“A rose-red city half as old
as time,” poet John William Burgon has said of it in his 1845 Newdigate Prize
winning poem Petra.
Concealed from the rest of
the world for many centuries before made famous by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig
Burckhardt in 1812, the ancient city of Petra dishes a unique attraction
emphasized by its rock-cut architecture where old settlements, royal tombs,
temples, and palaces were directly hewn out of massive rock walls.