Petra, originally known to its inhabitants as Raqmu or Raqēmō, is a historic and archaeological city in southern Jordan. Famous for its rock-cut architecture and water conduit system, Petra is also called the "Rose City" because of the colour of the sandstone from which it is carved; it was famously called "a rose-red city half as old as time" in a poem of 1845 by John Burgon. It is adjacent to the mountain of Jabal Al-Madbah, in a basin surrounded by mountains forming the eastern flank of the Arabah valley running from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba. Access to the city is through a famously picturesque 1.2-kilometre-long gorge called the Siq, which leads directly to the Khazneh.
Image: Urn Tomb, Petra 01
Image: Petra 286630893
Image: Treasury petra crop
Cliffs near Petra, View over Wadi Arabah
Nabataean Aramaic is the extinct Aramaic variety used in inscriptions by the Nabataeans of the East Bank of the Jordan River, the Negev, and the Sinai Peninsula. Compared with other varieties of Aramaic, it is notable for the occurrence of a number of loanwords and grammatical borrowings from Arabic or other North Arabian languages.
A third-century AD funerary inscription from Umm al-Jimal, Jordan
Tracings of Nabataean Aramaic inscriptions marking a tomb (kpr, top) and a sacred site (msgd, bottom) dated to the reigns of ḥrtt rḥm ʕmh (Aretas IV Philopatris) and mlkw (Malichus), respectively
Funerary inscription in Nabataeo-Arabic characters from Al-Ula, 280 AD
Museum exhibit of a "Sinaitic" graffito from Wadi Mukattab, Egypt