Petra, in southern Jordan, is a love letter to human civilisation from a long-lost empire. The Nabataeans, a nomadic Arabic people, began chiselling away at the natural sandstone surroundings around 2,300 years ago, slowly fanning out into the surrounding wadis (“canyons” in Arabic) over the centuries until it contained, it is believed, between 30,000 and 40,000 people. When Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt put it on the archaeological map in 1812, it was a ghost town, following centuries of abandonment.
While much of the city is gone, many of its monumental structures remain, carved straight into the cliffs. It’s a powerful testament to their construction abilities that the buildings most important to the Nabataeans withstood the intervening centuries while so few other civilizations were able to conjure anything quite so magnificent. With that in mind, Petra’s status as a Unesco World Heritage Site as well as one of the new seven wonders of the world, comes as little surprise.
