Meanwhile, back at the Royal Tombs

I love how camels, which alternate between being goofy and being nasty, always manage to look downright noble in profile.

Which doesn't mean that they aren't sneaky, and you'll never convince me that sitting cross-legged on top of one is ever going to be a good idea.

Sunday bird blogging

And now for something completely different: a purple sunbird in Keoladeo National Park.

And beyond the Treasury

Bedouins riding through the main part of the city.

There is so much more to Petra than I had realized, and I didn't begin to see it all in the one day that I had. (Maybe that's a good thing -- I can't imagine how many pictures I would have taken if I'd had, say, a week. I'd be going through them for the rest of my life.)

The structures in the background, for example -- those are the Royal Tombs, and I walked past them and took a few pictures, and had a soda at a nearby cafe so I could look at them, but I didn't get any closer than this. There are many more wonders that I never even saw.

Yet one more place I can't really cross off the list because I really want to go back.

The Treasury

I watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade last night instead of doing something productive, just to see the part near the end where Indy and company ride through a narrow desert canyon and arrive at the temple where the Holy Grail is hidden. The canyon and the temple were of course played, most effectively, by the Siq and the Treasury at Petra. And the experience in real life is almost that cinematic, minus the John Williams score. 

But in real life, you can have your picture taken with some genuine Roman centurions. Eat your heart out, Harrison Ford.

The Treasury was almost certainly not really a treasury; it was probably either a temple or a tomb. You can't go inside, but there's not much to see there -- just a large square chamber, mostly empty. But there's so much magnificence outside it really doesn't matter.

More gods

I'm guessing that these (still in the Siq) were made later, because the inscriptions underneath are in Greek. The Nabataeans spoke Aramaic, and left very few inscriptions behind.

Caves

There are caves -- some natural, most man-made -- in the rock walls throughout Petra. Many of them are tombs, but some were probably dwellings.

Because so many of the remaining structures in Petra are tombs, it's easy to think of it as a necropolis, but it was a thriving city where people lived and worked.

That niche by the cave entrance is also something that you see a lot along the Siq. The primary god worshipped by the Nabataeans was Dushara, Lord of the Mountain. And it was almost literally the mountains themselves that they reverenced. The statues of Dushara are cubes of stone, sometimes with crude circles for eyes, but usually featureless. Sometimes they actually carved away the entire top of a hill or mountain, leaving a cube-shaped “god block” behind.

Later, under Greek influence, they anthropomorphized the gods and started to add human features. But Petra makes so much more sense when you understand how the Nabataeans felt about these mountains, and why they would create their city by carving rather than building.

One more chorus and fade

Really the last one. I just found this one this morning and the colors are too gorgeous not to share.

One more chorus

More rock music

Rock music

The Nabataeans owed much of their success to their genius at managing water -- harvesting it, diverting it, hiding it.

There are remnants of culverts along the walls of the Siq, but the real water magic here is what happens when it meets rock.  After the canyon walls were split by some tectonic temper tantrum thousands of years ago, water carved out the dips and swoops and curves in these walls.

Where was I?

Right, Jordan. Petra. The Siq.

I've been sick with the Cold That Will Not Die, and haven't had the energy to post. And I hadn't looked at any of the Petra pictures since the day I took them so I had a lot of sorting and processing to  do. But maybe I can at least manage to get myself out of the Siq.

The Nabataeans were an Arab people, originally nomads, who established trading routes through the Middle East. (They were the source for frankincense and myrrh, so if the Magi really brought those gifts to Bethlehem, they probably bought them from the Nabataeans.) Petra, which they called Raqmu, was their capital.

It flourished for only a few hundred years before the Romans took over in AD 106, and was mostly abandoned by 700. When you pass through the Siq, you're walking on cobblestones that were laid 2200 years ago.

The Siq

The Siq (“the Shaft” in Arabic) is a mile-long natural gorge, only a few meters wide in places, with rock walls towering hundreds of feet overhead on both sides.

The red stone is streaked with yellow and black, and centuries of wind and water have shaped it into dazzling curves and facets.

It was one of the rare experiences that turned out to be much better than I had imagined it, and I've wanted to see Petra for many years. Every turn in the path brought another amazing vista. It made me giddy. It made me gush. “I can't believe I'm here! I'm actually walking in the Siq!”