Editorial
Petra Beyond Indiana Jones
The 1989 film gave Petra a façade and invented everything behind it. The real story is in the water systems, the aniconic sculpture, the painter who framed your photograph in 1839 and the families moved out so the world could come in.
Spielberg's crew filmed the Treasury's façade in Jordan, then built the Grail chamber on a soundstage in Hertfordshire — because the real interior of Al-Khazneh is a plain, undecorated room. It's a perfect miniature of how Petra is understood: one wall, photographed a million times a year, standing in for a city that is mostly still unexcavated.