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Petra, the many faces carved into the rock, largely attributable to the tombs, make it a unique monument.

Petra is a city located about 250 km south of Amman, the capital of Jordan, in a basin among the mountains to the east of Wadi Araba, the great valley extending from the Sea Dead to the Gulf of Aqaba. His name was Reqem Semitic or Raqmu (the 'Colorful'), attested in the Qumran manuscripts.

was a city in ancient Edomite and then became the capital of the Nabataeans. Around the eighth century was abandoned after the fall of trade and natural disasters, and although the ancient caves housed Bedouin families have until recent years was in a sense forgotten until then modern. The archaeological site was revealed to the Western world by the Swiss Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1812.

The many facades carved into the rock, largely attributable to the tombs, make it a unique monument, which was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO December 6, 1985. The surrounding area is from 1993 National Archaeological Park. In 2007, moreover, Petra was declared one of the so-called seven wonders of the modern world.

Petra is located halfway between the Gulf of Aqaba and the Dead Sea, at an altitude between 800 and 1396 meters above sea level (the urban area is located around 900 m) in the mountainous region of Edom to the east of Wadi Arab, about 3 hours drive from Amman.

The location and availability of water made it a place conducive to the development and prosperity of a city. The site is accessible only from the north-west, a narrow mountain path, and east through a canyon about 1.5 km long and up to 200 meters deep, the Siq, which housed the main access road.

Tombs of Petra were carved gullies and rocky sides of mountains, while the urban area, due to lack of vegetation, is characterized by a large outcrop of rocks of the collapse of the elevations of the buildings, so rock stones are visible in each point.

The funeral constructions are largely derived nell'arenaria polychrome Paleozoic age (delta deposit Cambrian / Ordovician - Forms of Umm Ishrin Sandstone), a sedimentary rock produced by the sedimentation and accumulation of small grains of sand. The result of this process is a rock consistent and durable, yet easy to dig, organized in layers or banks.

A particular feature of these sandstones is the change in color, with shades from yellow ocher to fiery red to white, due to different concentrations of oxides during the long process of consolidation. These spectacular color changes are particularly visible on the ceiling of Many tombs of Petra.

Around Petra are also rocks containing silica, which the Nabataeans exploited to produce a waterproof cement. The entrance of the city is an ancient river bed, a deep gorge cut in the high sandstone cliffs that was turned into a trench road elsewhere by diverting the stream.

The area of \u200b\u200bPetra is very close to the system-Dead Sea Jordan Valley, characterized by intense tectonic activity, with kinematic processing transtensive left, related to separation (rift) between Arabian and African plates. On 19 May 363, and again in 419, 551 and 747 earthquakes that took place damaged the city and its monuments.

still see installations designed to collect and distribute the water over and above the steep slopes of the soil, particularly dams and tanks in the open. For the collection there was also a major network of underground tanks. To the northeast and southeast of Petra, the Siq waters flowed in tunnels dug into the rock and plastered with waterproof plaster, or a supply water on a gentle slope, made of terracotta pipes or ceramic. This network supplied the aqueduct, 200 tanks (many of which were located on Mount Umm al-Beira, which means "Mother of the tanks), catch basins and a nymph, who was a fountain public part of the tanks, even reusing older structures, however, can be attributed to later periods in urban areas. Another network, a much larger scale allowed to pick up water sources and more distant neighborhoods to supply higher. All of these water systems led to Petra about 40 million gallons of water per day.

From a technological standpoint, the water distribution system in Petra has been compared to that of Rome the same time, and it was certainly enough to cover the needs of the city. Were actually the Romans who used the water network as a system of military pressure, cutting the aqueduct at of a siege, just as it did centuries later - in revenge for the story - to their city for work Vitige.

The result of this control was the creation of water resources at the time of an artificial oasis, the installation of which only ruins remain today.