632 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1910. 



'I- 



As the cave life is probably older in the Old World than in the 

 New so the cave dwelling of that continent is the most highly de- 

 veloped architectually. Many of the rock temples of Egypt^ — as 

 the far-famed rock temple of Abu-simbel — China, and India ^ are 

 among the highest known examples of man's skill and expertness 

 in rock cutting. Of all these none surpasses in interest and beauty 

 the ancient far-famed cliff city of the Syrian deserts, called Petra. 



Situated not far from an old caravan route across the desert from 

 Damascus to Mecca and protected from nomadic marauders by its 

 marvelous position, Petra has been occupied successively from most 

 ancient times by Edomites, Phcenicians, Egyptians, and Komans, 

 all of whom have left examples of their art in its rock-hewn temples 

 and amphitheaters, shrines, and house walls. After passing through 

 a narrow defile called the Sik, whose perpendicular walls tower 

 above on each side, a visitor suddenly beholds the magnificent 

 " Treasury of Ptolemy " cut on the side of the cliff. This beautiful 

 temple, empty because without cave behind it, is but the beginning 

 of a series of facades covering the high cliffs in the enlargement 

 of the canyon, at the base of which lies in ruins the fallen walls of 

 buildings long ago deserted. As one studies this greatest of all cliff 

 cities,^ built by human hands in the variegated rocks of a Syrian 

 desert, he realizes the height cliff dwelling architecture long ago 

 reached in the Old World, as a protection from foes by isolation. 

 This ruin, with all its wealth of beauty, is connected with a desert 

 and an arid climate, the same conditions which characterize its hum- 

 ble representatives in the New World. 



1 have sought for some explanation of the fact that the cliff 

 dwellings and pueblos built in caverns are confined to our southwest 

 and northern Mexico, and to the arid belt of Asia, Europe, and 

 Africa. Why, for instance, is the distribution so circumscribed, 

 especially when we find evidences that man elsewhere, as in the 

 West Indies, once lived in a previous stage in natural caverns. I 

 am inclined to recognize here the most striking instance of the in- 

 fluence of environment and geological conditions. Nowhere else were 

 there caves capacious enough, open to the air, and in many other 

 ways suitable for the erection of dwellings. Other caverns are 

 deeper, the limestone caves of the Alleghanies are more extensive, 

 some of those of the West Indies as inaccessible, but the majority 

 have narrow entrances and are otherwise unfitted for the development 

 of cave dwellings. 



i Emil Schlagintweit, Indien in Wort und Blld, Leipzig, 1890. Fergurson and Burgess, 

 The Cave Temples of India, London, 1888. 



2 Alois Musil, Arabia Petra?a, Wein, 1907. Gustav Dalman Hermann, Petra und 

 seine Felsheiligtiimer, Leipzig, 1908. Wm. Libbey, jr., and Franlilin E. Hoskins, The 

 Jordan Valley and Petra, New York, 1905. Also a popular account by the latter in the 

 Geographical Magazine. See also Scientific American, 1900, et alii. 



