Viking Resident Historian Challenge – Find the Petra “Treasury”

VRH – Hall of Fame

Viking Neptune April 11, 2023

Viking World Cruise – Petra, Jordan

Winner: Mike and Patty Bee

Petra may be best known as the site where Indiana Jones finds the Holy Grail in the movie India Jones and the Lost Ark. However, the beauty of this location and it’s tombs are a definite bucket list location and many travelers.

Each cruise I give the passengers a challenge to identify some important location. This cruise the Viking Resident Historian challenge was to find the Treasure at Petra and take a picture including the Treasury and a Camel. Several teams were up to the challenge and submitted pictures. However, Mike and Patty Bee were the first to send a picture – well done!

T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) writes to a childhood friend in February 1914 … “Petra, is the most wonderful place in the world, not for the sake of the ruins, which are quite a secondary affair, but for the color of its rocks, all red and black and gray with streaks of green and blue, in little wriggly lines….and  for the shape of its cliffs and crags and pinnacles, and for the wonderful gorge it has, always running deep with spring water, full of oleanders, and ivy and ferns, and only just wide enough for a camel at a time, and a couple miles long. But I have read hosts of the most beautiful accounts of it, and they give one no idea of it at all…so you will never know what Petra is like, unless you come out here…Only be assured that til you have seen it you have not had the glimmering of an idea how beautiful a place can be.”

Our Viking Neptune visited Petra and we were able to spend the day exploring this site rich with history and beauty. One of the highlights is to visit the “Treasury.” The building is not a palace, but is actually a burial tomb for the Nabatean King Aretas IV in the 1st century AD.

The nickname the Treasure is because early bedouin thought the urn at the top of the façade held vast riches. One legend is that the Egyptian Pharaoh and some of his armies escaped the closing of the Red Sea by Moses and created the Khazneh by magic as a safe place for his treasury, and continued in his pursuit of Moses. This led to the name Khazneh el-Far’oun, “Treasury of the Pharaoh.” The decorations on the front of the tomb are full of various figures from mythology and the afterlife. On top are figures of four eagles that would carry away the souls. The figures on the upper level are dancing Amazons with double-axes and Isis. The entrance is flanked by statues of the twins Castor and Pollux who lived partly on Olympus and partly in the underworld. In contrast to the elaborate facade, the interior comprises a plain main chamber and three antechambers.