by Bruce Feiler
Just the name Petra alone evokes magic, like Xanadu, Shangri-La, or Timbuktu. It’s the boutonniere of the Middle East, a shimmering, illusory place, carved out of salmon-colored mountains, where Indiana Jones finds the Holy Grail at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and where countless generations of European explorers tried but failed to locate its charms. Mention Petra today and people think of the Nabateans, the bedouin tribe from Arabia that hewed its capital in the corkscrew valley and gave Petra its glorious facade. The Nabateans thrived for four hundred years around the time of Christ. The chief source of their livelihood, frankincense, over which they had near monopolistic control, is prominently mentioned in the New Testament, when the Wise Men from the East offer it along with gold and myrrh as a gift to the baby Jesus.
But Petra also has roots in the Old Testament, long before the Nabateans. Because of its strategic location and abundant springs, the city was an important stopover on the King’s Highway as early as the second millennium B.C.E. In the Bible, Petra first appears in Numbers 31, when the Israelites are venturing north and slay Rekem, one of the kings of Transjordan. Rekem was the ancient name for Petra, and the king was likely a local chieftain who ruled some of the scattered Edomite population. Later, around 1000 B.C.E., King David occupied Petra in a failed bid to control Edom; his son Solomon consolidated control over the area and diverted Petra’s trading profits to his coffers.
This close association with the biblical story has led some to speculate that Petra may have played an even larger role in the history of the Israelites. Before leaving for Jordan, I had gone to visit a colleague of Avner’s, Dudu Cohen, an archaeologist, a guide, and a deeply observant Jew who lives with his family in a religious settlement south of Jerusalem. For years Dudu had been carefully constructing a radical theory he had just published in a prominent journal of biblical studies: that Kadesh-barnea, the place where the Israelites lived for thirty-eight of their forty years in the desert, was not Ain el-Qudeirat in northern Sinai, as is popularly believed, but Petra.
The heart of Dudu’s theory concerns what the Bible calls the place where the Israelites camped. Sometimes the place is called Kadesh, other times Kadesh-barnea. The popular view holds that these names refer to the same place, but Dudu found evidence suggesting ancient commentators viewed the two as referring to different places. The spy story, for example, is usually associated with Kadesh-barnea, in the wilderness of Paran. The story of Moses striking the rock, by contrast, is associated with Kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin. Paran is generally linked to the Egyptian border, while Zin is connected to the border with Edom.
In addition, some sources directly connected Kadesh with Petra. In Aramaic, the vernacular language of the late first millennium B.C.E., the name Kadesh is translated as Rekem, the same name used for Petra. Also, European travelers who came to the Middle East before the twentieth century, including the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who is credited with “discovering” the place in 1812, believed that Petra was the site of Kadesh. “Plus, it just makes sense,” Dudu said. “There is much more water in Petra than in the Sinai. At the time of the Nabateans, thirty thousand people could live there, and nomads require much less water. It easily could have supported the Israelites. Not six hundred thousand, but there probably weren’t that many anyway.”
So what difference does his theory make to the interpretation of the story?
“For starters, we didn’t wander around the desert for forty years,” Dudu said. “Sitting in Petra gave us a chance to form an identity. Usually, in sociology, one of the main elements in identifying a nation is territory. That’s why we have all the theories that Israel wasn’t formed as a nation until the time of David, when the country was unified under a single king. Before that, we were just tribes and didn’t have any territory of our own.
“But my theory gives a different perspective,” he said. “Slowly, sitting together in Petra, we formed a nation. We built roots. Moses told the story of our history. He planted in people’s minds the comments of God to our patriarchs that we will get the Promised Land. It’s ours. God gave it to us. Then, when they moved from there to the border with Canaan, the people were ready. They just waited for the order to cross the Jordan and conquer! And I think that’s why the rabbis see that point as a miracle, because the big change had occurred. In Petra we finally overcame the desert and became a unified people.”
By late morning, the camel saddle had rubbed off most of the skin from my lower back and inner thigh. I was verging on being in considerable pain by the time we arrived at a resting area just shy of the summit of Jebel Haroun. It was here, in 1812, that Johann Ludwig Burckhardt completed the deception that enabled him to “discover” Petra. Burck-hardt, a Swiss-born adventurer, posed as a Muslim—and even learned Arabic—in order to travel through the Middle East, then largely hostile to Europeans. Arriving in Syria in 1810, he was asked about his strange accent. Burckhardt said he was a trader from India and that his mother tongue was Hindustani. Asked to demonstrate, he spoke a guttural concoction of Swiss-German, which seemed to satisfy his hosts.
Two years later he set off for Petra. He couldn’t express his desire to search for the lost city, since it would have been interpreted as spying. Also, Muslims were not supposed to be interested in Petra, which was considered the work of infidels. But Burckhardt said he had vowed to sacrifice a goat at Aaron’s tomb. When he reached the outskirts of Petra, his guide suggested making the sacrifice there, but Burckhardt wanted to press ahead. They arrived at the entrance to the city, and again the bedouin suggested making the sacrifice. Again Burckhardt demurred. Finally they arrived at the Treasury, Petra’s signature structure. Burckhardt was the first Westerner to see the building since the Romans were kicked out almost 1,800 years earlier.
Somehow masking his excitement, Burckhardt managed to describe the building, and even sketch it, all the while concealing his journal underneath his robe. He continued to draw buildings throughout the site. Had his journal been discovered, he surely would have been killed as a spy. As it happens, he spent so much time making drawings that he ran out of time and was forced to sacrifice his goat at the terrace just below the summit of Jebel Haroun.
He clearly was not the only one to use this site for sacrificing. As we left our camels and walked up the final ascent of the mountain, which reminded me of the freestanding peak atop Jebel Musa, we saw dozens of burnt-out fire circles with animal bones scattered around them. Avner identified the bones—goat, sheep, even camels—which clearly had been used in ritual sacrifices by local bedouin. “Do Muslims actually sacrifice camels?” I asked Mahmoud. “Yes,” he said, “but rarely. They’re very expensive.”
About twenty minutes later we arrived at the top of the mountain, where a whitewashed shrine dedicated to Aaron sits atop a bald pate of flesh-colored stone. Holy buildings stood on this site as early as the Byzantine Era, when Christian travelers first associated the mountain with the place of Aaron’s death. The current shrine, which dates from 1459, is about the size of a small diner; it’s made of stone and topped with a dome that looks like the head of a giant snowman. The building was administered by Greek Christians in the seventh century when the ten-year-old prophet Mohammed passed through on a trip from Mecca to Damascus and climbed Jebel Haroun with his uncle. The guard, a monk named Bahira, prophesied that the boy would change the world. Today’s Muslim pilgrims pay homage to the prophet by draping the shrine with green and white pieces of fabric, twined threads, and seashells. These remembrances are considered the Islamic equivalent of lighting a candle to a saint.
We explored the inside of the building, which was dark, bare, and surprisingly cool. A stairway led down into a dank basement, where Aaron is said to be entombed. Two iron gates block the crypt, but we were able to catch a faint glimpse of a large stone tomb.
Back outside, we climbed the narrow stairs to the roof, which had a spectacular view of the surroundings. From here, the true charm of Petra became appare
nt. The only thing visible for miles in any direction was cluster after cluster of foreboding mountains, each one more parched than the next. In this scene, like a tub of Cracker Jack spilled onto the desert floor, Petra was clearly the prize. The tree-lined valleys around the ancient city looked like mint jelly dripping down a lamb shank. “I’ll say this about Dudu Cohen,” I said. “I don’t know about the historical accuracy of his thesis, but viewed from this location, it makes much more sense for the Israelites to have lived here for thirty-eight years than to have been in Ain el-Qudeirat.”
“Certainly for them,” Avner said. “It’s much nicer.”
“It’s also better protected. There’s plenty of water.”
“And the weather is better.”
We sat down on the roof and reviewed the story. In Numbers 20, during the Israelites’ fortieth year in the desert, after the incident in which Moses and Aaron disobey God’s instructions about the rock, God suddenly announces to the brothers:“Let Aaron be gathered to his kin,” a biblical euphemism for die. “He is not to enter the land that I have given to the Israelite people, because you disobeyed my command about the waters of Meribah,” God says. “Take Aaron and his son Eleazar and bring them up on Mount Hor. Strip Aaron of his vestments and put them on his son Eleazar. Then Aaron shall be gathered unto the dead.” Moses does as instructed, and Aaron dies “on the summit of the mountain,” a location identified only as being “on the boundary of the land of Edom.” The people bewail Aaron for thirty days.
As we were reading, we were joined on the roof by the Muslim guard, who must have been napping when we first arrived. He was from the bedouin tribe around Petra, the Bdul, and worked for the local government. I asked him if he thought Moses had come to this site. “Yes,” he said. “With Aaron. According to the books of the Jews, it was 3,200 years ago.”
“Do you feel them?” I asked.
“I feel blessed,” he said. “When I sleep here, I sleep much better than when I sleep down there.” He gestured toward Petra.
“And why is that?”
“This is the best place in the country. The air is good. Aaron is here. I feel safe.”
We bid him good-bye and rejoined our camels for the descent into Petra. It didn’t take long to realize that while I had twice used a camel to ride up a mountain, I had yet to use one to ride down. Riding up uses one set of muscles—the lower back, the inner thigh, the bicep. Riding down uses a different, much more sensitive set—the upper abs, the outer ankle, the tricep—as well as a few body parts I didn’t know had feeling, like the coccyx.
The remarkable thing about riding a camel is how much action it requires of the arms, which must work constantly to relieve pressure from every other body part. The right arm grabs the pommel in front to prevent you from falling; the left arm twists around to grab the pommel in back to relieve pressure from your groin. I had read Lawrence said that all bedouin have extensive knowledge of their genealogies. Now I know why. It’s impossible to spend eight hours on a camel and not think of your children. As Mahmoud delicately put it after one particularly rocky bend, “I’m glad I have two sons already.” It was at that point that I decided to dismount and walk a few steps on my own.
By the time we arrived in the central valley of Petra, Wadi Musa, it was the middle of the afternoon and we were coated in several layers of sweat, camel spittle, and regurgitated sage. I spotted a small spring alongside the path, and we stopped to wash our faces. As we stumbled from there into the main street of the ruined city, I realized that the limp one gets from riding a camel is a lot more twisted than that from riding a horse. All I could think was that eight hours on a camel is like eight hours on a camel—and nothing else. “And to think that the Nabateans arrived in Petra after eight months on a camel,” Avner said.
Though Petra may have had ancient roots, its glory years didn’t begin until the arrival of the Nabateans, one of the fleeting superpowers of the ancient Near East. The Nabateans were a nomadic tribe from the region of Nabatea in the northwest Arabian Desert. In the sixth century B.C.E., when Babylon depopulated the kingdoms of Judah and Israel across the Jordan, the Edomites filtered across the river to take their place. The Nabateans in turn filtered into Edom. Over the next several hundred years, they came to control the major trade route between Mecca and Damascus, as well as the one between Mecca and Gaza, an awesome vise grip on the region. To reflect their power, this previously nomadic people built a capital city in Petra in the fourth century B.C.E. At their peak around the time of Christ, the Nabateans were trading with not only Palestine, Egypt, and Syria but also Greece, Rome, even China.
The Nabateans traded all manner of goods, including animals, spices, iron, copper, fabrics, sugar, medicine, gold, and ivory. But by far their dominant item was frankincense, a product so popular that Avner likened its appeal, and influence, to that of oil in modern life. Frankincense is made from resin extracted from a desert tree of the genus Boswellia, which in herbal medicine today is used to treat arthritis, diarrhea, dysentery, pulmonary disease, and ringworm. The process involves cutting trees so their sap comes into contact with oxygen and harden into globules, not unlike what happens with manna, though without the digestion of plant lice.
Frankincense was valued for its smell, which is described as being sweet to the point of intoxicating, but was quite unlike the perfumes of today. For one, it must be burned to produce its smell. In addition, it has sterilizing qualities and was used in healing, preserving food, and protecting against insects. Also, because of its perceived otherworldliness, it was used in religious ceremonies; for example, it covered up the malodor at animal sacrifices. In Exodus, God instructs Moses to mix pure frankincense with several other herbs and use the compound to bless the Tent of Meeting. Frankincense was considered so important that God deemed its use for cultic purposes a capital crime, punishable by death. Other cultures also used it as a palliative to death. Before crucifixion, Roman prisoners (possibly including Christ) were offered wine laced with frankincense as a painkiller. The Roman emperor Nero is said to have burned at his wife’s funeral an amount of frankincense equal to the annual production in Arabia.
The reason the Nabateans rode frankincense to the status of regional power is that they figured out how to transport it from deep in the Arabian Desert, the only place on earth where it grows, to the commercial centers along the Mediterranean, where it could be profitably sold. The Nabatean Spice Route was a rarity in the Near East, a homemade route that skirted the fertile areas and thus eluded the larger powers. The two-thousand-mile pathway cut a southeast-northwest line across the desert. Viewed in terms of today’s geography, 90 percent was in Saudi Arabia, 6 percent in Jordan, 4 percent in Israel, and the last two miles in Gaza. The journey took three months each way to complete and at its peak involved over one thousand camels, each one carrying as much as five hundred pounds of frankincense. The key to the Spice Route was the Nabatean technique of collecting water in hidden underground cisterns, to be used when the traders arrived. In the Negev, Avner took me to a handful of these caverns, which are still remarkably intact. The Israeli Army trains soldiers for desert survival by dropping them a few miles from the cisterns and instructing them to find the locations. Few ever do.
Because the Spice Route was so complex an undertaking, the previously nomadic Nabateans were forced to undergo a process of civilizing themselves: organizing a security force, collecting and distributing money, building administrative centers. A similar process had occurred in Mesopotamia and Egypt thousands of years earlier when large numbers of tribes shifted from a hunter-gatherer culture to an agricultural one. Here the transition happened again, and the result was Petra, a city that was so spectacular in large part because it was developed by people unaware—and uninfluenced—by traditional urban design. The pyramids of Giza are grander and were built 2,500 years earlier. Jerusalem has a certain timeless aura to it. But Petra takes your breath away.
One reason is the charming oddity of the place. The
buildings in Petra are not freestanding but carved out of the side of sheer sandstone cliffs, not unlike the cities I carved out of sandpiles as a child. Because the edifices mostly consist of crypts hewed out of the sides of mountains, with elaborate, Hollywood-back-lot-style facades, the buildings never fell down, like most ancient buildings did. There are dozens still standing today in the one-square-mile area, ranging from tombs that are 150 feet high, to storage rooms no bigger than coffins, to sacred cult sites on mountaintops overlooking it all. There is also an open-air theater and main street from when Rome finally annexed Petra in 106 C.E. Altogether, Petra looks like a shopping center, in which each store has a showier front than its neighbor, and each one is more inviting than the next.
Adding to its allure is that Petra, whose location was unknown for centuries, has become one of the most mythologized cities in recent memory, a real-life Atlantis plucked from obscurity. Also, the cliffs themselves are visually stunning. The rock has been pickled by the wind into a cornucopia of colors: brown, orange, purple, pink. I never wanted to lick a mountain until I went to Petra. Artist Edward Lear walked up the central street in 1858 and described the cliffs as “brilliant and gay beyond my anticipation.” Agatha Christie saw the rocks as “blood-red.” But the most famous characterization came from John William Burgon, who described the stones in his 1845 poem “Petra” as being “as if by magic grown.”
Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,
Where erst Athena held her rites divine;
Not saintly-grey, like many a minister fane,
That crowns the hill and consecrates the plain;
But rose-red as if the blush of dawn
That first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,
