For one of the most famous ancient sites on the planet, there is a surprising amount about the city Petra – and the Nabataean people who built it – we don’t know for sure.
What exactly were their origins? How did their society function? And why did they hand-carve such spectacular monuments into the reddish rock of the Jordanian desert?
A recent find at Petra this week promised some “groundbreaking and historic” answers. Described by the team behind it as like finding the holy grail of Petra archaeology, a large tomb was excavated immediately in front of the Khazneh, or treasury, the most celebrated of its magnificent facades. Inside were 12 corpses and an array of grave goods, said to be made of bronze, iron and pottery.
“This is perhaps the most important tomb ever found at Petra and a discovery of historic proportions,” Josh Gates saidthe presenter of a Discovery Channel documentary that accompanied the US-Jordan excavation. “The breakthrough could not only reveal the secrets of the treasury above, it could also provide an extraordinary glimpse into the lives of the early Nabataeans who built Petra.”
Breathless global headlines followed—amplified by a photo of one find that, according to Gates, “looked almost identical to the holy grail featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade“, part of it was filmed outside the Khazneh.
That artifact was in fact the top of a broken jar, and experts in Nabataean burials were cooler in their assessment of the tomb’s significance.
“I think it’s being hyped up a bit in the media,” said Dr Lucy Wadeson, an expert on Nabataean burial traditions who teaches at the University of Edinburgh. She said that while the location of the find inevitably added interest, “we already knew this grave existed. The [Jordanian] department of antiquities already excavated two tombs there, and they left that one closed for a future date, so it’s not like it’s anything new.”
Megan Perry, a professor of biological anthropology at East Carolina University in the US and a leading expert on Nabatean burials, was more pronounced on X: “I’m not surprised @discovery @joshuagates – after all I’ve excavated many tombs in Petra and guess what? THEY CONTAIN FUNERALS! No one is surprised except people who haven’t done their research!”
The Nabateans were an Arab tribe whose origins are still debated, but which rose to wealth and power in the centuries before the Christian era thanks to their position on the trade routes of valuable aromatic products such as frankincense and myrrh from the Arabian peninsula to the Mediterranean Sea. At the height of the Nabataean civilization, their power extended from Damascus to northern Arabia. (Hegrain present-day Saudi Arabia, where Wadeson is a research consultant, is another important Nabataean archaeological site.)
Wadeson said the classical-style architecture at Petra, the Nabatean capital, drew on these extensive cultural connections, but while it was certainly a literate culture, they left very few written records. “The Nabateans didn’t really write about themselves. Our ancient textual sources about it are therefore often continuous comments from Greeks and Romans.”
Even tomb inscriptions are rare in Petra, she said, although some at Hegra gave intriguing suggestions of a very different society to their contemporaries, in which women could own property and possibly have real power.
“What’s interesting is that we have tombs in Hegra that are specifically owned by women and were only for the burials of their daughters and granddaughters, on the matrilineal line of descent,” she said. “We don’t really know why – were these divorced women? Were they holy court ladies in the temple?”
Coins also show Nabatean queens as well as kings, “so the queens obviously had a lot of power, and in some cases they ruled on behalf of their children”.
Wadeson’s own “holy grail” discovery would be to learn more about what the Nabateans believed about the afterlife, she said. “They are not a culture that wrote down their own mythology or their own history. But maybe they did, and we just haven’t discovered it yet. Papyri, for example, may still remain. This kind of evidence can still be discovered.”
