Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I'm very excited to have this opportunity to present at TEDxBari.
I admit this is my first time speaking to an audience all of Italians,
so I hope you'll bear with me.
But I'm very happy about the choice of the topic of the desert.
I think it's an interesting topic to explore,
and it gives me an opportunity for me to share my research,
which is an archaeological excavation in a desert land
and really reveals how humanity has dealt with the desert environment.
I work in Petra, which is in Jordan,
and it's located in the Southern Desert,
right on the edge of the Great Rift Valley along the Arabian Desert.
And today, the climate is such
that there's only about 100 millimeters of rainfall each year,
so it's very dry
and a lot of the water gets lost through evaporation
or just running off into the valley.
So very little of it actually stays in the land.
All of the indications that we have from the studies of ancient Petra
is that the rainfall was about the same today as it was then.
So, thinking about a very little rainfall.
Now, as you can see here,
Petra's located in a valley
that's surrounded by sandstone and limestone mountains.
And the sandstone is created by layers of sediment,
and this is in various colors:
we have purple and blue and white and yellow,
but the predominant color is red,
which has led to the reference to Petra as a "rose-red city."
Now, Petra has three features that it's very famous for.
People tend to know -
if they know Petra at all, they know about these.
One of these is the Siq.
The Siq is a natural gorge
that functioned as the formal entrance into Petra,
but it was created by wind and water erosion,
and it runs about two kilometers through the rock
and ends with -
or the Nabataeans,
they placed this monumental facade right at the end of it,
so it's a very dramatic entrance into the city.
Now, this is called the Khazneh, actually Khaznet Far'oun,
the "Treasury of the Pharaoh."
But that is a title from folklore; there's no actual connection.
It was never a treasury.
It was actually a funerary monument, a funerary temple.
Many of you probably recognize it.
It's entered popular lore
as the place where Indiana Jones discovered the Holy Grail in a movie.
But this monument is not Petra itself; it is just one of hundreds of -
it's one of hundreds of these rock-cut facades
all around the valley of Petra.
And I'll just show you a couple of my favorites.
If I showed you all of them, we'd be here all night.
This one is the - we refer to as the "royal tombs."
And then here's just common family tombs.
This is the Corinthian tomb.
And this is the largest.
It's called Ad Deir, which means monastery,
and it was used as a monastery in the Christian Era.
Now, one of the reasons -
after seeing all of these funerary monuments,
people came to talk about Petra and call it a "city of the dead."
But it's much more than just this necropolis,
much more than these tombs.
There was an entire city in the valley.
And that city was formed, was able to be formed
because it's situated right on the crossroads
of the caravan routes that came out of Arabia,
carrying frankincense and myrrh,
which were in great demand in the Mediterranean world,
including in Rome.
And so the peoples that were living in Petra,
who had originally been a migrant population,
they exacted control over this crossroads and were able to build up a wealth.
They charged taxes,
and so they were able to build up a wealth
and created their city,
which became a political, economic and also a ceremonial center
for the Nabataean Kingdom,
first century BC, first century AD.
It's estimated that there were about 30,000 people living in Petra,
but it's really just a rough estimate
because only 2% of Petra, not even 2% of Petra
has actually been excavated, or uncovered,
so we're really just getting a glimpse of what the city was all about.
When you look at the environment,
you might wonder, well, how is this possible?
You have this desert, this arid land.
How is it possible for a large population to have lived here?
Where did they get the water
for the people, for their animals, for the irrigation of their crops?
And the answer is in springs.
There were perennial springs in the hillsides behind Petra.
"Ain" is the Arabic word for spring,
so there's Ain Musa, Ain Limun, Ain Brak,
and then there's a fourth one that's further to the north
called Ain Debdebeh.
And the Nabataean people, they were able to make use of these springs,
which produced sufficient amount of water,
supplemented by the rainwater,
for the population.
The thing is, though, that these are outside of the valley.
The Nabataeans, one thing they had to do -
because when there was rain, there would be these great flash floods -
they had to build dams,
and they cut this tunnel through the mountain
to divert the flash floods
to prevent it from creating disasters in the city itself.
And they cut about 25,000 meters of channel into the rocks
to carry the water from the springs down into the city
and to the places where they needed and wanted it.
These channels are cut into the stone,
so they run along the topography of the land,
and then when they wanted to cross places
where it wasn't convenient for those cut channels,
they created pipe lines,
so they used these segments of ceramic tubes
to connect along and carry the water to wherever they needed it.
It's not all just practical function.
You see a lot of elaboration,
use of fountains with the water.
This one picture shows a lion,
and the water came in from the back of his head
and spewed out of his mouth.
But because of that water, his head has now been eroded away,
and so we don't get to see that.
And the other picture here shows a water channel,
and it's running under the legs
of what was a camel carved into the mountainside.
And in front of the camel is a man who's leading the camel.
These were buried -
the bottom half of this sculpture was buried under the sand,
and in the 1990s,
when the Jordanians excavated to find the original pavement in the Siq,
they uncovered the preserved feet of both the camel and the man.
Now, the Nabataeans also had to store water,
so they had cisterns and reservoirs -
we see them everywhere around the valley -
to store, keep all the water
so that they would have sufficient for the dry months.
Okay, so because of this water, we were able to have this city.
You have the Siq,
you have the rock-cut facades,
and then you have this water system, which Petra is so famous for.
But I can say one more thing, one additional element,
that Petra is now famous for, or should be famous for.
This is the results of fieldwork I did.
I started in 1998 as a graduate student,
and I chose this terrace in the middle of the city to investigate.
It was believed for 100 years that this was a marketplace.
Petra's a center of trade;
there must have been a marketplace;
why not this big terrace in the middle of the city?
But our team - you had to work in a team.
Archaeology's always a team.
We, I have other professional archaeologists,
students,
and also people from the local village, the B'doul, the Bedouin.
And in the first field season,
we were able to realize that this terrace was never a marketplace.
There was no evidence of it ever being used as a marketplace.
The southern half of the terrace
was occupied by a grand pool,
a monumental pool:
46 meters, 23 meters, 2.5 meters deep.
You can think of an Olympic-sized swimming pool
to try to imagine this.
But this pool had an island in the middle of it,
and the island had a pavilion on it.
So from this reconstruction here, done by our architectural artist,
you can get an idea of what we think this island looked like.
It would have been a great place to have banquets.
It would have also been a very good place to be able to have private discussions
because nobody could be standing around listening to you.
The island pavilion had wide doors on all four sides
so that whoever was inside
would have a view across the water surrounding the island
and then also a view to the north,
across the terrace and to the city,
on the north side of the city and the mountains there.
So, wonderful, expansive views.
Everywhere we dug, we found channels circling around the pool,
dropping down to the terrace next to the pool
and channeling out across the terrace.
And with further investigations,
we found that that terrace was, in fact, a garden.
We found pathways and plantings,
and in fact, we know from studies of the soil,
from the botanical remains found in the soil,
that this terrace was planted with palm trees.
So you have to use your imagination here
and just imagine a grove of palm trees on this terrace with the pool behind it.
So this pool and garden
was part of a larger complex right in the middle of the city.
This is a phenomenon of the second and first centuries BC,
where palaces in the Hellenistic world -
next door in Judaea for example -
would have gardens and pools as part of the palace complexes.
So the Nabataeans, they made sure that they had their own garden and pool,
as something that would be expected for the royalty to have.
However, in this case, because of the desert environment,
imagine if you were somebody on one of these caravans
traveling for days through the desert
and then you stopped in Petra,
you walked through the Siq,
you saw all these water channels and fountains,
but then as you wandered down the middle of the city,
you saw this oasis, an artificial oasis.
This would have been very impressive.
You would have imagined
that the Nabataeans were masters of the desert.
How were they able to not only store and transport the water they needed
but they were able to actually create a surplus,
something that could be actually wasted
on display and luxury in this garden?
The garden itself is a kind of a visual propaganda,
a political statement
about the conspicuous consumption of what was most precious,
the most precious resource, which was water.
And this kind of statement, this kind of propaganda,
allowed the Nabataeans
to be able to equate themselves
with the other kingdoms in the area,
to present themselves as worthy equals to the Hellenistic kingdoms
and then, of course, Rome, as the empire expanded.
Romans did take over Petra,
and they changed the trade routes so that they bypassed Petra,
which led to the decline of the city, the economic decline of the city.
And over time, this garden was no longer maintained.
It was used as an agricultural field,
and the pool was filled with sand
and, essentially, just became another part of the desert.
So it's only through archaeology now,
2,000 years later,
that we're able to actually uncover and realize
what these Nabataeans were capable of,
that they were able to become these masters of the desert
and to create a urban oasis in Petra.
Thank you.
(Applause)