand years after the earthquake had knocked it off it.

1985 — the World Heritage listing

UNESCO inscribed Petra on the World Heritage List in 1985, under criteria (i), (iii) and (iv). Those criteria recognise it as a masterpiece of human creative genius, a unique testimony to a civilisation that has disappeared, and an outstanding example of a type of architecture. That listing is the reason the site you walk today is protected rather than quarried.

The 80% still buried

The authority that manages the site states its own figure plainly: 80% is yet to be discovered. Everything on petra tours from amman — the Treasury, the Royal Tombs, the Monastery — is drawn from the one-fifth that has already been excavated. What a guide points out on a four-hour walk is a fraction of a fraction, and it is the reason archaeologists are still working here two centuries after Burckhardt.

Petra in one table

Where to check these facts

The dated facts above come from the site's own custodian and from UNESCO's listing record, not from a tour listing.

• Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority — History of Petra
• UNESCO World Heritage List, entry 326
• Jordan Tourism Board — Petra