Marrin Robinson

“Ever since I saw an exhibit on Petra at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, I have wanted to visit this place. The images of Petra’s intricately carved temples in dramatic rock cliffs remained inscribed in my mind years after seeing the exhibit. What I had forgotten, or not noticed in the exhibit, was the incredible multicolored rock. The rock looks like marbleized paper that makes up the cliffs and decaying structures of this once forgotten city. Petra, a city carved and built by the Nabateans, and known in the Bible as Mount Seir and Edom, flourished at the time of Jesus. After the Roman conquest, the city gradually fell apart as one of the major trading centers between Egypt, India, China and the Mediterranean. It became a lost city, known perhaps only to the local Bedouin population until an adventurer, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt “discovered” it in 1812 and aroused interest in it in the West.

We spent three full days here and still only covered the major sites. I hiked up to the top of mountains to see magnificent temples that rise up the sky, and scrambled over rock and in and out of caves looking at ceremonial niches with the ochers, reds and purples that streak the rock carving. These structures look like ghosts, melted images worn down by wind and rain evoking a past that barely reveals its full presence. When I first arrived, I kept noticing carvings above me that were actually just the natural cliff. After a while, I realized that the ancient Nabateans must have designed an architecture inspired by the natural carving of the rock. 

– Marrin Robinson, letter from Petra, 2001