EAST OF THE DEAD SEA

The 2,000 year-old Rose Red City of Petra was the religious center of an ancient desert people named Nabataeans. They didn't build huge temples such as this - they carved them out of cliffs of rose-red sandstone in their hidden mountain sanctuary east of the Dead Sea.
Their capital was the ancient city of Ammon, known to the Greeks and Romans as Philadelphia, after the Hellenic ruler of Egypt, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (309-246 BC).
Nabataea flourished until it was conquered by the Roman Emperor Trajan (53-117 AD). The Nabataeans converted to Christianity and lived as peaceful farmers until they were overrun by Arab invaders in the 7th century who forced them to submit to Islam.
They vanished, and so did any memory of Petra until it was discovered by a Swiss explorer, Johann Burckhardt, in 1812. Ammon, pronounced Amman (ah-man vs. ah-mone) by the Arabs, had been reduced to rubble by a series of earthquakes during the Middle Ages, and remained a small village with some Roman ruins for centuries.
The entire area east of the Dead Sea was a forgotten desert wasteland, incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in the early 1500s and ignored by the Sultans in Istanbul. And then the history that continues to shake our world today began...
