The city of Petra, the capital of the Arab Nabateans, is one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world and the most important tourist attraction in Jordan. The Red Sea, Petra is characterized by the nature of its architecture carved in pink rock, which contains a mixture of ancient architectural arts belonging to various civilizations, and it is an entire city carved in pink rock.
Petra is a unique example of the oldest Arab civilization (the Nabataean civilization), as the Nabatean Arabs carved it from the rock more than 2000 years ago, and it is a witness to the most rich and creative ancient Arab civilizations. Swiss Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1812, through an expedition in the Levant, Egypt and Arabia for the British Royal Geographical Society, so many scholars and orientalists call Petra “the lost city” due to the delay in showing it to the world, and the English poet Bergen described it as the city The stunning oriental, the pink city like no other.
The Nabataean kingdom flourished and its borders extended in the south to reach the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula, where the city of Mada’in Saleh is located. The Nabataeans extended their influence to reach the shores of the Red Sea, the eastern Sinai Peninsula and the Hauran Plain area in Syria until the city of Damascus. Many kingdoms surrounded the Nabataean kingdom and its capital, Petra. Civilizations: including the Pharaonic civilization in the west, the civilization of Palmyra in the north, and the civilization of Mesopotamia in the east, so the Nabataean Kingdom was in the midst of the civilizations of the ancient world, and constituted a focal point of convergence and continuity of various global civilizations.
The Nabataeans were famous for the techniques of water engineering and water harvesting, and they were the owners of the idea since ancient times. The Nabataeans developed irrigation systems, rainwater collection, and springs. They mastered the construction of dams and reservoirs that they dug in the rock. They also built canals for long distances, in addition to building agricultural terraces on the slopes to exploit the land in agriculture.
