Petra

A few quotes from this American Museum of Natural History exhibition about Petra below, but check out the whole thing.

The Nabataeans provided shelter and water—for a fee—at strategically placed settlements along the caravan routes. Foreign traders also paid tolls and customs taxes in exchange for safe passage both within Nabataea and beyond its boundaries. This income helped finance the Nabataeans' commercial empire, enabling these former nomads to create a spectacular capital city with lush gardens, ornate houses and elaborate monuments.

The Nabataeans developed a sophisticated public waterworks fed by three larger springs located several miles from Petra. Systems of strategically placed rock-cut gutters lined with watertight plaster, combined with terracotta pipelines, followed the natural landscape to feed nearly 200 cistern tanks, many reservoirs and a nymphaeum, or public fountain house. Water was also diverted for agricultural use to support crops and herds, and the Nabataeans developed rules for water allocation to govern its consumption.

Our knowledge of Petra changes every day. With less than one-twentieth of the ancient city unearthed, new wonders constantly emerge at the hands of Jordanian, French, Swiss and American archaeologists. Excavators found an immense pool complex near the Great Temple in 1998; in 2000, a Nabataean villa outside the Siq. In a stunning 2003 discovery, rock-cut tombs came to light beneath the Treasury, challenging old ideas about this iconic building.

There are some nice pictures and more information here . There is some "debunking" of popular myths here , along with an interesting account of modern archaeological efforts in the area:

There is one final myth about Petra that should be mentioned, especially after Indiana Jones' recent visit: the nature of the real archeological fieldwork involved.

The drama of Indy's triumphant dash to the Khaznat al-Faroun, the romance of a "lost city" of magnificent stone monuments, the promise of stupendous discoveries in the next trowelfull of earth all obscure the everyday grind of the archeologist's labor - the price of the knowledge that he or she uncovers about an ancient culture, its nature, its development and the processes that brought it into being.

There is romance, of course: Anyone who has ever visited Petra has felt the site's dramatic pull upon the senses. Yet there is also the drudgery, dust and frustration that accompany excavation - and disappointment, too. Petra does not reward the archeologist with treasure in the commonly accepted sense. Rather, there is a daily mass of broken pottery, corroded coins, mutilated architectural debris, unknowable fragments and the constant knowledge that each season of work is only a pitiful drop in the bucket of research that really needs to be done in Petra and surrounding sites.

It should be noted that the above dates from 1991, before the discoveries mentioned in the AMNH quote.

When looking at any ruins, there is a tendency to wonder about the people who lived there so long ago, to ponder their daily lives and speculate as to their ambitions. There are two obvious questions: did they see their decline coming, and did they consider what their civilization would leave behind for prosperity? At the height of their influence, did the people of Petra imagine their city would be a hollow shell of itself in a few hundred years? Did they know their monuments would inspire such wonder thousands of years later?

Then, of course, we turn our gaze inwards -- what will we leave behind? With so much information online, will the record of our day-to-day lives and the hardcopies of our efforts and achievements endure? Will some future scientist study the wreckage of our skyscrapers, the remnant scraps of our highways? Or do we think that our civilization simply cannot decline and disappear as did so many ancient cultures?