LIFE IN THE BIG CITY Petra sprawls and snakes through the mountains, with most of its significant features collected in a flat valley. Royal tombs line one side of the valley; religious sites line the other. A wide, paved, colonnaded street was once Petra
PETRA WAS A NEXUS OF COMMERCE AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE
THEY CLEARLY APPRECIATED ARCHITECTURAL SHOWMANSHIP A GOOD SENSE OF TIMING, A FLAIR FOR THEATRICAL
SITING.
the hills are pocked with smaller caves as well, their ceilings blackened by the soot left from decades of Bedouin campfires. Some of the caves are truly imposing, like the Urn Tomb, with its classical facade carved into the cliff on top of a base of stone-built arches, and an eroding statue of a man (perhaps the king) wearing a toga. Others are easy to miss, such as the cave known as the Triclinium, which has no facade at all but possesses the only intricately carved interior at Petra, with stone benches and walls lined with fluted half-columns. Standing inside the valley it is easy to see why Petra thrived. The mountains contain it, looming like sentries in every direction, but the valley itself is wide and bright.
So much of Petra feels like a sly surprise that I became convinced the Nabateans must have had a sense of humor to have built the city the way they did. They were gifted people in many ways. They had a knack for business, and cornered the market in frankincense and myrrh. They had real estate savvy,
establishing their city at the meeting point of several routes on which caravans shipped spices, ivory, precious metals, silk and other goods from China, India and the Persian Gulf to the ports of the Mediterranean. They had a talent for melding the dust and dirt around them into a hard, russet clay from which they made perfume bottles and tiles and bowls. They were expert artisans. And while it isn’t recorded in historical texts, they clearly appreciated the hallmarks of architectural showmanship—a good sense of timing, a flair for theatrical siting.
The most convincing evidence of this begins with the Siq, the main entrance to the city, a natural ravine that splits the towering rocks for almost a mile. It’s a compressed, confined space; its rock walls lean this way and that. Once you inch your way through it, you are spilled out onto a sandy apron and confronted with the most dramatic structure in Petra— Al Khazneh, or the Treasury, a cave more than a hundred feet high, its facade a fantastical mash-up of a Greco-Roman doorway, an Egyptian “broken” pediment and two levels of columns and statues etched into the sheer face of the mountain.
The Treasury wasn’t actually a treasury at all—it gets its name from the riches said to have been stored in the great urn atop the circular building at the facade’s center. The statues adorning the colonnaded niches suggest it may have been a temple, but most scholars think it was a tomb housing the remains of an important early king. (A favorite candidate is the first century B.C. Aretas III, who used the word Philhellenos on his coins—“friend of the Greeks”—which might explain the building’s Hellenistic flair.) Inside the cave there are just three bare chambers, today empty of whatever remains once rested there.
Perhaps the Nabateans placed this grand building here because the Siq served as a buffer to marauders, much like a wall or a moat. But I can’t help but think that they knew that forcing visitors to approach the Treasury via a long, slow walk through the Siq would make a perfect lead-up to a great reveal, designed to delight and astonish. The gradual approach also leaves the world with a timeless pun, because coming upon the Treasury this way makes you feel as if you’ve found a treasure at the end of a secret grotto.
AS AHMED AND I rode along,
I could just make out in the distance the team from Virtual Wonders, who had spent the day flying a drone over the Great Temple, shooting high-resolution images of it from above. The company was formed in 2018 by three friends with complementary talents. Mark Bauman, a longtime journalist and former executive at Smithsonian Enterprises and National Geographic, knew the people in charge of historical locations like Petra and how to work with local authorities. Corey Jaskolski, a one-time high school dropout/computer whisperer (he eventually earned a graduate degree from MIT in electrical engineering), who has patented systems for impossible-seeming robotic cameras and 3-D scanning for use underwater, on land and from the air, would manage the technological challenges of image capture and digital modeling. Kenny Broad, an environmental anthropologist at the University of Miami, is a world-class cave diver and explorer for whom scrambling around a place like Petra was a piece of cake; he would serve as chief exploration officer. The three of them shared a passion for nature and archaeology and a concern with how to preserve important sites.
While outfits such as the Getty Research Institute and the nonprofit CyArk have been capturing 3-D images of historical sites for some time, Virtual Wonders proposed a new approach. They would create infinitesimally detailed 3-D models. For Petra, for instance, they would capture the equivalent of 250,000 ultra-high-resolution images, which will be computer-rendered into a virtual model of the city and its breathtaking structures that can be viewed—even walked through and interacted with—using a virtual-reality headset, gaming console or other high-tech “projected environments.” Virtual Wonders will share these renderings with authorities and other scholarly and educational partners (in this case, the Petra
National Trust). Detailed modeling of this kind is at the leading edge of archaeological best practices, and according to Jordan’s Princess Dana Firas, the head of the Petra National Trust, the data will help identify and measure the site’s deterioration and assist in developing plans for preservation and managing visitors. “It’s a longterm investment,” Firas told me.
By the time I arrived in Petra, the Virtual Wonders team had scanned and imaged more than half of Petra and its significant buildings using an assortment of high-tech methods. A DJI Inspire drone—for which a military escort is required, because drones are illegal in Jordan—uses a high-resolution camera to collect aerial views, shot in overlap-
WHAT WILL IT MEAN TO CREATE A PERFECT MODEL OF A PLACE LIKE PETRA ONE THAT YOU CAN VISIT FROM YOUR LIVING ROOM?
ping “stripes” so every inch is recorded. Exact measurements are done by photogrammetry, with powerful lenses on 35-millimeter cameras, and Lidar, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, a revolving laser mechanism that records minute calculations at the rate of a million measurements per second. When combined and rendered by computers those measurements form a detailed “texture map” of an object’s surface. All of this data will be poured into computers, which will need about eight months to render a virtual model.
None of this is cheap. In Petra, the Virtual Wonders team hiked around with about a half-million dollars’ worth of gear. According to Bauman, the company’s hope is that the cost of the projects will be recouped, and exceeded, by licensing the data to film companies, game developers and the like, with a portion of the revenue going back to whoever oversees the site, in this case the Petra National Trust. This isn’t an idle hope. Petra is so spectacular that it has been used as a location in films, most famously Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; countless music videos; and as a setting in at least ten video games including Spy Hunter, OutRun 2 and Lego Indiana Jones. If its approach succeeded, Virtual Wonders hoped to move on to similar projects around the world, and since I left Jordan the company has begun work at Chichen Itza, the Mayan city in the Yucatán. It has also scored a clear success with an immersive virtual reality exhibit titled “Tomb of Christ: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre Experience,” at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C.
I left my donkey and crossed through the ruins of the flat valley to join the team on a ridge overlooking the Great Temple. “We’re shooting stripes,” Jaskolski called out as the buglike drone rose and jetted across the open sky toward the temple. Jaskolski’s wife, Ann, was monitoring the drone on an iPad. She reached out and adjusted the drone’s landing pad, a gray rubber mat, which was weighed down with a rock to keep the gusty breeze from toying with it. The drone made a burbling sizzle as it darted over the temple. Somewhere in the distance a donkey brayed. A generator coughed and then commenced its low grumbling. “We’re killing it!” Jaskolski called to Bauman,
sounding a little like a teenager playing Fortnite. “I’m really crushing the overlap!”
Bauman and I hiked along the ridge to another building known as the Blue Chapel. A few crooked fingers of rebar stuck out of some of the rock— evidence that some clumsy restoration had been attempted. But otherwise, the structure was untouched, another remnant of the city that Petra once had been, a bustling capital, where lives were lived and lost; an empire etched in time, where the city’s carapace is all that remains.
ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE VALLEY from the Treasury, across the plain, Petra’s architects kept another great trick up their sleeve: Ad Deir, or the Monastery. This ancient temple is thought to have been dedicated to a deified Nabatean king named Obodas I, and possesses Petra’s largest carved facade. But the path there gives you no glimpse of it at all. For 40 minutes Ahmed and I clung on as our donkeys climbed up the steep path. I kept my eyes glued to the back of Ahmed’s head so I wouldn’t have to see the sheer drop-off along the edge of the trail.
As we made yet another turn with no building in sight, I began to wonder if I had misunderstood our destination. Even when Ahmed stopped and announced that we had arrived, there was nothing to see. The heat was getting to me and I was impatient. I grumbled that I didn’t see anything. “Over there,” Ahmed said, gesturing around a ragged rock wall. When I turned the corner, I was met with the full-frontal view of an enormous facade with an array of columns and doorway-shaped niches, almost 160 feet wide and nearly as tall, carved into a rocky outcropping. It was so startling and beautiful that I gasped out loud.
Like so many of the monuments here, the Monastery’s interior is deceptively simple: a single rectangular room with a niche carved into the back wall, which probably once held a stone Nabatean icon. The walls of the niche itself are carved with crosses, suggesting the temple became a church during the Byzantine era—hence the name. The Monastery is said to be the best example of traditional Nabatean architecture—simplified geometric forms, the urn atop a rounded building at the center. It is believed that the Monastery’s architect took inspiration from the Treasury but pointedly stripped away most of its Greco-Roman flourishes. There are no statues in the spaces cut between the columns, and overall it’s rougher, simpler. But out here, all alone, in front of a wide stone courtyard where Nabateans and travelers from across the