Forbidden History - Lost Treasures of Petra

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

A very small percentage of the ancient city of Petra in Jordan has been excavated by archaeologists - what treasures could still lie undisturbed beneath the city in hidden tombs? Investigative journalist Jamie Theakston travels to Jordan to see what he can find… Cast List: Rev. Lionel Fanthorpe: Author ‘Mysteries & Secrets of Time’ Alan Butler: Author ‘Before the Pyramids’ Lynn Picknett: Historian and researcher specialising in exposing historical conspiracies. She is also the co-author of several notable works Dr. Suleiman Farajat: Former Director of Petra Site  Clive Prince: Co-Author, The Templar Revelation  Simon Cox: Author ‘Decoding the Lost Symbol’  Jamie Theakston: Investigative Journalist  Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. It's one of the great wonders of the ancient world. But who built the magnificent city of Petra and why? What treasure remains buried here? And what dark secrets remain hidden in this mysterious place?

There were ancient treasures which were ancient even then. being found that were finding their way through Petra. You would go to jail if they came and they found this in your house. Right, okay. They had a lot of resources, they had a lot of money to spend. So it wouldn't be that surprising if some of that was still around somewhere in some form. I can't believe that my nose is this close to something that's 8,000 years old. Over the centuries, a lot of surfaced belonging to the ancient culture there.

And the Arabs certainly believed that there were astonishing treasures hidden in the buildings, in the rock face, the carved rock face there. I think it's very probable that of all the valuable goods that came through, a great many treasures were left there and are buried there to this day. Petra is one of the most magical places in the Arab world, famous for its rose-cut rocks, its eerie tombs, and its colorful history. And since 2007, it's been designated a world heritage site.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists now visit Petra every year. But is there a darker, more secret side to this ancient city involving hidden treasures and relic smuggling? Journalist Jamie Feigston is on a mission to find out. The city of Petra remained unknown to the Western world until 1812. when it was discovered by the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burkart, who had traveled through the region disguised as a Bedouin. Petra lies in a vast desert region in the south of Jordan,

a country in the very center of today's Middle Eastern conflicts, surrounded by Syria, Iraq, and Israel, and home to over 2 million Palestinian refugees. Despite the political and religious tensions that swirl around it today, It's one of the most famous cultural sites on the planet and visited by millions of tourists every year. Petra is one of the most ancient cities and at the same time, one of the most unusual cities.

It's, as the famous poetic description, goes, a rose-red city half as old as time. Petra seems to have everything, which is utterly. fascinating to people. It has magnificent architecture. It's carved out of solid rock, and yet it has Greek pillars and all sorts of different kinds of Byzantian architecture, and yet it's absolutely in the middle of nowhere. It is literally miles and miles out in the desert. It was just something. It was like, you know, a mirage almost. You arrived there and you and your animals

drank water and hung out, and there were merchants from all over the area. So basically, you could do yourself a bit of good with your business, you could have fun, and you could stock up with water. The city we see today was built around 400 BC by a nomadic Arab tribe called the Nabatians, who were known to be excellent engineers. Enclosed by towering rocks, Petra not only possessed the advantages of a fortress, But its position meant that it controlled the main commercial routes which passed through it

to Gaza in the west, Damascus in the north, Akaba south on the Red Sea, and across to the Persian Gulf. But it was the ability of the Nabatians to control and sustain a constant water supply out in the desert that led to its success and growth. The Nabatians who built the city in the first place were an amazing mixture. of water engineers, and they were experts, real experts, and expert traders. They knew the cost and value of everything, and when the trading caravans came through from north, south, east and west, they made the most of it.

They were, in fact, almost an ancient shopping mall long before we invented them in the 20th century. We have to remember that this was a place that was literally on the Silk Road. There was silk and spices coming all the way from China, coming right past the front door. There was bitumen going from the Dead Sea to Egypt in the opposite direction and all sorts of precious things coming up from the Arabian Gulf and beyond. There was frankincense and myr. Petrol was a metropolis in itself.

and must have seemed an incredible place to come upon after days and days of plodding on through the desert. Part of the magic of Petra is in the arrival. Whether you were a Bedouin trader or a Sultan or a tourist, you all arrive in exactly the same way, via a magnificent gorge called the Sikh. It was formed by a natural geological fault. It's a mile long, about 250 feet deep,

and recently, archaeologists discovered chambers underneath the stone and sand, which were believed to have housed soldiers who would rise up and repel any attackers. It has this natural protection, which is at one point only three meters wide, and that leads into the city. The walls tower up to 300 feet, so that with that sort of natural defense, Half a dozen men could protect it against the world. At the end of the Sikh is this magnificent building,

the Treasury, or Al-Kaznay, as it's known locally. It's one of the most recognizable historical sites in the world. Famously, Harrison Ford and Sean Connery charged up to it on horseback, looking for the Holy Grail. And they weren't the only people who came to Petra looking for great treasures. There's one marvelous story that connects Petra with the Pharaoh of the Exodus, who was alleged to have been pursuing the runaway Hebrew slaves all the way to Petra, and finding that he wasn't able to keep up with them,

because he had very prudently brought a lot of his treasure with him and his army to keep it safe, that he deposited the treasure there, intending to come back, for it and went on in pursuit of the Jewish slaves, and he never came back to collect the treasure. And of course there was the marvelous account in the Ottawa Journal of 1927 that said treasures had been found, but only a very few had been removed.

That newspaper article from all those years ago suggested that there's a lot of buried treasure under Petra. Dr. Suleiman Farhat is a former director of the Petra site, who showed President Obama around the ruins in 2013. Today, he agreed to be Jamie's guide to this fascinating site, starting with the inside of the treasury, a place that few tourists ever see. This is actually a big mausoleum for one of the Nabatian kings.

Oh, right. burial chamber. Yes, a perial chamber, but this is not the perial chamber. The perils are below. What we see in modern Petra is very different from what it was like when it was in its prime and at its peak some 2,000 years ago. We have to remember that the red sandstone of which the city is built is subject to constant falling and erosion.

and there are upward of nine or ten feet of rubble and sand over the old city streets and the old city centre. So if we could get that rubble out, if we could get the sand shifted, get back to the original Petra, heaven alone knows what's buried under those streets and especially under the magnificent building known as the treasury. Journalist Jamie Thexton is in the ancient city of Petra in Jordan,

looking for the lost treasures that are said to have been buried there over the centuries, now deep under the soil and rocks. So far, he's been given exclusive access to the most iconic building on the whole site, the treasury, but it turned out to be an empty mausoleum with no clues to the whereabouts of the city's past splendors and treasures. And yet the belief that this ancient place still has valuable secrets and priceless relics to give up runs deep. No more so than with the local Bedouin tribes who still head into the desert knights looking to hit the jackpot. So Suleiman, there's an urn that, according to legend, has treasure up there.

Yes, there is an urn above the thallus there. Actually, it is a solid rock. There is nothing inside it. Ostrically, it was the traditional simple of death. That's all. But the local people and the Bedouin, they used to shoot it by their guns to break it and to get the treasures inside it, but there was.

The Arabs certainly believed that there were astonishing treasures hidden in the buildings, the carved rock face there, because actually they took pot shots at the buildings. You can still see the sign of the buildings. the sign of their pot shots, to try and dislodge what they were utterly convinced were treasures lodged, hidden in the actual edifice itself. It wouldn't be at all surprising if there were still treasures down there because it was an

incredibly rich city, rich place. It was on some of the major trade routes. It controlled some of the major trade routes, so a lot of money went through there. They had a lot of resources, they had a lot of money to spend. So it wouldn't be that surprising. if some of that was still around somewhere in some form. Not all of the site here has been excavated, has it? No, only I can say 15% of the site have been excavated. The rest is existed under the ground. Wow, so 85% of Petra hasn't been done.

Even more 80% of Petra, expecting actually in the future to find a lot of archaeological artite acts. Very unique and valuable things. Why don't we dig it up? Well, you know, Jeremy, this is actually, it's very costly. And the other things, it is actually a very delicate job for archaeologists. Sure, but it's like it's exactly what we want to find, isn't it? You know, this could tell us so much more about the Nabatians and...

Right, the most important thing is to preserve what you have excavated. If you leave it exposed, then it's better to leave it under the ground down, to excavate it. Oh, I'm not sure I agree with you. People right back into, as far as we can see, have been looking for treasure in the place. Now, in the first instance, that probably isn't too surprising, because where it was and what it was meant

that significant treasures probably were starred there at one time. Access to the inside of the treasury was rare enough. But for a journalist like Jamie to be allowed to go down to the tombs below was literally unheard of. The tombs beneath the treasury were excavated by Dr. Farad back in 2004 and revealed a series of royal burials, skeletons, and offerings to the dead. Petra is a warren of tombs and caves cut into the rock. It's a pre-Christian ghost town, and even with all the tourists around,

it can be quite an eerie place. So were there Bedouin tribes been living here until quite recently? Yes, they were living in the caves of Petra till 1987. Wow, so people would actually be living here. Yes, they were living in the caves, but they were moved by the government outside the archaeological site. And am I right thinking there was a New Zealand lady lived here as well? Yes, her name is Margaret.

And she came in 1979, and she was sitting on the steps of the treasury, and she met Muhammad Othman for the first time there. Then they got married, and they had a cave. And you know that when she came to Petra to visit her, she visited her in her cave, and she had a cup of tea with her there. So hang on, she lived in a cave here and had tea with the queen.

Yes. I remember that. Do she get it painted and make it all nice before the queen arrived? No. No. The Bedouins who have been there a very long time and know the ruin well are convinced that there are huge treasures buried there. And they've been there long enough and they've understood the city well enough to be reliable

guides and guardians. And if we take note of their thinking, they would not still be working so assiduously to find anything that's still there unless they had a good reason to believe that there are still vast treasures there. Petra was the Prebyor Inn of its time. It was a huge hotel.

It was kind of like a... sort of a Las Vegas in a way. So there was lots of people coming through, there was lots of stuff happening. So stuff gets lost. Sometimes it's just the minutia of life, pottery bowls or wooden sticks or whatever it may be, but precious things get lost too.

Now, the sand often gives back what it's taken and the locals who live in the area, who are the Bedouin, do make fines, either because they know where to look or just because they chance upon things. There wouldn't be a city at Petra if the Nabatians hadn't been able to control a constant source of water in the middle of the desert. For thousands of years, water has meant one thing here.

Life. According to Arab tradition, Moses, or Musa, as he's known, struck a rock with his staff, sending water cascading into the city Down rocks. In fact, the actual spot where Moses is said to have struck the rock has been turned into a shrine in the heart of the modern city of Petra. The local people still use the natural spring today for fresh drinking water,

which is then carried down through the town via the original gullies on the side of the road. It was a combination of an ideal trading center. It was brilliantly fortified and naturally fortified. and it was, in a sense, an artificial oasis at which the water never failed because they knew how to conserve it. There's still lots to be found. I mean, the area around Petra is full of places

where Bedouin and locals are digging this stuff up all the time. You've got a relics market that is being very efficiently run. Jamie was put in touch with a relic dealer in the capital of Jordan, Amman, who is said to have built up a substantial collection of relics and artifacts from the petrocyte over the years. The Bedouins will unearth pieces of pottery or other simple artifacts from maybe millennia and more ago, and they will then take them off to a local dealer and perhaps get 10 or 20 dinars for the relic they've found. And it will make its way to Amman and sell for a hundred times what the Bedouin discoverer was given by the dealer in Petro.

There's still lots to be found. You know, the area around Petra is full of caves and grave sites and places where Bedouin and locals are digging this stuff up all the time. And at that point you have almost like an international criminal market taking hold of this because you have good stuff sent off to the Gulf. You have the touristy stuff that some of it sold locally. It becomes a large-scale business. These fines that the Bedouin make don't usually get passed on to the historical authorities of Jordan or the surrounding regions.

It's much better for whoever it is. to pass it on to an in-between dealer, if you like, who will buy it on the black market, pay a very, very small price for it. And then he then will sell it on. It will be sold on again, and it will often end up in the private collection of some person living down in Arabia or even up in Israel,

who will have paid a massive amount more for it than was given in the first place. Journalist Jamie Thiexton is on the trail of the lost treasures of the city of Petra in Jordan, left behind by its previous inhabitants, the Nabatians, and the countless visitors down through the centuries. He's already been on an extensive tour of the site with local historian Dr. Suleiman Farhat, only to find empty tombs and caves. Whatever was here seems to have long gone. But when he visited a relic dealer in Amman, he was told that

treasures were still being discovered by the local Bedouin tribes who live near the ancient site. If anyone knew where something could be found, it was them. I, for one, trust the Bedouin knowledge of the area. That's pretty good evidence that there is a substantial treasure waiting to be found. Back in Petra that evening, Jamie was put in contact with some local Bedouins who still excavate in the area. who supply the ever-hungry collectors. Ahmed, do you think that there is maybe treasure still buried up at Petra? Yeah, still many things, because, you know, exactly from like 60% of Petra,

out and now under the grounds. And sometimes in the winter times, you know, you find many Bedouins around, go around to you, and there's a women's, men, and kids, go to look for the Coons. It's like Romans or Nabatians, what the money he used it like, in Roman and in the Bacan times. Some of them he dig in the nights. But why do they have to wait until it's nighttime before they... Because it's not allowed.

Okay, so you can't dig... Yeah, from the government, yeah, it's not allowed. In the winter time, anybody go because, you know, it's the winters or the water. You can find the coons. Something other, like battery or jar or lamp or something, you go in the night because it's not... not allowed. Do you ever go dig it? Yes. But it's not allowed.

But we try to make our living, like... Sometimes we go all of us, you know, we go some... And so how do you make a living for it? Do you sell what you find or... Some of them, you know, we sell it. Somebody, there's some people's speciality, buy something like this. And some of them we keep it, something like treasure or something you didn't find... Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Collect, like some of us, like to collect some special kind of money, like the Nebatian. Because the Nebatian, you know, it's few money, not like the Roman. Roman, for example, they found it in everywhere. One of the big factors there in social terms is the way that the Bedouins behave. They have been there for centuries. They regard it as their territory, their property, and they get a little piece of pottery or the odd instrument or spoon or some other piece of cutlery.

They will want to lay first claim to it. it is, they will put a good price on it and sell it to the tourists. Needless to say, this is not a side of Petra that the tourists see, nor a part that the authorities want known. They see many of these Bedouins as thieves, but the Bedouins tell Jamie that it's their territorial right to live and dig at Petra. So Abdullah, do the Bedouin know where the treasure is buried? No, nobody know. But, you know, they go away.

They go and they digging. Some of them they find treasure, some of them not. Nobody know. If I know there is a treasure, I will go. And do the Bedouin believe that that treasure belongs to them? If it was their land, the treasure is theirs. You know, for example, like if I found it, it's for me. Like here on, for example, all the Bedouin,

no, if I found the gold, it's belonged to me. Like, because they, we are belong to the Batian people. We are with a Bedouin who's like travel and stay here and like our grandfather, it's Nabatian. So we believe like everything we found it, it's belonged to us. And do you have any relics here in your house? Do you keep stuff here? Yes, we keep, yeah.

So what have we got here? This was a jar. It was used like in Byzantine terms. It's the last time for the beginning, you know, there's the first time Nebatians and after Roman. and this one is the last time. It's the Byzantians. It's made from the Byzantians. So this is what?

2,000 years old? Yeah, something like this, 2,000 years old. Because I saw jars like this at the private collection in Amman. Yeah. And is this worth a lot of money? Yeah. When we sell it, we sell it sometimes with a cheap price. For us, when we sell it like, one, two, exactly, let me take, 200 dinar, something like 200 d'n.

So that's about 200 pounds in our money. Yeah. Yeah. But maybe to a big American collector it would be worth thousands of pounds. Exactly. Wow, okay. And this came from Petro? Yeah. This was what we find in that right.

This was exactly. We found it one of the tombs, but it was full of water, you know, many water. And this was we found it one of the tomb in Petro. So if the government knew that you had this, would they take it away from you? Would you be in trouble? Or would they take it away? You would go to jail if they came and they found this in your house. Right?

Okay. Okay, all right, okay, that's amazing, thank you. They live in hopes that they'll find perhaps the lost treasure of Pharaoh or some riches that were left there when it was part of Baldwin's Kingdom of the Holy Land. And I, for one, would be inclined to trust the Bedouin knowledge of the area and to say yes, that's pretty good evidence that there is a substantial treasure waiting to be found. After a few hours of chatting away over tea, the local Bedouins felt comfortable enough with Jamie and the crew to invite them on one of their scavenging trips into the desert, to see what, if anything, they'd find.

Many of the local Bedouin families send small parties out into the desert after dark, to see what can be dug up. Most of the discoveries are just coins, shards of pottery, and other low-value items, which they sell onto tourists. But occasionally, something more significant does come up. The guy's saying that they need to keep the radio noise down because they're worried the guards might hear.

Once they arrived on the... site, Jamie and the crew were given a quick security briefing. The Bedouins don't want to get caught out here, so they post lookouts, and if an unidentified vehicle approached, it would be time to leave, fast. Jamie is taken to an area on the outskirts of Petra that the Bedouins had been working on for some time. They said it was part of an original Nabatian settlement, which had already yielded up some small artifacts.

So what kind of thing are you looking for? We look like jars, knives, come in something like this. Okay. It has often been said that people have always looked for treasure in Petra. And I think they certainly have. And of course at times, reports have been made that treasure was found there. Reputedly, according to Arab writers, the Crusaders found treasure there in the 1180s, treasure that was related to the distant Hebrew past.

Whether this is true or not, it's hard to say. After about an hour of digging, the Bedouins discover a small object. It was an oil lamp, almost identical to the ones Jamie was shown in Amman, and one of the most common artifacts that's excavated in Petra. But to the Bedouins, it's not significant and not valuable. Despite possibly being over 2,000 years old, it would only fetch around $10 if they sold it to a dealer. The sun would be coming up soon, and the team didn't want to outstay their welcome, so it was time to go. They might not have found anything significant, but as the discovery of the oil lamp proved,

this ancient place still has many relics and secrets to give up. Things are found regularly at Petra, on a small scale or large scale. of it sold by the locals. The bigger stuff goes into the international antiquities trade. But yes, there are things being found all the time, and there's obviously a lot more to be found. It's only 35% excavated. What else is to be found?

And with those finds, there will be caches of relics. There will be graves, there'll be tombs. We found, I think, a drop in the ocean of what's to be found in places like Petra, and other great sites. One of the reasons why it seems likely that before long some vast treasure may be uncovered is this trickle of relics, it's persistent, it goes on. If there was nothing coming up in the sand,

then we could say, okay, it's just an ancient city, it's obsolete, it's gone. But when these interesting discoveries are made, So regularly, it does give grounds to hope that there is something much bigger, much more valuable, just waiting to be unearthed. It's a jug today, but at the end of the year, there may be a jug full of gold pieces.

Petra is a magnificent ruin that's been standing proudly in the desert for over 2,500 years. But there is a secret side. side, a relentless, even ruthless search by relic hunters and dealers for whatever's been buried there over the centuries. The $6 million question is, what, if anything, is still left? Baring in mind that only 15% of the whole site has ever been excavated, the likelihood is quite a lot.