Jordan is one of the driest countries in the world. Yet, over 2,000 years ago, a mysterious tribe constructed Petra, a thriving city with spectacular temple-tombs carved into rose-colored cliffs. But as mysteriously as Petra emerged from the desert, it disappeared – lost to most of the world for over a thousand years. How did an ancient people construct buildings to rival Rome? How did they build a water system to supply a city in the middle of the desert? Who built Petra and why did it disappear?

Equipped with remote sensors and digital imagery, archaeologists and engineers wade deep into the sands of time to unlock the ancient secrets of Petra. And, in a daring experiment, archaeologists and sculptors team up to carve an iconic temple-tomb to find out how the ancient people of Petra built their city of stone.

A U.S./French production team, led by award-winning filmmaker Gary Glassman of Providence Pictures, is completing a one-hour special on The Lost City of Petra (WT) that will air on NOVA in 2015.

Using clues gathered from the stunning rock cut tombs, archaeologists are on a quest to determine not only who carved the magnificent cliff-face tombs of Petra, but how. Halfway across the world in Southern California, two stone carvers recreate a Nabataean tomb against a sandstone cliff face. Could they uncover the key to Petra’s tombs?

Beyond Petra’s city of the dead, archaeologists are working to unearth the city of the living. Petra’s location in this desert terrain made the nomadic Nabataeans the gatekeepers to the ancient trade routes between Persia, India, and China to the east and Egypt, Greece and Rome to the west. But, although frankincense and myrrh made the Nabataeans rich beyond belief, how were they able to sustain a city of over 20,000 people in the searing heat?
Archaeologists think the answer may be hidden in plain sight. Investigations are uncovering massive waterways spreading throughout the central city and the surrounding canyons. Alongside the tombs for the dead, chiseled into the same sandstone cliffs, the Nabataeans produced ingenious tunnels and cisterns that collected the scarcest of rainfall and distributed water through a vast network of gravity-fed pipes. These ancient builders were capable of filling bathhouses, fountains, and a massive central pool complex to such abundance that some scholars believe Petra may have been the Las Vegas of the ancient world.

For over a millennium Petra was lost to the western world, but in 1812, a Swiss adventurer disguised himself as a Bedouin, and caught the first long-awaited glimpse after a treacherous pilgrimage through the Middle East. Two hundred years after Johann Burkhardt's rediscovery of Petra, less than 1% of Petra has been explored, but now groundbreaking discoveries are happening daily. Explorers are revealing how the Nabateans, using simple hand tools, built this oasis of culture in one of the harshest climates on earth, who actually created Petra, and ultimately, why it disappeared.

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