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"... match me such a marvel, save in Eastern clime
A rose-red city, half as old as time."

These are the words that Dean Burgen was inspired to write about one of the most mystical and magical locations of the ancient near east. The Jordanian site known to history as Petra, lies about 3-5 hours south of modern capital of Amman and about 2 hours north of Aqaba, the countries only port, on the edges of the mountainous desert of the Wadi Araba. There is a modern town of about 15 thousand inhabitants perched on the mountainsides and valley floor of the region and the landscape alone is breathtaking before you even consider the ancient grandeur that lies hidden within its keep. The surrounding mountains are of such scale and otherworldly design that the film "Mission to Mars" was actually filmed here to simulate the geography of the red planet.

A brief history of the ancient city runs like this. Petra was first established sometime around the 6th century BC, by the Nabataean Arabs, a nomadic tribe who settled in the area and laid the foundations of a commercial empire that extended as far as Syria and Saudi Arabia. Despite successive attempts by the Seleucid king Antigonus, the Roman emperor Pompey and Herod the Great to bring Petra under the control of their respective empires, Petra remained largely in Nabataean hands until around 100AD, when the Romans under emperor Trajan took over. It was still inhabited during the Byzantine period, when the former Roman empire moved its focus east to Constantinople, but declined in importance thereafter. The Crusaders constructed a fort there in the 12th century, but soon withdrew, leaving Petra to the local people until the early 19th century, when the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt visited it.

For all of its past glories, most of Petra's structures are long fallen to dust. Once the canyons and rock walls that provide the foundation for the ancient trade centre boasted colonnades and paved streets, a tangle of shops and houses brimming with life and colour, now they live only in the imagination of the visitor, their ghosts walking with you as you imagine their lives. Although the living part of the city, the Acropolis, is gone, what remains of this once 25, 000 strong city is its Necropolis, its "City of the Dead". Carved into the very walls of the multi coloured canyon are the facades that make up the tombs of its inhabitants. It is easy to view the whole place as a funery site, for the reason that today that is all

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