Petra

i'll admit it, i didn't know what Petra was until I was standing in it. 'Petra' means "rock" in some Semitic language. and that's what there is. A lot of rock.

In 1994, Israel and Jordan signed the Arava Treaty, which was something good and peaceable. This treaty has made it possible for Israelis and others to visit since then. So, I took the bus south to Eilat, the southernmost tip of Israel, on the Red Sea.

Meanwhile, starting around 12th century BCE, tribes started migrating from SW Arabia/Yemen northward to the area now called Jordan. The Nabatean tribe (a name you may recognize from the Bible) arrived in the area of the Edom Mountains at the end of the 6th century BCE. They were nomadic herders, but built a settlement at Petra in the 4th century BCE as a burial ground.

The Greeks under Alexander tried to conquor it, without success. The Romans had their stay, and the Crusaders also built some fortresses nearby, but then it started to get covered with sand. There's quite a lot of sand, and wind to blow it over. But then, in 1812, a Swiss guy was walking around and started building a sandcastle, and noticed that the spot he was removing sand from was actually an ancient temple! Well, almost. Then in 1985, UNESCO declared it a World Heritage site, which enabled them to remove the indigenous Bedouins from the area and to fund other white men to come with their spades and paintbrushes to start building more sandcastles, um, I mean excavating.

The site is in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the Ashwara Mountain Range, in the Petra mountains, in Wadi Musa (named for the prophet we know as Moses). This is thought to be the site where Moses' brother Aaron was buried. The mountains are sandstone and limestone, and with different mixes of minerals, form red or marblized rock.

We walked an hour, starting at the Visitors' Center, through the canyons, along the Roman aquaducts, with camels, mules, and horse-drawn carriages blasting or bumbling around us, offering rides to ease the burden of the ovenlike weather.

The red, marbalized limestone is reminiscent of Bryce Canyon or other red rock deserts of the American Southwest.

Then, as we turned a curve of the canyon, we glimpsed through the gap in the rocks an enormous temple chisled out of the rockface, and beyond it an entire city recently unearthed by a Brown University team of archeologists.