2,000-year-old tomb with 12 skeletons found in Petra, where ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ was filmed

Archaeologists have discovered a 2,000-year-old tomb containing 12 skeletons beneath the ‘Treasury’ in the ancient city of Petra in Jordan.

In Arabic, the Treasury is known as ‘Al-Khazneh’, which translates to ‘the Pharaoh’s treasury’. The exact purpose of the Treasury is unclear, but it may have been a mausoleum for the Nabataean king Aretas IV Philopatris. Movie buffs may remember it as the site where the “Holy Grail” – the cup Jesus is said to have used at the Last Supper – was found in the 1989 film “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

While excavating the grave, archaeologists recently unearthed the remains of pottery buried with the individuals. They discovered that one of the skeletons was holding a ceramic vessel that resembled a chalice statement from the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Sediments and materials from the graves date to sometime between the mid-first century B.C. and the early second century A.D., according to an analysis by Tim Kinnairda Research Officer at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of St Andrews.

It is not clear who these twelve people were, and research into the grave and its remains continues.

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A ceramic chalice in the dirt

Archaeologists unearth a ceramic chalice in a tomb beneath the Treasury in Petra. (Image credit: Discovery’s Expedition Unknown)

Filling in the gaps

The grave was discovered during remote sensing work carried out by Richard Batesa geophysicist at the University of St. Andrews.

“The discovery is of international significance because very few complete burials of the early Nabataeans have ever been recovered from Petra,” Bates said in the statement. “The burials, their goods and the human remains can all be expected to contribute to filling the gaps in our knowledge of how Petra came to be and who the (Nabataeans) were.”

The Nabateans flourished in southern Jordan about 2,000 years ago. Caravan routes traveled through their kingdom and Petra became a great city with breathtaking architecture. The Romans took control of their kingdom in the second century AD and Petra fell into decline afterward, according to the American Natural History Museum.

When the remains of a tomb were discovered, an excavation plan was drawn up by Jordan’s Department of Antiquities and the American Center of Oriental Research. Discovery Channel also supported the excavation and produced a documentary about it, which recently aired in the TV series ‘Excavation unknown.”

Laurent Tholbecqa professor at the Archeology and Heritage Research Center of the Free University of Brussels, who was not involved in the research, told LiveScience that “about twenty years ago, two similar tombs next to this one were excavated by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan.”

The newly discovered tomb, which must be older than the Treasury, will help pinpoint a date to the Treasury itself, which has long been a point of contention, he said.

The “dating of the Khazneh, which has long been disputed but now placed in the first quarter of the first century AD, must be confirmed by the date of the artifacts found in this tomb,” Tholbecq told in an e-mail email Live Science.

Lucy Wadesonan archaeologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the research praised the find. “This discovery will hopefully shed light on the little-known burial practices of the Nabataeans, since so few unlooted graves have been excavated,” she told LiveScience in an email. “Now that the human remains and grave goods have been found in their original context, we can finally reconstruct the burial rituals associated with these beautiful graves.”

Megan Perryan anthropology professor at East Carolina University who has done extensive archaeological work at Petra but was not involved in this dig, said the discovery of this tomb is not a surprise and is a bit overhyped. A “grave immediately adjacent to this grave was excavated in 2003, so the discovery of another grave is not particularly unexpected,” Perry told LiveScience in an email. Perry also noted that “other tombs excavated at Petra, including those I have examined, have found many more than a dozen individuals.”

Perry said that “surprisingly little of Petra has actually been excavated, so any new data is good data, provided the project is done with best practices in mind,” noting that it could yield more information about Al-Khazneh.

LiveScience contacted the archaeologists who excavated the grave but did not hear back by the time of publication.

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2,000-year-old tomb with 12 skeletons found in Petra, where ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ was filmed

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