Petra in the Accounts of Western Travelers: Selected Narratives from the Nineteenth Century

Review by David J Breeze John William Burgon’s description of Petra as ‘the rose-red city, half as old as time’ dates to 1845, well within the timeframe covered in this book. It remains an apt statement, underlined by the choice of the Treasury in Petra as the location of Indiana Jones’ encounter with a crusader knight. Yet to describe Petra as ‘rediscovered by Westerners’, as is often said, is to ignore the 12th-century crusader castle overlooking the ancient city. Even so, from that time into the 19th century, the city was lost to Western scholarship, as David Kennedy states in his preface. The aim of the authors is to collect and publish selected 19th-century narrati