Petra and the Paradox of a Great City Built by Nomads: An Explanation Suggested by Satellite Imagery

Abstract

Petra has been seen by many as an historical and archaeological anomaly, a city with all the urban amenities seen in other great cities of the ancient world that was built by a famously nomadic Arab society. In the centuries before the advent of the Common Era, the Nabataeans amassed great wealth by controlling the trade in precious commodities, especially spices and incense, over the Arabian Peninsula. Written accounts from the fourth century B.C. indicate that so committed were the Nabataeans to a nomadic lifestyle that agriculture and the construction of houses were outlawed (Starky, 1955: 87). Yet by the first two centuries A.D., as Rome tightened control over trade in the region, many magnificent tombs and civic structures had appeared in Petra, and during this time there was a proliferation of village and temple complexes in Nabataea. Enhancement of Landsat satellite imagery suggests that villages and civic architecture appeared only in those areas where soils were arable and the terrain was amenable to the diversion of sparse rainfall to those arable soils. The appearance of Nabataean villages, temples, densely settled urban areas, and the famous tombs and monuments of Petra might therefore have emerged together as facets of a way of life appropriate to an agriculturally based economy that did not exist in Nabataea before that time.