Day 12 Petra, Jordan

Today we were in the land of the ancient Edomites. Edom or the Edomites are mentioned a hundred times in the Old Testament in reference to the exodus from Egypt (Numbers 20) and other battles between Israel and the kingdom of Edom in the reigns of Saul, David and Solomon.

There is archeological evidence that Petra has had human habitation for around 10,000 years.

The Edomites were present at Petra before the Nabateans but it seems that the Nabateans were the ones who did all the carving of the spectacular mausoleums found at Petra. The shots show two of the better surviving examples: the "Treasury" and the "Monastery".

When worked in the summer the sandstone is soft and powdery so the “carving” would have been more like “filing”. The artisans worked from the top down so they had somewhere to stand!
The Nabateans left no written inscriptions apart from the names of their Gods and the names of some of the persons buried in the tombs at Petra. So they remain a largely mystery people. The Nabateans appear to have either conquered the Edomites or co-existed with them at least initially. The Romans conquered the Nabateans in 106AD and Romanised Petra. The Crusaders used Petra but only modified it slightly. Between then and its declaration as a Heritage site by the UN in the 1980s, Petra was used by the local Bedouins.

The Nabateans were also active in the land of the Midianites in Saudi Arabia, another nation frequently mentioned in the Old Testament and the birthplace of Moses’ father-in-law.