Al-Beidha
A short distance north of Petra lies an area of pale honey colored rock – Al Beidha in Arabic, ‘the white one’. Here in the 1st century AD the Nabataeans established a commercial suburb, a place for trading caravans to stop en route between south Arabia and the Mediterranean.
Al-Beidha’s fertile land had been exploited for many millennia before the Nabataeans, a Neolithic group settled here around 7000 BC, hunting animals with flint weapons and gathering wild plants to eat. They also grew wheat and barley and kept goats and sheep.