Petra: History

History
Petra was the capital of the Nabataean kingdom — Arab traders who, from around the 4th century BC, controlled the key stretches of the incense and spice routes connecting Arabia, the Levant and the Mediterranean. Their wealth came specifically from managing and taxing that trade rather than from conquest or farming, and you can see exactly where the money went in the elaborate rock-cut architecture that survives today.

What’s easy to miss amid all that carved stone is the engineering underneath it. The Nabataeans built an extensive water management system — channels, cisterns, dams — sophisticated enough to sustain a real population in genuinely arid desert. They captured and stored seasonal flash flood water with a level of skill that modern hydrologists still study today.

Rome annexed the Nabataean kingdom in 106 AD, and Petra carried on as a regional centre for a while afterward. But a major earthquake in 363 AD did serious damage to its infrastructure, and as trade routes gradually shifted away from the region over the following centuries, the city slipped into a slow decline — eventually forgotten by everyone except the local Bedouin, until 1812 brought it back into the world’s awareness.

Petra was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985 and voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in a global poll in 2007 — recognition that’s driven a real surge in international visitor numbers over the two decades since.