there may be enemies at the gates there
may be enemies within the walls and
sometimes the very landscape and climate
in which a culture grows must be
conquered
it may be too rocky too arid but here
canyons and gullies became the streets
and thoroughfares for one of the most
spectacular civilizations in all of
human history
[Music]
this is Petra where the sheer
improbability of its location was also
the secret of its spectacular
flourishing the reason why this tomb
endured and survived armies and
earthquakes is that the Nabataeans who
built it cut it into the sandstone
surface of the mountain rather than
build some freestanding marble monument
the mountains shook with earthquakes but
these buildings stood intact
the Nabataeans engineered systems to
trap the rains which came in winter and
their desert hydraulics made this place
not so much rose red as bright green
a garden city of fountains swimming
pools groves and orchards
[Music]
and the water which made all that
possible also made it possible to feed a
city of 30,000 people many of whom were
immigrants from all over the region
there were Egyptians and Syrians and
Judeans and Greeks and Romans and they
were all coming to Petra to enjoy what
the Persians called a parrot daisa a
pleasure resource a little bit of heaven
on earth
[Music]
and they all brought a flourish of their
own cultural styles with them most of
the art discovered here has been taken
to museums but what survives tells the
story of a cosmopolitan playground there
are curious abstract representations of
a Nabataean goddess
carved heads from the wine-soaked
Hellenistic count of Dionysus
recent excavations have brought to light
ritzy villas carved into the living rock
inside them here's to happiness murals
from that same Dionysian cult cherubs
vine leaves the inevitable bunches of
grapes and from the later years of
Petra's life Byzantine mosaics found
beneath the sand and rubble of a ruined
church Petra had its day or rather at
centuries and then it ended
not because of conquest but because new
trade routes simply made Petra
commercially irrelevant
and without that commercial lifeblood
there was no longer any reason to
struggle against the desert the people
left the systems for capturing water
fell into disrepair and the desert
reclaimed the city