The Ancient City of Hegra, in the Arabian Desert, c.50 CE: this rock-hewn city was built by the Nabataeans, and it originally served as a center for international trade, but it was later transformed into a necropolis with more than 100 monumental tombs [3990×5246]

Hegra (also known as Mada’in Saleh or al-Hijr) is an ancient rock-hewn city located in the desert north of al-Ula, in what is now Saudi Arabia. This site was built by the Nabataeans — the same culture that famously constructed the city of Petra, in modern-day Jordan.

As [this article](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/hegra-ancient-city-saudi-arabia-untouched-for-millennia-makes-its-public-debut-180976361/) describes:

> The rock-cut constructions at Hegra look similar to its more famous sister site of Petra, a few hundred miles to the north in Jordan. Hegra was the second city of the Nabataean kingdom, but Hegra does much more than simply play second fiddle to Petra: it could hold the key to unlocking the secrets of an almost-forgotten ancient civilization.

> The Nabataeans were desert-dwelling nomads turned master merchants, controlling the incense and spice trade routes through Arabia and Jordan to the Mediterranean, Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia. Camel-drawn caravans laden with piles of fragrant peppercorn, ginger root, sugar and cotton passed through Hegra, a provincial city on the kingdom’s southern frontier. The Nabataeans also became the suppliers of aromatics, such as frankincense and myrrh, that were highly prized in religious ceremonies.

> The Nabataeans prospered from the 4th century B.C. until the 1st century A.D., when the expanding Roman Empire annexed and subsumed their huge swath of land. Gradually, the Nabataean identity was lost entirely.

> The challenge with getting to know the Nabataeans is that they left behind so little first-hand history. With the immense popularity of Petra today, it’s hard to imagine that we don’t know much about its creators. Most of what we’ve learned about the Nabataeans comes from the documents of outsiders: the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians.

> Like Petra, Hegra is a metropolis turned necropolis: most of the remaining structures that can be seen today are tombs, with much of the architectural remains of the city waiting to be excavated or already lost, quite literally, to the sands of time. One of the only places where the words of the Nabataeans exist is in the inscriptions above the entrances to several of the tombs at Hegra.

> Obscure though they might be to us now, the Nabataeans were ancient pioneers in architecture and hydraulics, harnessing the unforgiving desert environment to their benefit. Rainwater that poured down from the craggy mountains was collected for later use in ground-level cisterns. Natural water pipes were built around the tombs to protect their facades from erosion, which have kept them well preserved thousands of years after their construction.

More than 100 monumental tombs (and roughly 2,000 smaller burials) have been documented at Hegra:

> Hegra contains 111 carefully carved tombs, far fewer than the more than 600 at the Nabataean capital of Petra. But the tombs at Hegra are often in much better condition. Sphinxes, eagles and griffins with spread wings—important symbols in the Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Persian worlds—menacingly hover above the tomb entrances to protect them from intruders. Others are guarded by Medusa-like masks, with snakes spiraling out as hair.

The largest monumental tomb at Hegra is a structure known as Qasar al-Farid, meaning “the Lonely Castle.” This tomb rises to a height of 22 meters (about 72 feet) and it was carved into an isolated rock formation situated far from all of the other structures at the site.

#Sources & More Info:
– Smithsonian Magazine: [Hegra, an Ancient City in Saudi Arabia Untouched for Millennia, Makes its Public Debut](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/hegra-ancient-city-saudi-arabia-untouched-for-millennia-makes-its-public-debut-180976361/)
– UNESCO: [Hegra Archaeological Site](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1293/)
– BBC: [Uncovering the Secrets of Mystery Civilization in Saudi Arabia](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49424036)
– Nexus Network Journal: [Land and Skyscrapes of Hegra: an Archaeoastronomical Analysis of the Nabataean Necropoleis](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00004-024-00774-z)