Revisiting a Lost City.

PETRA (Extinct city); NEW York (N.Y.); UNITED States; JORDAN

The ancient civilization of Petra comes to New York. Now amateur archeologists need only travel to New York's American Museum of Natural History to rediscover "Petra: Lost City of Stone" in a striking new exhibit of 200 works. Marking the first U.S. Jordanian cultural collaboration, the show (on view through July 6, 2004) is cosponsored by the AMNH and the Cincinnati Art Museum which-thanks to its participation in Petra's 1937 excavation-owns the largest collection of Petra artifacts outside Jordan. In the fourth century B.C., Petra (population 20,000) was the capital of the Arab kingdom of Nabatea, whose nomadic citizens had settled down to a life of commerce and urbanity at the crossroads of East and West. With huge photographs and an enormous three-screen-surround film, the exhibit re-creates majestic vistas of Petra's ruined temples and monumental tombs. At the entrance, a large cardboard cutout, mimicking the siq, offers a dramatic first glimpse of Petra's grand khazneh (treasury), representative of its Hellenic-inspired architecture. It is almost as breathtaking as being there in person.