Written By:
David Trubridge
I fly in for a trade show.
A city on the sand, built with oil money. A ski slope, a mega-shopping mall and a giant aquarium in the desert. From a distance the incongruous cluster of tall buildings fills the sky; well, they would be tall until you see the Burj, twice the height, a lone finger in the sky fading into the haze. I do my business and move on to Jordan.
Nature and culture entwined. Gravity draws water down, running over the rock and cutting deep gorges. It seeps, it trickles, it flows, it pours and it rampages in devastating floods. It wears down the surface and carries away sand which also becomes an abrasive. This rock itself was once sand, washed down from another much older rock face, to become sediment in some ancient sea, the layers building up in different colours, red, white, black, purple, brown. The pressure heats and the earth heaves, pulling and twisting the layers into flowing strata. An endless cycle of wear, deposit, compact, convolute and wear . . . Different minerals and varying pressure and heat cause cause different hardnesses so that the layers of stone wear unevenly. This creates wondrous folding, flowing, ornate forms and voids in the cliff face.
An example of fractals, the repeating patterns of nature.
Then along come the Namataeans. They live in the natural caves which provide perfect shelter. Soon they realise that the soft sandstone is easily worked, so they enlarge their caves and carve benches and alcoves. A highly skilled culture evolves that knows stone so well that they can manipulate it in increasingly impressive ways. They carve water cisterns and channels to run the water into them; they build a dam and carve a tunnel to divert flash floods; flights of carved steps lead to nearby summits where religious ceremonies are enacted.
But the Namataeans are a technical people, they have no art. They are also traders who make the most of their strategic position at the cross roads of EW and NS trade routes through the Middle East. Their leaders and rich nobles hear of great cities to the east and to the west, so they send out their stone cutters to come back with inspiration for their greatest projects. What they bring are the pilasters and ornate cornices of Greek temples, stepped facades from Assyria, and obelisks from Egypt. During the last two centuries BC, all are incorporated in a mish-mash of styles, rather like a typical New Zealand suburb with its mixture of Georgian, Tudor, adobe and Californian houses.
As well as carving out cliff faces, they learn to quarry stone and build free-standing monuments and halls. They quarry up the cliff from the base leaving wide square cut overhangs. The remaining example of their building is grossly ugly; heavy, square and grandiose with none of the finesse of their sources. They built to impress and to show off technical mastery, which indeed they do.
Cold, blank flat concrete walls come alive with shadow patterns cast by my Sola light and a tree.
Most of today’s remains are tombs, statements of aggrandisement — a futile attempt to rob death of its inevitable victory. Self important people claimed valuable street frontage to impose their memory onto everyone who passes. They look impressive, but they are only facades — half rounded pilasters and shallow cornices emerge out of the cliff, the whole point of the supportive function of the pillar lost. These grandiose facades usually front a single diminutive burial chamber, a cubic void cut into the rock with a few alcoves or graves. All that remains now, after grave robbers have added their final insult to death’s ignominy, is a cold stone cube void, blackened by the fires of later living inhabitants.
An example of what I call ‘biophobic’ design. With its arrogant assertion over nature there is no nurturing here!
Some contain dining halls or triclinia with carved benches. Some, like the monstrous ‘Monastery’, are overscaled to giant proportions with little sensitivity to the original Greek intent or refinement, in the manner of the late Baroque. It is too easy to be overawed by the size and achievement of these creations, and not see just how ugly and affected they really are.
The Namataeans were so strategically powerful that they managed to hold out against the Romans for a long time. But ultimately they were marginalised by new sea routes across the Indian Ocean, so they pragmatically invited the Romans in. The newcomers completely rebuilt the central street, turning it into a bustling and sophisticated city centre, complete with an amphitheatre, carved of course out of the rock (and probably older tombs).
As always, nature had the last word. Two earthquakes devastated the city leaving little but rubble and the implacable tombs. These too suffered over time as the chiselled square edges and openings were worn back into nature’s rounded forms, softer strata disappearing first to leave only the harder rock, or parts protected from water by overhangs. Nature forms, man imposes and nature reclaims.
The great power of this site lies in the beauty of its setting, its blend of nature’s relentless inevitability and its unassuming beauty, with man’s ingenuity. But this ingenuity leads, as rivers do to the sea, to man’s downfall through hubris. We kick through piles of stone rubble, pottery shards and sand. There is no way of knowing whether it came from old buildings or just natural erosion — all is levelled. Underneath many riches probably still lie.
The entry, through the 2km long narrow winding chasm called the Siq, is a master stroke — it is not the only entry to the city, as there is easier access from the north, but they chose this to elevate the mystique of the city, making it appear hidden and secret. Its power remains today. And here I find one endearing human touch, the carving of a drover and his camel on the cliff side, which exhibited a rare glimpse of intimacy and humanity.
Overall, I think I expected something warmer, more human and liveable, and was disappointed by the austere and anachronistic tombs.
I lift up my eyes to the hills and they are as they have always been. And there I follow to sit and suffuse in the desert sun.
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
(Ozymandias by Shelley.)
