Petra



1- ANSWERS FOR THE GRAPHIC ORGANIZER:

**1.** Is quite //__SAFE__//
 * 2.** Located on the crossroads between //__ORIENTAL__// and __//EUROPEAN CIVILIZATIONS//__
 * 3.** __//PETRA//__, the Nabataean **4.** __//CAPITAL//__, discovered in **5.** __//19TH CENTURY//__ **6.** by a __//SWISS EXPLORER//__
 * 7.** Nowadays, this city is considered one of the seven __WONDERS__ of the **8.** __WORLD __



> - Was a bustling hub of international commerce and culture, with Rome, Egipt and Greece > - The strctures of the city were chinseled by hand into the sandstone cliffs > - These structures were covered with stucco and brigthly painted, creating great facades > - At its heigth, around AD 50, the city and its environs boasted as many as 20.000 residents//**
 * 2. QUESTIONS ABOUT THE READING: Petra of Jordan. **
 * __Where is Petra located?__ //**Petra is located deep within the deserts of Jordan.**//
 * __Who were its inhabitants?__ **//The Nabataeans//**
 * __What is/are its characteristics?__ **//- Was the gathering for the nabataean traders of incense, spice and perfumes
 * __How important were tombs in Petra? What did they mean?__ As **//part of Nabataean culture, the rich families spared no expense to hire master architects to create elaborate facades for the funerary monuments, to display wealth.//**
 * __How did this city become an urban center?__ //**This city become an Urban Center form its origin as a tend encampment, as a place for commerce and trade**//
 * __How was this city organized/planned?__ **//Innitialy, Petra grew along the natural contours of the landscape, even its main street, wich followed the curve of the Petra's main river. After the roman occupation, the planner imposed an urban grid, as in most other roman cities, with a straigth road along the central marketplace//**

Petra is an ancient city located in the deep deserts of Jordan; a country in the middle-east, founded by a group of arabian nomads, the Nabataeans, two-thousand years ago, with a population of about 20.000. The main characteristic of Petra is that is a city built inside a narrow gorge, with spectacular monuments cut into the surrounded cliffs. In Petra, we can find many monumental tombs memorizing the kings and leaders of the Nabataeans, where many of the architecture elements were took from Alexandria and Helenisctic Greece, and were common troughout the ancient Mediterranean region. Petra was a crossroad for the ancient cultures from Europe and the Middle East, grew as a place for commerce and trading of textiles, spices and incense from distant regions, but due to political and trade route changes, the city was forgotten. Petra was rediscovered in the 19th century by a Swiss explorer, because the city didn't appear in modern maps, and the many visitors went to Petra to see its wonder. Nowadays, Petra is considered one of the seven wonders of the modern world, due to the spectacularity of its monuments and ruins built directly in the cliffs.
 * 3- WRITING OF THE PARAGRAPH.

media type="file" key="Petra Daz.mp3" [|Petra Daz.mp3]**