In Search Of History - The Hidden Glory of Petra (History Channel Documentary)

stories from the pages of time stories of triumph and tragedy adventure and achievement as we go in search of history journey to a spectacular city in the Jordanian desert carved from solid rock and hidden from Westerners for over 1,500 years who built these remarkable structures and what secrets lay buried beneath them [Music] the mountains of present-day Jordan a formidable barrier between the fertile lands of Palestine and the vast deserts of Arabia and keepers of a 2000 year old secret [Music] in the year 1812 a young swiss adventurer named johann budva Burkhardt discovered that secret disguised as an Arab merchant he was travelling south through the biblical lands of Palestine Bedouin nomads had told Burkhart of a wondrous ancient city hidden inside a mountain Burkhart came in search of this forgotten and treasure his guides led Burkhart into a twisting gorge so narrow that in places it threatened to blot out the Sun behind him lay the danger of a flash flood or have attacked by nomadic tribes Minh the Bedouin who killed any foreigner they found in their domain before him lay only the unknown suddenly the canyon walls closed in daylight all but disappeared and then in the darkness the secret was revealed [Music] the astonished Burkhardt beheld a massive structure carved from the mountains rock that would have been surprising enough but it was only the beginning as he penetrated deeper into the sandstone gorges Burkhart saw hundreds of other monuments carved from the mountains with consummate skill scattered for miles along the canyon walls Burkhart dared not share his excitement with his bedouin guides only his disguise protected him from instant death but as a well trained historian he knew that he had stumbled upon what could only be an ancient civilization long forgotten by the Western world Johann Ludwig Burckhardt had found the hidden glory of Petra it's the most mysterious place you can't help but think who were these people who came here and settled and did this where did they get these ideas what you almost want to thank you who had who had the gall to do this today Petra's location is no mystery it lies a few dozen miles north of the Red Sea in the modern nation of Jordan although only a fraction of the city has been excavated archaeologists estimate that once it covered an area the size of lower Manhattan as in burkhardt's time petra evokes wonder in all fold it along its rugged canyons ancient hands once carved multicolored sandstone into a magnificent city [Music] in the hard desert the builders of petra chiseled an opulent splendor curiously resembling the architecture of Greece and Rome in their hands a sandstone cliff became a theater which held 8,000 people [Music] [Applause] a mountainside became a massive building nearly 150 feet high Caverns became immense rolled tunes but who were the people who carved these astonishing monuments and how could they have carved them out of solid rock for centuries the Bedouins of southern Jordan rapped Petra's history in a veil of legend - the Bedouin Petra is a haunted place the abode of the jinn the jinn are the goblins of desert folklore invisible demons who haunt deserted places pestering unwary humans the Biddle tribe knows them all too well [Music] once we were traveling through here the Jim gave us a very hard time some were screaming some howling some laughing some choking acting like children or crazy old people as soon as the Sun sets they assemble you hear screaming you hear singing really it's a shameful thing there is a lot of it in Petra the padule are the descendants of nomads who once jealously guarded the secret of the great city hidden in their mountains one reason petrol lay so long undiscovered by the West was that the Bedouins killed any foreigners who came near it in badula folklore petra was the spot where the Bible tells us Moses splits solid rock with his rod to find water for his people the Badou believed that the narrow Gorge burkhart followed to the city is the cleft made by Moses's staff they say that the huge carved building burkhardt's saw was made by Moses's archenemy the Pharaoh of Egypt once we start looking at the myths of Petra we run into the Pharaoh because all of Petra has just tied into this whole story of the the Pharaoh of Egypt chasing the children of Israel while he was supposed to been drowned on the way but according to local legend of course he arrived to Petra the Bedouin believed that the Pharaoh hid his enormous wealth inside an urn atop the building they call the Treasury the treasury's urn is pockmarked by hundreds of Bedouins bullets fired over the centuries in the hope that the shattered urn would release a shower of gold whenever people came to visit they would say that since this was a Treasury if they knocked down the upper part Gold would pour down on them they would fire at it but there was no gold whatsoever that was all nonsense in spite of the legends no treasure has yet been found anywhere at Petra the urn is a well-known symbol that often is found on tombs in the greco-roman world presumably it's the only which the ashes or the spirit of the dead person resides and the Treasury is almost certainly a tomb of one of the early kings archaeologists have counted nearly 800 carved tombs at Petra could it have simply been a vast Cemetery most scholars believe that in ancient times petrol was more a city of the living than of the dead 2,000 years ago while Jesus walked the hills of Galilee less than 200 miles away as many as thirty thousand people may have been living in Petra Petra has been misinterpreted by many visitors because they see tombs it is thought of as a dead City this was a city that was vital that was a lie today a few shattered fragments eroded by time are all that remain of what must have been a splendid civilization got going down well show you the stairs which is kind of interesting because you can actually see the where archaeologists at Brown University in Rhode Island are attempting to reconstruct ancient Petra hoping to rebuild the city using computer graphics their work has barely scratched the surface there isn't even a map made of the entire ancient city there are pieces of it have been mapped a few excavations here a few guys Cove Asians there it's a drop in the bucket we want to look for the hearts and the souls of the people who lived here and to understand better their customs no one was writing an account of daily life here in Petra or if they were it is something that has eluded us we have not been able to to find it and none of the other excavations that have taken place here have found it either a few inscriptions and ancient texts speak of mighty kings who were lovers of democracy of powerful gods and sumptuous feasts of great triumphs over enemies and of the right of women to own property we know little else about the builders of petra except their name the Nabataeans part of the interesting thing about the Nabataeans about petra is that nobody really knows exactly where they came from there were people who coming out of the desert with little wanted a lot they wanted to learn they clearly were grabbing a little bit of culture from here and a little bit of culture from there and it would be interesting to know how they transform themselves from a nomadic community to to a city to a large thriving metropolis and one of the major cities of the Middle East what little we know about the Nabataeans hints at astonishing talents and equally astonishing wealth which enabled them to build a magnificent city in one of the harshest environments on earth about five centuries before the birth is Christ an obscure tribe of nomads rolled out of the vast Arabian desert they call themselves the Nava to the Greeks called them the Nabataeans to this day no one knows where they came from what drove them to their extraordinary achievements [Music] or where it's fairly certain that the Nabataeans originated as a an Arab nomadic tribe in northern Arabia we still really don't know why they settle that remains a mystery how why they began to adopt Roman and Greek agriculture while the origins of the Nabataeans may remain obscure the fact is that they would become one of the wealthiest peoples of the ancient world but how could such wandering nomads acquire great riches in such a desolate domain being known as leap threw out their tents where they decided to settle for a while and then pull them down and go somewhere else and all of a sudden you have them moving into the site of Petra and creating these huge monuments literally out of nothing but 2,000 years ago great riches were frequently encountered in these desert hills in ancient times trade was the wealth of the desert caravans crossed and re-crossed the Middle East carrying precious cargo from distant lands in the desert control of trade routes was the key to wealth among the nomads extorting tolls from passing caravans became the number one industry this is a practice widespread in the bedouin world whatever resource you have that can link you to the wider economy you will exploit it but while other tribes were content to rob their neighbors the Nabataeans were soon pillaging and trading all over the Near East they even became Pirates attacking merchant ships in the Red Sea until the Egyptian Navy stopped them from the beginning the Nabataeans were nomads with ambition they soon dominated a vast territory stretching from Damascus in the north to parts of Saudi Arabia in the south and east and to the Sinai Peninsula in the West about 300 BC they built the city of Petra strategically located in the only place caravans could pass through the rugged mountains east of the Jordan River they want to show off their newfound wealth their newfound importance in the Middle East and the best way to do that is to build to show everyone who comes through Petra and back then everybody traveled through Petra it was it was the nexus of all the trade routes through that area and so what better way to show off your people's newfound power than to have these tremendous buildings but for Petra to survive an enormous problem had to be solved the Nabataeans controlled a domain where only four or five inches of rain fell every year one of the lowest annual rainfalls on earth how could a city survive in a desert wealth had created Petra but only food and water could sustain it the Nabataeans met this challenge with their usual success at the entrance to Petra they dug a massive tunnel through a mountain to control the winter rains for millions of years flash floods had rushed wildly through the canyons the Nabataeans tunnel channelled these floods into an elaborate water management system they brought the water in via closed-circuit just like the bikes we use today bringing it down the mountain into the city with aqueducts on top of the mountains in addition to that they had two perennial Springs in the city area and they had dozens of water runs going into catchment basins into cisterns tremendous ability to conserve water and to use it traces of Petra's water system are still visible lined with plaster to prevent the porous sandstone from absorbing precious water this system gave Petra a reliable water supply but how could a desert produce enough food to support a city here to navigate ingenuity triumphed we've got this this great question why and what from where did the Nabataeans get all this knowledge and apparently they brought it back they went from place to place and we can see this electus ism in all aspects of their life and this is part of their engineering skill that someone came back with an idea locally somebody said okay we can do that this is off dot some 60 miles west of Petra in Israel's Negev desert 2,000 years ago it was called Oh Buddha named for Oh Buddhist the second a king of the Nabataeans ancient Oh Buddha was a Nabataean fortress and trading post from its Citadel soldiers riding camels patrolled the caravan routes and at obiter the Nabataeans made the desert bloom today pistachios almonds and other crops still flourish at of dot watered by the ancient irrigation system of the Nabataeans in valleys where rainwater collected Nabatean farmers built networks of dams and ditches to capture it using this simple system the Nava teams made the desert their breadbasket and fed tens of thousands of people we can see dozens and dozens of threshing floors where the grain was prepared to go to market we can see aqueducts that had never been recorded to bring the water into a pressurized water system for some of the citizens we could see the road some four foot traffic only some four camels the some that would accommodate wheeled vehicles coming into petrol from virtually every Compass angle of dots ancient fields reveal how a city of Petra's size could have survived in the desert but so many other questions remain why would desert nomads carve these massive buildings what purpose did they serve power the Nevadans able to carve such colossal structures archaeologists believe that most of Petra's 800 carved monuments were tombs the presence of so many tombs has led some to argue that Petra was not a city but a royal cemetery like Egypt's Valley of the Kings but most scholars believe that Petra's tombs were surrounded not by sacred silence but by the noisy bustle of a metropolis Nabataean kings built Petra not to prepare for the next world but to flaunt their wealth and status in this one the neighbors had tremendous supple curves and things of that nature Nabataeans had to one-up them and so we find that cliffs all around the petra basin being adorned with hewn ireri monuments whatever their motives were building on such a grand scale the Nabataeans applied their seemingly limitless energy to the task in their sandstone canyons they cut their tools out of solid rock today we can still see that chisel blows that centuries ago hollowed out a family's mausoleum in these tombs the dead joined their ancestors in eternal sleep while the living held banquets in their memory some tombs were of relatively modest size others were of staggering proportions with ingenious technique the Nabataeans carved entire mountain sides into monuments the tomb façades are built from the top down you have to build scaffolding or some kind of a ladder several hundred feet up and you begin by carving out some grooves in the rock the idea is to be able to insert would moisten the wood and as it expands it begins to crack blocks and what you see today as scars on most of the tombs are the drill holes left over after they've split the rock the final work is done by actually chisel anus it's literally sculpted but no one knows whether the Nabataeans themselves designed and carved the great tombs of Petra or whether they imported architects from Alexandria Antioch or other ancient centers of culture just as a paris fashion would be current in 7th Avenue in New York at the current designs and fashions of Greece would be brought to Petra by a number of architects or whatever that may have been hired by the kings who lived here however these monuments are navigating built we classical principles there is an indigenous flavor to them that is very Semitic and very important one of the great mysteries of Petra is exactly where their architectural ideas came from because they use a little of everything we find material coming from Egypt we find material that looks very Mesopotamian we find greco-roman in ancient times the grand centerpiece of Petra was its theater a purely greco-roman design which seated 8,000 people no one is completely sure why the Nabataeans built it but experts have one theory numbah teams were like everybody else in the neighborhood once you get a high capital surplus after all you can't be a barbarian you can't be living in the boondocks they had to have a main theater because this showed that you were really women Petra's architecture hints at how the Nabateans may have amused themselves and how they may have worshiped and grieved fragments of their sensuous artwork suggest refined tastes and worldly pleasures but what they actually believed remains unclear unfortunately the Nabataeans took their secrets with them to their graves sometime in the ancient past atop the canyons which tower over Petra Nabataean craftsmen carved away an entire mountaintop leaving only a pair of obelisks no one knows why some scholars believe that the mysterious obelisks are the images of Nabataean gods [Music] religion is another mystery a Petra we have virtually no documentation on the religion of the people we do have inscriptions that mention various deities and we have carvings all over the place that apparently represent those deities scattered throughout Petra are mysterious carved monuments called God blocks the gods of ancient Near Eastern nomads forbad they're worshipers to know their names or behold their faces the Nabataeans chief god was do Shara his name means he of the mountains of Shara Shara is a mountain range near Petra beyond his name we know nothing about to Shara Petra's God blocks and obelisks may have been images of him but as the Nabataeans became wealthy sophisticated city dwellers who adopted Greek culture do Shara would not remain faceless for long the Shara came in and I suspect although we here again we have no documentation that he acquired the attributes of everybody in the neighborhood could this have been a later image of do sharra archaeologists believe that the Nabataeans merged their God with Greek and Egyptian deities like Zeus Dionysus and Osiris some lights generally speaking don't anthropomorphize their deities and of course once we get into the Hellenistic period this becomes an important deal because the Greeks and Romans had sculptures of their deities and after all if we're going to be sophisticated modern we've got to do the same thing [Music] but even sophisticated Nabataeans may have celebrated some rather sinister rituals at the top of a mountain high above Petra the Nabataeans carved a mysterious altar [Music] it was almost certainly a place of sacrifice where the priests of Petra snoo offerings to their gods but what did they sacrifice here or whom [Applause] the Bible tells of widespread human sacrifice in the ancient land of Canaan just across the Jordan River from the lands of the Nabataeans the priests of Baal God of the Canaanites sacrificed children on mountaintops [Music] Yahweh God of Israel demanded that Abraham sacrifice his only son Isaac on a mountaintop at the last moment Yahweh provided a ram as a substitute but there is evidence that for the Nabataeans there were no substitutions an inscription found near Petra tells of a priest sacrificing a young man perhaps his own son other ancient accounts tell of boys and girls killed and offered to the Nabataean goddess a loser one text commemorates the annual cutting of a young boy's throat at an avid City some 200 miles from Petra and so the altar of Petra's high place may once have run with human blood a gift to gods whose representations now live on in Petra's obelisks speculation about human sacrifice sparks heated debate debate that may never be resolved simply because we have an altar people immediately start saying well did they sacrifice people I doubt it by the time we get to the first century everybody is pretty sophisticated I mean we don't do that anymore presumably as time went on child sacrifice became less common but there are a few scant references in some navigate in text to fountain Peter and nearby that suggested occasion it was still practice and that would not be surprising given the long history of child sacrifice in the Western Semitic world and it makes more sense than we might think most of these were fertility calls the gods had given you the gift of children and it was only proper that you should return a part of the gift at least so it was a great honor in a way although sort of dubious honor the Nabataean gods continue to puzzle archaeologists but a recent spectacular discovery leaves no doubt that petra was eventually conquered by another God in 1992 archaeologists uncovered the ruins of a sixth century Church adorned with magnificent mosaics after nearly two thousand years the church mosaics of Petra fairly glow with life and surprised us with their worldly themes animals plants and human figures parade before us and delightful lively scenes which seem to have little to do with the Bible but there is little doubt that the building was consecrated to the worship of Christ at a core the American center of Oriental research in Amman Jordan staff members are trying to fit together an enormous jigsaw puzzle of shattered stone fragments from the Petra Church as the work of restoration progresses the brilliant artistry of the stone carving is revealed the people of Petra must have lavished as much money and skill on building their church as they did on tombs and pagan temples but beyond its artistic splendors the petra church has yielded an even more remarkable find [Music] [Applause] [Music] over 50 papyrus scrolls were found inside the church all of them reduced to carbonized lumps by a fire which destroyed the church soon after it was built in a special laboratory at a core a team of scholars is carefully separating the charred layers of the scrolls and preparing them to be translated ancient sources suggest that in the early years of Christianity heretics who disagreed with Orthodox Dogma were exiled from nearby lands to Petra perhaps the Petra Scrolls will reveal their teachings maybe as fragments are reassembled unknown forbidden Gospels will be revealed so far all the scrolls translated have been administrative church records but dr. Yakko frozen leader of the restoration team has found that even these mundane records can give tantalizing glimpses of the lives of ordinary citizens of Petra one such fragment was the last will and testament of a man named whore I shall leave behind all my belongings to the possession of a pasta Petrus the most holy priest on the condition that they will pay from it the provision of food and clothing to my mother are you during all her lifetime even if it may be half of the whole property and so these texts are very important for the archaeologists because they tell us about the plots the houses the churches and the monasteries of Petra and the neighborhood for example we have a lot of divisions of property with a very accurate description of the what itself and all the neighbors and that's why we know exactly in some parts of of Petra who was living where and where we have the churches and monasteries and so on only a few of the 50 Petra scrolls have been translated as restoration continues who knows what secrets they will reveal to us from the scrolls we may at last begin to decipher the daily life of Petra and learn more about why the city eventually died for in the sixth century when the Petra scrolls were written the Nabataeans greatest days were passed by the time of Christ the Nabataean Empire was nearly 500 years old and still going strong [Music] but the Nabataeans prosperity was to cost them their independence the people of Petra had grown so rich from taxing caravans that they attracted the attention of the world's most powerful Empire the Empire of Rome the all-powerful Romans were becoming annoyed with Petra they were tired of paying higher prices for goods that pass through Nabataean territory the roman emperors decided that if caravans paid taxes to the Nabataeans the Nabataeans could pay taxes to Rome the legions were sent marching toward Petra two expeditions were sent down to conquer Petra the first one was bought off and the second one got about half way down and the Emperor died and they had to turn around go back but the Romans really wanted some control over this whole area finally when a Nabataean king died in 106 ad the Roman Emperor Trajan sent a legion to announce that from now on Petro belong the Nabataeans had little choice but to accept Roman rule petra began its new life as capital of the Roman province of Arabia petraea the Romans built a road through the middle of the city they installed a governor and they wisely allow the Nabataeans to pursue business as usual it was nature not wrong that put an end to Petra [Music] according to ancient records at 9 p.m. on May 19th in the year 363 AD a cataclysmic earthquake struck Petra at least half of the city was destroyed the earthquakes timing could not have been worse by the end of the 4th century a beleaguered Rome was abandoning its Arabian frontier the trade routes were shifting merchants were leaving after the earthquake struck Petra never recovered as time went on the Navitus abandoned it these people had talent and they simply took their talent with him and left now there wasn't really much to be done they the storefronts along the paved street for example are are completely covered with rubble so that really it wasn't much left [Music] [Applause] [Music] by the 7th century when Muhammad's armies brought Islam Petra had become a hidden secret of the mountains the Nabataeans had vanished into the desert as mysteriously as they had once - merged from it but not without leaving one final legacy to the Middle East the Nabataean alphabet evolved into the alphabet of Arabic the language spoken today by millions from Morocco to the Persian Gulf today the desert like a vast dry ocean has closed over the Nabataeans who once ruled its great expanses life has returned to its timeless ways while archaeologists puzzled over the riddle of Petra [Music] what happened to the Nabataeans I don't know I kind of I'd like to think that they are still there are the people that we are living with when we excavate the site are they descendants of the Nabataeans I like to think so they are so proud of their Petra this is their home the padule to my way of thinking our Nabataeans and spirit and certainly Nabataeans in pride we may never fully understand the Nabataeans much of their once great civilization has been lost forever but even the little we know today is enough to appreciate their unique genius and astonishing accomplishments it was a civilization that flourished than vanished leaving a spectacular tantalizing achievement carved in stone a timeless monument to the passion of those who go in search of history [Music]

Channel: Peter David Documentaries

Views: 424,734

Rating: 4.6814656 out of 5

Keywords: Nabataean Kingdom, History Channel Documentary, History's Mysteries

Id: TmyCbKS14ow

Length: 42min 40sec (2560 seconds)

Published: Wed May 09 2018