Walking the Bible (55 page)

As we were reading, we were joined on the roof by the Muslim guard, who must have been napping when we first arrived. He was from the bedouin tribe around Petra, the Bdul, and worked for the local government. I asked him if he thought Moses had come to this site. “Yes,” he said. “With Aaron. According to the books of the Jews, it was 3,200 years ago.”

“Do you feel them?” I asked.

“I feel blessed,” he said. “When I sleep here, I sleep much better than when I sleep down there.” He gestured toward Petra.

“And why is that?”

“This is the best place in the country. The air is good. Aaron is here. I feel safe.”

We bid him good-bye and rejoined our camels for the descent into Petra. It didn’t take long to realize that while I had twice used a camel to
ride
up
a mountain, I had yet to use one to ride down. Riding up uses one set of muscles—the lower back, the inner thigh, the bicep. Riding down uses a different, much more sensitive set—the upper abs, the outer ankle, the tricep—as well as a few body parts I didn’t know had feeling, like the coccyx.

The remarkable thing about riding a camel is how much action it requires of the arms, which must work constantly to relieve pressure from every other body part. The right arm grabs the pommel in front to prevent you from falling; the left arm twists around to grab the pommel in back to relieve pressure from your groin. I had read Lawrence said that all bedouin have extensive knowledge of their genealogies. Now I know why. It’s impossible to spend eight hours on a camel and not think of your children. As Mahmoud delicately put it after one particularly rocky bend, “I’m glad I have two sons already.” It was at that point that I decided to dismount and walk a few steps on my own.

By the time we arrived in the central valley of Petra, Wadi Musa, it was the middle of the afternoon and we were coated in several layers of sweat, camel spittle, and regurgitated sage. I spotted a small spring alongside the path, and we stopped to wash our faces. As we stumbled from there into the main street of the ruined city, I realized that the limp one gets from riding a camel is a lot more twisted than that from riding a horse. All I could think was that eight hours on a camel is like eight hours on a camel—and nothing else. “And to think that the Nabateans arrived in Petra after eight
months
on a camel,” Avner said.

Though Petra may have had ancient roots, its glory years didn’t begin until the arrival of the Nabateans, one of the fleeting superpowers of the ancient Near East. The Nabateans were a nomadic tribe from the region of Nabatea in the northwest Arabian Desert. In the sixth century
B.C.E.
, when Babylon depopulated the kingdoms of Judah and Israel across the Jordan, the Edomites filtered across the river to take their place. The Nabateans in turn filtered into Edom. Over the next several hundred years, they came to control the major trade route between Mecca and Damascus, as well as the one between Mecca and Gaza, an awesome vise grip on the region. To reflect their power, this previously nomadic people built a capital city in Petra in the fourth century
B.C.E.
At their peak around the time of Christ, the Nabateans were trading with not only Palestine, Egypt, and Syria but also Greece, Rome, even China.

The Nabateans traded all manner of goods, including animals, spices, iron, copper, fabrics, sugar, medicine, gold, and ivory. But by far their dominant item was frankincense, a product so popular that Avner likened its appeal, and influence, to that of oil in modern life. Frankincense is made from resin extracted from a desert tree of the genus
Boswellia,
which in herbal medicine today is used to treat arthritis, diarrhea, dysentery, pulmonary disease, and ringworm. The process involves cutting trees so their sap comes into contact with oxygen and harden into globules, not unlike what happens with manna, though without the digestion of plant lice.

Frankincense was valued for its smell, which is described as being sweet to the point of intoxicating, but was quite unlike the perfumes of today. For one, it must be burned to produce its smell. In addition, it has sterilizing qualities and was used in healing, preserving food, and protecting against insects. Also, because of its perceived otherworldliness, it was used in religious ceremonies; for example, it covered up the malodor at animal sacrifices. In Exodus, God instructs Moses to mix pure frankincense with several other herbs and use the compound to bless the Tent of Meeting. Frankincense was considered so important that God deemed its use for cultic purposes a capital crime, punishable by death. Other cultures also used it as a palliative to death. Before crucifixion, Roman prisoners (possibly including Christ) were offered wine laced with frankincense as a painkiller. The Roman emperor Nero is said to have burned at his wife’s funeral an amount of frankincense equal to the annual production in Arabia.

The reason the Nabateans rode frankincense to the status of regional power is that they figured out how to transport it from deep in the Arabian Desert, the only place on earth where it grows, to the commercial centers along the Mediterranean, where it could be profitably sold. The Nabatean Spice Route was a rarity in the Near East, a homemade route that skirted the fertile areas and thus eluded the larger powers. The two-thousand-mile pathway cut a southeast-northwest line
across the desert. Viewed in terms of today’s geography, 90 percent was in Saudi Arabia, 6 percent in Jordan, 4 percent in Israel, and the last two miles in Gaza. The journey took three months each way to complete and at its peak involved over one thousand camels, each one carrying as much as five hundred pounds of frankincense. The key to the Spice Route was the Nabatean technique of collecting water in hidden underground cisterns, to be used when the traders arrived. In the Negev, Avner took me to a handful of these caverns, which are still remarkably intact. The Israeli Army trains soldiers for desert survival by dropping them a few miles from the cisterns and instructing them to find the locations. Few ever do.

Because the Spice Route was so complex an undertaking, the previously nomadic Nabateans were forced to undergo a process of civilizing themselves: organizing a security force, collecting and distributing money, building administrative centers. A similar process had occurred in Mesopotamia and Egypt thousands of years earlier when large numbers of tribes shifted from a hunter-gatherer culture to an agricultural one. Here the transition happened again, and the result was Petra, a city that was so spectacular in large part because it was developed by people unaware—and uninfluenced—by traditional urban design. The pyramids of Giza are grander and were built 2,500 years earlier. Jerusalem has a certain timeless aura to it. But Petra takes your breath away.

One reason is the charming oddity of the place. The buildings in Petra are not freestanding but carved out of the side of sheer sandstone cliffs, not unlike the cities I carved out of sandpiles as a child. Because the edifices mostly consist of crypts hewed out of the sides of mountains, with elaborate, Hollywood-back-lot-style facades, the buildings never fell down, like most ancient buildings did. There are dozens still standing today in the one-square-mile area, ranging from tombs that are 150 feet high, to storage rooms no bigger than coffins, to sacred cult sites on mountaintops overlooking it all. There is also an open-air theater and main street from when Rome finally annexed Petra in 106
C.E.
Altogether, Petra looks like a shopping center, in which each store has a showier front than its neighbor, and each one is more inviting than the next.

Adding to its allure is that Petra, whose location was unknown for centuries, has become one of the most mythologized cities in recent memory, a real-life Atlantis plucked from obscurity. Also, the cliffs themselves are visually stunning. The rock has been pickled by the wind into a cornucopia of colors: brown, orange, purple, pink. I never wanted to lick a mountain until I went to Petra. Artist Edward Lear walked up the central street in 1858 and described the cliffs as “brilliant and gay beyond my anticipation.” Agatha Christie saw the rocks as “blood-red.” But the most famous characterization came from John William Burgon, who described the stones in his 1845 poem “Petra” as being “as if by magic grown.”

Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,

Where erst Athena held her rites divine;

Not saintly-grey, like many a minister fane,

That crowns the hill and consecrates the plain;

But rose-red as if the blush of dawn

That first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;

The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,

Which Man deemed old two thousand years ago,

Match me such a marvel save in Eastern clime,

A rose-red city half as old as Time.

As it happens, Burgon had never been to Petra when he wrote these oft-quoted lines. When he finally came sixteen years later, he realized his glasses may have been miscolored and wrote abjectly in a letter to his sister, “there is nothing rosy about Petra, by any means.”

Burgon’s backsliding may have been a bit too steep. If anything, Petra seems to change color every hour of the day, a veritable sundial of shades. In midafternoon, when we arrived, the sun still careened off the top of the mountains and covered much of the central street with sharp-edged shadows, black against the yellow sand. You can see many of Petra’s surviving structures from its column-lined central street,
which is located at the epicenter of a series of off-shoot canyons that peel off like petals on a morning glory. Petra never contained private homes, or at least they’ve never been found. Residents are thought to have lived in tents. The city was mostly occupied with administrative buildings, religious sites, and the tombs of nobles and kings. Petra, in that way, is remarkably similar to the pyramids: a paean to national power, a religious zone, but, in its most impressive structures, a graveyard.

We hiked up the so-called East Cliff, a raised plateau just above the central street that looms over the town like the royal box at an opera house. This area contains some of the city’s most famous structures, a half-dozen facilities known as the Royal Tombs. Each tomb is named after a prominent architectural detail—the Urn Tomb, the Silk Tomb, the Corinthian Tomb—and consists of a carved exterior masking a hollow cavity about the size of a high school classroom. The facades have been whittled out of the mountain into a series of columns, pediments, and friezes that climb as high as seven or eight stories and can only be described as faux Greek in their style and discombobulated in their effect. The Nabateans are thought to have picked up these and other techniques in their trading with powers around the Mediterranean. All in all, the tombs have the feel of classical temples put together from a kit, not assembled in precisely the right way, and affixed to the front of the mountains to satisfy a newly minted royal class, a few generations out of the desert, and not quite to the point of having set up an art school.

“So why did they care more about building tombs than building houses?” I asked Avner. We had settled on the stoop of one of the tombs, overlooking the fading light in the valley.

“The simple answer is that maybe they considered life after death their normal life. If there is an afterlife, the part of life on earth is very limited. You build pyramids if you’re Egyptian. You build
nawamis
if you’re a pastoral nomad.”

“So if so many Egyptian texts have to do with the afterlife,” I said, “and they built the pyramids in 2650
B.C.E.
; and if the Nabateans cared so much about the afterlife and they built these enormous tombs in the second century
B.C.E.
: why doesn’t the Pentateuch, which was written halfway between these two times, pay more attention to the afterlife?
The patriarchs are buried in Hebron, but no attention is given to how or why. Miriam, Aaron, and Moses all die in the desert and are buried with no mention of what happened to them.”

“Because the Bible deals with life—how to live a holy life, an ethical life, a spiritual life. One of the reasons the Israelites ignored Egyptian influence on death is that the purpose of life in the Pentateuch is largely to serve God, or to have a family that will serve God. There’s no mention of an afterlife. Life ceases when you die. And when you die, you stop serving God.”

“But God continues.”

“That’s right. This is a break from other Near Eastern religions. In Egypt, in Petra, the kings become deities themselves. The pyramids, these tombs, are representations of the power of those people after they die.”

“But if you’re an Israelite—”

“There’s only one God. He exists forever. So if you’re going to build a temple, you build it to God. You don’t build it to yourself.”

We climbed down from the Royal Tombs and strolled through the molded canyons toward Petra’s most famous site, the Treasury, a two-thousand-year-old architectural masterpiece that would be on any short list of the most beautiful buildings in the world. As visitor Andrew Crichton wrote in 1852, “There is scarcely a building in England of 40 years’ standing so fresh and well preserved in its architectural decoration.”

Like the tombs, the Treasury, which is believed to have been completed around the first century
B.C.E.
, is not exactly a building, but a carved facade. Its 120-foot-high veneer has columns, pediments, and classical lions that could have come from the Parthenon. But the king’s taste was by no means limited to Athens. The Treasury, which is often shown in photographs through a jagged opening in the cliffs, also boasts a reproduction of Isis, the Egyptian goddess, and two large eagles, which represent the chief Nabatean god, Dushara.

“Again, the Nabateans, coming from the desert, had no architecture of their own,” Avner said. “Therefore they were very eclectic.”