Dynastic History | The Petra Church — The Archive That Outlived the Kingdom by Four Centuries

The Nabataean kingdom had been gone for close to four hundred years when the documents in this building were written, and they are the nearest thing Petra has to an archive.

The American Center of Oriental Research excavated the church between 1992 and 1998, on a ridge above the city centre; the complex is fifth- to sixth-century. In December 1993 the team opened a room on its north-east side and found roughly a hundred and forty papyrus rolls, blackened and fused into lumps. They had been carbonised in the fire that destroyed the church, and the fire is the only reason they exist.

What they contain is household administration. They are the papers of one propertied family, Theodoros son of Obodianos and his relatives, and they run to dowries, divisions of estates, disputed boundaries, sales and loans, written mostly in Greek with Nabataean and Arabic words for local things. Around three hundred and fifty people are named in them. Legislation issued at Constantinople under Justinian turns up applied in Petra within about a year of promulgation, which is a measurable fact about how far a capital's writ actually travelled.

Most of the rolls were too damaged to read. A few dozen yielded text, published across five volumes by the University of Helsinki and the University of Michigan with ACOR. Note the father's name: Obodianos is formed on Obodas, borne by Nabataean kings, and here it belongs to an ordinary landowner four centuries after the last of them, in a city whose court left almost nothing written of its own.

A shelter built during the ACOR campaign covers the mosaic floors; the atrium beyond it is open, and some of the papyri are shown at the Jordan Museum in Amman.

📸 Cover: the atrium and cistern head of the Petra Church, Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons