Destinations: Oases in Time

Not far from Petra, southern Jordan’s “rose-red city half as old as Time,” lie two sites that are far too frequently overlooked.

About a half-hour’s drive from Petra is Little Petra (Siq al Barid in Arabic), which, like its more massive namesake, served as a way station for Nabatean incense caravans more than 2,000 years ago. And then, within walking distance of Little Petra, are the ruins of Beidha, where a group of Neolithic hunter-gatherers ceased wandering, settled down and built homes.

Visitors to Little Petra first glimpse an elegant tomb with an urn carved above the building’s triangular pediment. The tomb stands at one end of the narrow defile that provides entry to the site. Like all the rock-cut buildings at Little Petra, it was probably carved between the first century B.C. and the first century A.D.

Traders plying the route between the mountains of south Arabia and the Mediterranean port of Gaza, the gateway to Rome and its empire, rested in Little Petra’s cool gorge while their donkeys and camels remained tethered outside near huge cisterns full of water. (One of those ancient cisterns—062still used today by local Bedouin—can be seen at the head of a stairway that comes into view after you turn right off the main road from Petra toward Siq al Barid.)