Petra - the Stone City

Today we visited Petra - the city carved from the pink sandstone of the region. This city dates from 312 BCE. It is astonishing.

An alternative to walking

Fr John on his horse

The horse needed to lighten the load...

Tombs dot the hills on the way down to the wadi

The narrow part of the wadi

a camel's feet - the rest was destroyed by the iconaclasts

The camels and their owner

The entrance is down a winding narrow canyon which give you glimpses of what lies ahead. Then suddenly the gulley opens out into a wide basin with a monumental building facing you. This has, like most of the buildings, been carved out of the stone. This is the Treasury building.

The Treasury

Like most places in the Holy Land, there have been many civilisations at Petra, beginning with the Nabataeans and ending in the Byzantine era.

A couple of us headed further in to visit the other great building, the Monastery. On the way one passes an overwhelming number of buildings and tombs.

The Monastery was probably built for use by religious associations

my archaeologist's pose

The front of the Monastery - 51m high

Incredible colours of the rock

The trail

The Lion Triclinium

The Lion

Detail - most depictions of living things were destroyed by Islamic Arabs

The Roman road

The local Bedouin make a buck by offering rides. Apparently it's free to get on. It costs to get off!

We had a late lunch and exhausted fell into the bus for the trip to the town of Madaba. Earlier in our stay in Jerusalem we had been shown a copy of a part of a Mosaic map of the Holy Land. This is in the Jewish quarter. The original is in a Greek Orthodox Church in Madaba.

Jerusalem

The map dates to the 6th century. Photographs don't really do the map justice. It is extraordinary to look on a map that pilgrims to Jerusalem used to find their way 1700 years ago. Even today parts of Jerusalem identified on this map can be identified in the actual city.

After a short visit we went to our hotel - the Hotel Delila! As it was Thursday night and Moslems begin their holy day after sunset on Thursday, it was very quiet. I slept well!