Al-Khazneh, known in English as the Treasury, is a monumental tomb carved directly into a sandstone cliff face at Petra, the ancient capital of the Nabataean Kingdom in present day Jordan. Cut around the first century AD, most likely as the mausoleum of a Nabataean king, its facade, roughly 39 meters high, combines a lower story of classical columns and a pediment with an upper story built around a broken pediment and a central tholos, a design drawing on Hellenistic and Alexandrian architectural sources reworked into a distinctly Nabataean composition. The facade's English name comes from a local legend that an urn carved near its top held pharaonic treasure, an idea disproved by the many bullet marks left by treasure hunters who fired at the solid stone urn. Reached by visitors on foot through the narrow sandstone gorge known as the Siq, Al-Khazneh is the best known monument at Petra, itself inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985.
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In Style
The Treasury at Petra, its facade carved directly into sandstone cliff face in the 1st century BCE, is the defining monument of Nabataean rock-cut architecture.
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