Lost to whom?
Petra is often called a lost city, and Johann Ludwig Burckhardt is often called its discoverer. Neither description is quite right. Petra was never lost to the people who lived in the surrounding region. What happened in 1812 was that a European traveller reached the ruins and, afterwards, wrote about them in a form that reached Western readers. It is better described as a Western rediscovery than a discovery.
Petra before 1812
Local communities, including Bedouin groups, had always known where Petra was. The valley was associated in local tradition with Moses (the nearby town and spring are called Wadi Musa, “Valley of Moses”) and with Aaron, whose traditional tomb stands on Jabal Harun, a mountain overlooking the site. The name of the ruins was also tied to a pharaoh in popular stories, as in the name of the Treasury.
Written sources also kept the memory alive in different ways. Greek and Roman authors had described Petra. Christian sources listed it as a bishopric. Medieval Arabic writers mentioned the area, and Arabic sources report that the Mamluk sultan Baibars passed through the region in the 13th century. Crusaders built a small fort nearby in the 12th century. In Europe, however, the exact location of the ancient city had been uncertain for a long time, and some places in the region had been confused with it. A Crusader castle at Kerak, for example, was known in Latin as Petra Deserti.
Interest in the area increased in the early 19th century, when explorers working for European societies began to travel in the Near East. The German traveller Ulrich Jasper Seetzen was in the region around 1807 and heard of ruins in the Wadi Musa area, but he did not reach them.
Who was Burckhardt?
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt was born in Lausanne in 1784, studied in Germany and travelled to England, where he was hired by the African Association, a London society that sponsored exploration. His assignment was to travel to Africa, ultimately to search for the course of the Niger. To prepare, he went to Aleppo in Syria, spent roughly two years learning Arabic and Islamic customs, and began to travel in the guise of a Muslim scholar, taking the name Sheikh Ibrahim ibn Abdallah.
The journey to Petra, 1812
In 1812, on the way from Syria to Egypt, Burckhardt travelled through what is now Jordan. He had heard from local people of impressive ruins in the Wadi Musa area. Because an inquisitive European would have attracted suspicion, he gave a convenient excuse: he said he wished to sacrifice a goat at the tomb of Aaron, a plausible pious act for a Muslim traveller. His guide took him through the valley, and in doing so he passed through the Siq and saw the Treasury, the theatre, rock-cut tombs and other remains.
He did not have long or freedom to look. His guide was wary, and Burckhardt feared that open note-taking or sketching would reveal his real purpose. He noted what he could, recalled more later, and wrote it up afterwards. His account is therefore brief and sometimes imprecise, but it correctly identified the site as ancient Petra, which was the key point. He did not enter the city as a conquering discoverer; he reached it as a guest in disguise, depending on local goodwill.
After Petra
Burckhardt continued to Egypt, and in 1813 he became the first European in modern times to record the great temples at Abu Simbel in Nubia. He died of dysentery in Cairo in 1817, aged about 32, before reaching his intended goal. His journals were published posthumously in 1822 as Travels in Syria and the Holy Land, which brought Petra to a wide audience in Europe.
What followed
Later visitors came quickly. In 1818 two British naval officers, Charles Irby and James Mangles, travelled to Petra and described it. In 1828 the French travellers Léon de Laborde and Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds made detailed drawings of the monuments. The Scottish artist David Roberts visited in 1839, and his lithographs brought the site to a much wider public in the following years. The poet John William Burgon, who never saw it, wrote a prize-winning poem about it in 1845, giving it the “rose-red” nickname. Later in the 19th century, scholars such as Rudolf Brünnow and Alfred von Domaszewski surveyed and recorded the monuments in detail in works published in the early 1900s.
Scientific excavation grew in the 20th century and continues today, including recent survey by drone and satellite. Petra was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985.
Why the story matters
The story of Burckhardt shows a pattern that appears at many ancient sites. Petra and the Great Zimbabwe walls in southern Africa, for example, were known to nearby communities for centuries before outsiders wrote about them. A “discovery” in a European sense usually means that the site became visible to a particular audience.
It also matters for how Petra is understood today. The Bdoul Bedouin lived among the ruins for generations, in caves and tombs, until resettlement in the 20th century, and their knowledge of the landscape was essential to every visitor. They remain part of the living story of the place, not a footnote to a Western one.