The Semitic name for the city, "Reqem", found on a Nabatean inscription at the entry of the siq (the narrow gorge leading into the city) evokes a multitude of embroidered colours in the sandstone: hues of white and pink, striped with yellow and ochre and even blue. The vast majority of the 3000 monuments known in Petra were hewn directly in this easily worked, but friable, material.

The site is cradled in a natural amphitheatre through which the Wadi Moussa threads its way alongside the siq. For ages Petra was an uninhabited necropolis, a sanctuary. Today, Petra has sprung back to life with its population of archaeologists, certainly much smaller than the Nabatean population, which must have numbered some ten or twenty thousand souls, living in painted grottoes and in hillside houses somewhat comparable to Pompeian villas.

  Some six hundred tombs, mostly anonymous, jut out of the sculpted faÁades of the rocky cliffs. Petra is more than unusual; it is haunting, with its hundreds of religious, innumerable niches and recesses for statues of deities, sacrificial altars dotting the hillsides, and temples lining the lower city. First century B.C. inscriptions in the temple Qasr al-Bint, invoke Zeus Hypsistos and Aphrodite, undoubtedly the local Nabatean gods Dousares and al-Uzza.

Today, the extraordinary beauty of the site is threatened by the growing number of visitors, and, ironically, by humidity. As underground water filters up through the rock by capillarity, it brings with it salt deposits which damage the sculpted cliffs. Recent proposals for consolidation of the rock have been submitted by certain institutions, such as Electricité de France, the national French electric company with its corporate patronage programme.