A 2,000-year-old tomb has been uncovered at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Petra, one of the world’s most famous archaeological sites. It contained the well-preserved skeletons of 12 individuals and hundreds of artefacts.
The tomb was found just beneath the Treasury, Petra’s famous sandstone edifice that has become iconic thanks to its feature in Hollywood films including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).
The joint US-Jordanian archaeological team has said that the discovery could help save age-old mysteries about the ancient city and the people who built it, according to The Times.
Uncovered alongside the 12 skeletons were hundreds of millennia-old bronze, iron and ceramic artefacts, with team leader Dr Pearce Paul Creasman, executive director of the American Center of Research, expecting the excavation to produce hundreds more.
Such discoveries have led the archaeologists to believe the individuals were of high social standing, as well as the fact of the tomb’s location in a prominent position within the city.
Petra, originally known to its inhabitants as Raqmu, is a historic and archaeological city in southern Jordan, made famous for its rock-cut architecture and water conduit systems. It is one of the New Seven Wonders of the World and was declared a UNESCO Site in 1985.
UNESCO has described Petra as “one of the most precious cultural properties of man’s cultural heritage” and the site remains a symbol of Jordan as well as the country’s most-visited tourist attraction. Tourist numbers peaked at 1.1 million in 2019 but were hit hard by the pandemic, before soon reaching 905,000 in 2022.
Today, most archaeologists suspect the Treasury – named from a theory that it had originally held the pharaoh’s treasure due to its opulence – was built by Aretas IV, a Nabataean king who ruled from roughly 9BC to 40AD. The latest find further supports this theory, based on the presumption that the uncovered tomb predates the treasury itself.
The team dated the tomb to the first century BC using luminance dating, “which tells you the last time certain soils saw sunlight,” Creasman explained.
The tomb was initially discovered using ground-penetrating radar. Until now, “almost all” of the large number of the suspected tombs that have been discovered have been devoid of any contents.
“It is rare to find a tomb with human remains in Petra,” Creasman continued. “So when you do find one, that becomes extremely valuable.”
Little is known about the Nabataeans, who were first recorded in 312BC when they resisted an attempted invasion by a former general of Alexander the Great, who inherited parts of his empire.
“They just appear in the historical record and then it goes over a hundred years before we read about them in text again,” Creasman said, by which time they had become a full-fledged society and Petra had been built.
Those recordings that do exist suggest that the Nabataeans were a notably egalitarian society, a theory that has been supported by an apparent lack of differences between noble and non-noble tombs. Early history remains more of a mystery.
Creasman hopes the new findings will reveal more about the Nabataeans, even from traces of food in the bodies’ teeth that might provide clues about their diet.
“This is going to help us learn more about a shared, regional past,” said Creasman. “The Nabateans were a multicultural trading society who only worked because they united as a people. I hope they might be able to teach us something today.”
