Chapter 47 civilization beyond words

I got a piece of experience from my past travels: Don’t pay too much attention to the high and low hills in general. If there are high mountains suddenly appearing in the Great Plains, you should pay attention to them, and there are likely to be scenic spots inside; If it is oddly shaped, you must stop, or you will regret it sooner or later. Going south from Amman, two hundred kilometers are boring sandy land and dunes, which is tiresome.Suddenly, there was a huge purple-brown monster in the distance, like a group of fountains boiling towards the sky, with billowing steam still lingering on it.But this is just a metaphor. The spring has long since solidified and turned into a mountain range, and the lingering steam is the clouds on the top of the mountain.This, they say, is Petra.

In the 19th century, a Swiss scholar who studied Arab civilization saw from an ancient book that there was a rose-colored castle in this vast desert.There should be some remains of this castle, even some rose-colored gravel?After nine years of searching, he found this place. There is a crack in the mountain pass, which is bottomless. When you step into it, you can see that the cliffs on both sides are about seven or eight meters away, forming a curved and smooth corridor. The sky above and the road below form two parallel narrow lines.The cliffs connecting two narrow lines, some are in the shape of a knife, and some are in the shape of a drenching, but all of them are rose red, with some ocher patterns and white waves in the middle. Mandy stretched in.

I don't know how many roads I walked and how many turns I turned, but I didn't panic at all, because I was followed by the blue sky and accompanied by roses, and the road ahead must be auspicious.The end of the corridor is a Roman-style palace chiseled on the cliff. The six columns on the ground floor, which are more than ten meters high, have almost no defects.Entering the foyer, there are steps leading to the main entrance, and there are side doors on both sides, and the carvings on the door frame and lintel are also very intact.On both sides of the foyer are tall relief sculptures of knights, and both people and horses are presented in a concise and full freehand style.On the second floor, there are three groups of tall pavilion columns, the middle group is circular, and there are nine Roman-style statues in relief.

The overall style of the palace is exquisite, elegant and magnificent, which concentrates the aesthetic pursuit of European nobles. However, the circular pavilion columns on the second floor and the freehand reliefs on the first floor have a distinct oriental style. This palace, you don't even want to think of it as a relic.Its neatness is like a classical building still in use in modern times.But how can there be such a luxury in modern times, dare to build a palace with all rose-red rough stones, and it is built by chiseling a mountain! This palace is called the treasury of the pharaohs.After walking for a while, you can still see a complete Roman arena. All the auditoriums are carved out of mountains and surrounded by a precise semicircle.Opposite the arena, there are a large number of luxurious European-style royal tombs.In addition, there are caves among the rose-colored cliffs, and each cave has exquisite design.

Standing at the bottom and looking around, one can immediately come to the conclusion that this is a dreamlike and beautiful city, but this city is surrounded by mountains, and there are only one or two mountain cracks that are secretly connected.It is dry, ventilated, and has springs. I think any tribe in ancient times would regard it as the safest and most comfortable fortress as long as they set foot in it. Petra is so beautiful and magical, but it lacks words. Maybe some words are still hidden in some undiscovered grottoes, so we can only guess and imagine its history. It is generally believed that it was the sanctuary of the Nabatean people in the second century BC. They were a branch of the nomadic Arabs who came from the north.It was once prominent, so this hidden place was also very lively. In the past, merchants rushed in and out of the winding corridors, using it as a post station.It also entered the sphere of influence of the Romans, so it was marked with a deep Roman style.

However, around the seventh century AD, it suddenly became deserted, and even gradually died away.The reason is that the merchants in the past have opened up the sea route, and this place is no longer a traffic station; the second is that there were two earthquakes, and the rolling rocks made people dare not live here anymore. In short, it has completely escaped the sight of civilization. For almost a thousand years, the exquisite rose-red palace and the Roman arena are no longer remembered, but they still exist intact, accompanied only by the breeze and the moon. Only some nomadic Bedouins live here, and I don't know how they feel when they face these magnificent ruins.Their descendants may think that there are such gorgeous halls and jade steps in the world for them to stay.Then, if they accidentally nomad to Paris, they will also sigh in vain.

Standing in the valley of Petra, I have been thinking about this question: Most of the visible civilizations we visited along the way are famous in history, but Petra provides another form of civilization that makes historians dumbfounded. There should be more forms in the history of human development than visible civilizations, right? Knowing that there was a kingdom, but not knowing the time and reason for its existence, let alone the name and history of the ruler; it is estimated that there has been a war, but they don’t even know the ownership and victory or defeat of the two sides; Unable to determine their owner and purpose

Because explicit civilizations have clarified their own historical logic, it is easy for future generations to understand the breadth and depth of their existence in an exaggerated way.But this exaggeration conceals how much real richness, chaos, contention and annihilation! People's understanding of the history of civilization mostly rests on written records and the norms formulated by the recorders.This is no wonder, because people always have a desire to simplify and clarify various complex phenomena, especially in classrooms and textbooks. Therefore, canceling weak civilizations, abnormal civilizations, and hidden civilizations has almost become a kind of Pervasive psychosocial habits.The evil result of this kind of mental habit is to use a few established concepts to define the framework of ancient and modern civilization phenomena, and to cut the foot to fit the shoes, which hurts the diversity and naturalness of the civilization ecology.It is a common phenomenon for us to move towards disorder due to the pursuit of excessive order, and to damage civilization due to the attempt to regulate civilization.More often, much of the humanities has been contributing to this phenomenon.

Petra, with its astonishing beauty, denies this.It says that human beings have a longer history, more ways of living, more sinister encounters, and more lonely glory than common sense. November 6, 1999, Petra, Jordan, overnight at Silk Road Hotel