Deep in the Jordanian desert, hidden from the West for many centuries, lies the mysterious city of Petra. This beautiful and unique oasis consisting of towering sandstone buildings carved directly into canyon walls was once the bustling capital city of the Nabataean empire. Petra’s remote location in the arid desert provided a resting point for caravans traveling through the Arabian Peninsula. This strategically placed city gave the Nabataeans unprecedented control over the import and export of goods, allowing them to amass extreme wealth. Although the Nabataeans were of Arabic descent, influences of the Western world can be clearly seen in the architectural details of the buildings they left behind. Archaeologists have uncovered large temples, tombs, churches, Roman baths, and gardens.
As former nomads, the Nabataeans accumulated knowledge of the desert that allowed them to survive in a land with no rivers, and few water sources. They developed an ingenious system of water collection that permitted them to settle in the canyons, first constructing dams to divert seasonal deluges of rain into channels chiseled into cliffs. Water was then channeled into cisterns, sealed with plaster, allowing for much needed year-round access in a dry environment. The dams and cisterns also served as protection against the dangers of flash floods that plagued the narrow canyon system.
Having worked out a viable method for water collection, the Nabataeans settled themselves along trade routes, providing an oasis to travelers, for a fee. Malichus II, king of the Nabataeans collected a 25% tax on all imports and demanded other fees that likely doubled the cost of goods traveling into Arabia, according to The Periplus of the Red Sea written in the first century by a Greek author.
With the influx of disposable income, the newly settled community began hiring stonemasons from as far as Alexandria to chisel away at the rock, constructing a city unlike any other. These masons incorporated the styles of the Greeks, Indians, Egyptians, and Romans when creating homes complete with inner courtyards, tombs and palaces with towering ceilings, and staircases cut directly into the sandstone. Among the most well known of Petra’s structures is Al Khazneh, commonly referred to as the Treasury. Despite its name, the structure was not a storehouse for the wealth of Petra, but rather the tomb of a Nabataean king carved in the Hellenistic fashion.
At its peak over 30,000 men, women, and children resided in Petra, but by the fourth century it was in decline. In 106 AD, the city was conquered by the Romans and integrated into its Arabic province. When earthquakes devastated parts of the city in 363 AD, they were never rebuilt. After another earthquake in 551 AD the city was all but abandoned. With the adoption of Islam, Petra became unreachable to the West, and faded into obscurity until the nineteenth century. In 1812, Swiss explorer and Orientalist Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, posing as an Arab merchant, made his way across the desert discovering the ancient city and reintroduced it to the Western world. Access to the area would remain difficult for many years to come, and
Edward L. Wilson’s description of his 1881 trip to Petra reveals the difficulties he encountered in dealing with the native peoples of the area:
All who have left record of their visit to Petra tell of the difficulties encountered with these suspicious Bedouins. Many a would-be visitor has been driven back from the very gates, robbed and insulted, without so much as a bird’s-eye view of Petra to compensate him for ten days of hard desert travel.1
Nevertheless, Wilson was determined to travel to the city and finally succeeded in viewing and sketching the site almost one year after beginning his journey.
Several decades before Wilson, English photographer Francis Frith (1822–1898) braved this treacherous path to gain access to the hidden metropolis, encountering many difficulties in his quest. Frith made the first of three visits to Egypt in 1856, and on his third journey to the Middle East in 1860, he intended to travel from Akaba to Petra. But he found his way into the city blocked by a decidedly unfriendly political climate. A rivalry between the sheikhs of the surrounding area prevented his expedition from descending into the gorge that held the most famous monuments. In the end, he was forced to pay “heavily to be escorted by a hitherto untrodden route (back) to Gaza.”2 He must have been frustrated to have reached the border of Petra before being forced to turn back. His photograph Cliffs-Petra shows the outskirts of the famous community he was able to visit later that year, and he made a series of images of the great rock city.3
Though Frith was by no means the first to photograph the wonders of the Middle East, he was the first to systematically record its contemporary urban landscape, as well as the ruins of past great civilizations for mass public consumption. Enduring a significant amount of discomfort throughout his travels, he often used abandoned tombs as darkrooms, crawling on his hands and knees by candlelight to affix his image onto glass plates (in Egypt, he had a darkroom on his boat). This photo of the cliffs of Petra in the Solari Foundation Collection inspires the same wonder in the modern viewer as it did in the nineteenth century. His artistic style provides the audience with access to exotic locations while conveying as much information as possible. It is because of Frith’s tenacity and fortitude that there is a nineteenth-century photograph of this enchanting hidden city. As the very foundation of Petra begins to crumble under the pressure of its popularity, the value of images such as Cliffs-Petra to the historical and cultural history of the Middle East cannot be overstated.
Teresa Shannon
Francis Frith, Cliffs–Petra, c.1858, albumen print, 15.9 x 21 cm, SOLARI 94.039.100L