Petra: Sacred City of Temples and Tombs
By Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin
One of the great archaeological and architectural gems of the world, Petra is located about 180 miles south of Amman in Jordan. For centuries, Petra was a romantic “lost” city, visited only by hardy adventurers like Jacob Burckhardt; today it is visited by tens of thousands from around the world. Nestled in a desert valley accessible only through narrow canyons, Petra uniquely combines the natural beauty of Canyonlands National Park with spectacular two thousand year old rock-cut tombs and temples. For historians of religion, Petra provides an important example of ancient Near Eastern concepts of sacred space.
Petra was the capital of the Nabateans, a pre-Islamic Arab tribe that inhabited the area of modern Jordan and southern Israel in the three centuries before and after Christ. By the first century BC, the Nabatean Arabs had grown fantastically wealthy as middlemen transporting valuable Arabian spices and incense to the Romans. In 106 AD, the Romans annexed Petra and usurped control of the trade routes, leading to the decline of Petra and the Nabateans. During the two centuries before the Roman conquest, however, the Nabateans built dozens of magnificent rock-cut tombs for their kings, priests, and aristocrats, and temples for their gods in a mixture of Greek, Roman, and indigenous Nabatean architectural styles. Unfortunately, only a few Nabatean inscriptions have survived; we are forced to piece together an understanding of their beliefs from isolated comments by non-Nabateans.
Few houses or commercial buildings have been found at Petra, which leads many to believe that the place was primarily a sacred city of temples and tombs. The principal god of the Nabateans was the sun-god Dushara, meaning “he [the god] of [the mountain] Shara,” which is equated with mount Seir of the Bible (Genesis 14:6). Dushara was represented only by uncarved stone pillars; the Nabateans apparently had a taboo against “graven images” of their god similar to that of the Israelites. Dushara’s consort was the moon-goddess Allat, the Great Mother, who was widely worshiped by pre-Islamic Arabs but rejected and condemned during Muhammad’s monotheistic reforms of the early seventh century AD.
The sacred monuments of Petra include both temples and tombs, although the two categories often overlap. The most famous tomb of Petra is the magnificent Khazneh (“treasury”), universally recognizable as the shrine of the Holy Grail from the Indiana Jones movie. Its facade, twelve stories high and chiseled out of a reddish sandstone cliff, is the most elegant in Petra, carved in imitation of a temple gateway and adorned with now badly worn sculpture.
The largest tomb is known as the “Deir,” or “monastery,” recalling its use by Christian monks from the fifth through the thirteenth centuries AD. Originally, however, it was the imposing tomb of the deified Nabatean king Aboud I. A massive rock-cut monument some fourteen stories high, the tomb is carved into the pyramid shaped peak of the mountains surrounding Petra. It is accessible only by ascending a sacred way from the valley of Petra to the top of the mountains, climbing hundreds of ancient rock-cut stairs in symbolic imitation of the celestial ascent of the soul to the realm of the gods dwelling on top of their sacred mountain. The facade of the tomb also looks like the gateway of a temple, with massive columns, huge niches for now-lost statues, and a forty-foot high doorway. The interior is bare today, but it once held statues and the sarcophagus of the god-king Aboud. The walls are surrounded by low seats that were used by his descendants and worshipers for sacrificial banquets in honor of their deified ancestor.
Petra also includes a fascinating open-air sanctuary or “high place” at the top of another mountain peak. Here, the top of the mountain was chiseled away and flattened to form a broad sacrificial platform and altar, with a large twenty foot high obelisk representing Dushara.
More traditional temples are found in the valley along the central road of Petra, sometimes called a sacred way. The best preserved of these is known among the bedouins as the Qasr Bint Fara’un (“Palace of the Pharaoh’s daughter”), but it was actually another temple to Dushara. This temple has a three-part structure with an inner Holy of Holies typical of Semitic temples, including Solomon’s. The courtyard before the temple contains a large, well preserved altar and ramp, which also roughly parallels the altar of the ancient Israelite temple.
Jane Taylor, Petra and the Lost Kingdom of the Nabataeans (Harvard, 2002)
Maria Guzzo, Petra (2002)
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