04. The Nabatean city of Petra, Jordan

The ancient Nabataean city of Petra was recently voted as the seventh wonder of the ancient world. Is a historical and archeological city in Jordan. Established sometime around the 6th century BC as the capital city of the Nabateans, it is a symbol of Jordan as well as its most visited tourist attraction. It lies on slope of Mount Hor in Basin  among the mountains which form the eastern flank of Arabah (Wadi Araba), the large valley running from the dead sea to the gulf of aqaba. Petra has been a UNESCO world heritage since 1985.

It was complete with several temples, a festival theater, a nymphaeum, a bathhouse, a sacred way, a monument gate, many pools, and several other public buildings. The temples and other public buildings occupied the central valley, where the royal tombs were situated.

Along with this, the people who maintained Petra had to live there. This included priests, sculptors, grave diggers, temple attendants, administrative staff for the many public buildings, merchants who sold temple and burial paraphernalia, and other support people who ran services that provided things like food and water. If there was a royal court in Petra, then this would have entailed another whole group of people. These people alone may have numbered several thousand, along with their spouses and families.

There are also over one thousand burial monuments in Petra and several hundred others in the other burial cities. Most of these were for family and tribal units. Thus the tombs could have contained tens of thousands of people. Added to this, there are extensive Nabataean graveyards located near Petra and the other cities where the more common people were buried. This adds up to a lot of graves.The Nabataeans wealthy were mostly buried in five Nabataean burial cities.
From the inscriptions, it can see that the tombs were made by Nabataean sculptors and not by imported slaves or laborers.