Feature Photo: The Treasury
Editor’s Note: These photographs may look old-fashioned now, but when we first started posting photos most images were scanned in from film negatives, and the resolution on the internet was very poor. Images needed to be only a few kilobytes so that you could download them with a phone modem; now they are thousands of times bigger.
The Treasury
Petra, Jordon
Photographed in the early morning light
Petra the “rose-red city, half as old as time,” was lost to civilization until discovered by Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, a Swiss explorer, in 1812. Now Jordan’s main tourist attraction, Petra was originally carved out of the whorling-red sandstone between 800 BC and 100 AD by the Nabataean Arabs and flourished as a hub for the trade routes between the Mediterranean and Asia. The grandeur of Petra’s 800 monuments defies photographs and descriptions making it a must-see for world travelers.