Today, I will take you on a faraway trip to Jordan in Petra. We shall visit the place that is called the Treasure. Many down the centuries tried to find the Treasure hidden inside this place. The Treasure or Al-Khazneh, how it is called in the Arabian language, is actually a vast tomb carved most beautifully in stone. The name of the city Petra is Greek and means stone, which comes from the word Petros which means rock.

The Treasure was built long ago around I Ad. by the Arab Nabateans. The architecture has Greek, Roman influences but also some original beauty. You may know this beautiful building if you enjoyed Indiana Jones, as we can admire it in one of these movies: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

As you may see in pictures, the place was carved in the rock. It is situated in the middle of a rocky desert where water was priceless, but the Nabateans found solutions. It seems they were pretty good engineers as they could store, pump the water from a few miles. They could also avoid the flooding, even if in Petra the rain is something you don’t see every day, all the rain can come all at once and flood all the area. But somehow, the Nabateans succeeded in overcoming those problems with dams. Petra was a flourishing city, even if it was situated in a rocky desert. At some point in history, the city remained empty.

Now let’s go back to the story of Crypt or the Treasure. On top of the Crypt, a lovely carved urn attracts people and thieves. It seems that the name of the Crypt Al-Khazneh( the Treasure) made many look for the Treasure on top, in the urn. There also was a legend from where the Crypt got the name Treasure. It seems that some bandits and pirates hid their treasures in that urn from above. Unfortunately, the urn also got some bullets from those searching for treasures over the years. Other legends say this place was the treasury for the Egyptian Pharaoh from Moses’ time.

 The bones in the Crypt got lost with time, as the place was looted over the years.

Even if time eroded the stone, we can still admire the beauty of this Treasure. We can still see four the Eagles that would carry your soul in the afterlife on top of it. You will meet some beautiful, strong Amazons on the upper level, so be aware and don’t upset them. They have double axes and are good at using them. At the entrance, we shall meet the twins Castor and Pollux. They lived on Olympus Mountain and partly in the underworld, so be careful.

Petra was lost for many years, but in 1812, a Swiss explorer rediscovered the place. His name was Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Since then the tourism has started to grow. Petra is one of the most exciting destinations to visit, but there is one lousy part like in all ancient places that gets overcrowded with tourists the building or the place starts to degrade much faster.

I hope you enjoyed my story! Here is a link that I found on Youtube that I found pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II_lOJJOAFM

 

 

– the picture and the video are not mine. They are just gathered from the internet.