Shards of an Empire: A Historian in Petra, Jordan

by Aaron Larsen (Canada)

I didn't expect to find Jordan

The wind from the Gulf of Aqaba batters the plateau high above the Wadi Araba valley, hot and dry as the sand and stone surrounding me, parching my lips and whipping my scarf behind my neck. The scorching desert sun begins to cool as it starts its path toward the western horizon, and from this vantage point I could be Moses, gazing upon the Promised Land bathed in the golden sunlight. The message scrawled in spray paint on corrugated metal advertising “The Best View in Jordan” is not wrong. Most people who climb the eight hundred steps carved into the mountainside at the farthest extent of the Petra Archaeological Park find this view by accident. Promised with views of “one of the legendary monuments of Petra,” a trickle of weary tourists and adventure seekers step onto the high plateau to be greeted by Al-Deir, or the Monastery, the largest Nabataean monolith. Far away from the crowds of tourists gathered around the more famous Al-Khazneh Treasury building, only the most motivated of adventurers find their way beyond the main expanse of the lost city to this fortress of solitude. Here, tourists gather before the gargantuan edifice to forgotten gods and kings, and I could be one of them. However, I am not. I am not the leader of an exodus gazing upon the vast expanse of a conflicted kingdom of heaven. Nor am I the awestruck pilgrim, arriving at journey’s end before an enormous monument. Instead, I am crouched in the sand and the rocks, running my fingers through the past. The Promised Land beyond tells of intangible figures from a mythic age and the Monastery tells of mighty rulers long turned to dust, both visages right before my eyes yet equally unreachable. Yet here in the sand are the true links to the past. I opened my eyes by following my ears. The soft crunching of dust and stone underfoot suddenly replaced by another, more fragile sound. A crack. My gaze was broken from the horizon and the monolith before me and was drawn to the very ground on which I stepped. It was reddish brown, like the earth surrounding it, but earth does not crack in such a way unless touched by human hands. Reaching down, I found a shard of pottery underfoot. I had learned in the Petra Museum the day before that through its delicacy, Nabataean pottery was immediately discernible from the earthen wares of the empires that overlapped this greatest of crossroads. Thinner than the pottery of Romans and Greek, Nabataean pottery shared a reddish hue with the earth from whence it came, formed into thin plates, urns, and bowls by the hands of artisans and decorated with delicate black floral motifs. This shard was thin, and as I rolled it in my hands, I found the telltale thin lines of black ink painted on it millennia ago. The story of the shard forms in my mind. The clay taken from the earth, placed upon a nameless potter’s wheel, spun by gentle and talented hands into a work of art. His or her fingerprints upon it, baked in a kiln, and painted with incredible attention to detail. It may have served its purpose once or a thousand times, passing between the hands of innumerable people thousands of years ago before shattering, a whole world lost to the sands of time. My gaze lifts, but no higher than the ground in front of me. The shard is not alone. Here a Roman amphorae handle. There, Umayyad glazed green shards. A veritable sea of broken links to our human past stretches before me, crafted with love and touched by those so long ago, each with a story of life and death. Here, before the great monument of an empire, I knelt in the dirt, humbled by trash.