History has been filled with seekers.
Archaeologists filled with curiosity and majorly luck.
But, was there anyone who ever found the tomb of primes?
I made Skye pull every academic paper, news or rumor on El-Deir she could find before we ever boarded a plane.
If I was about to walk into a building that six dead gods had apparently decided to occupy, I should at least know what the archaeologists who'd spent their careers on it thought it actually was.
What she came back with was less a settled history than an argument that had been running for over a century.
The physical facts, at least, weren't contradictory or surprising in any way.
The facade runs roughly 47 meters high and 48 wide, carved directly into the sandstone rather than built up from it, the way everything monumental in Petra is carved rather than constructed which makes it, by a comfortable margin, the largest single monument in the entire city.
Al-Khazneh, the Treasury everyone recognizes from a hundred photographs, is a little over half the Deir's width and several meters shorter.
The style is an hybrid nobody in the ancient world would have found strange: Hellenistic elements — broken pediments, a tholos with its conical roof and stone urn.
However, nobody has ever found a burial inside it. That was a fact.
That single fact undoes most of the easy assumptions a visitor makes walking up eight hundred rock-cut steps expecting a tomb.
The interior is one large chamber, a raised inner niche reached by two short flights of stairs, low benches running along both side walls — the layout, several papers argued, of a formal ritual dining hall, a biclinium, built for a private religious association to gather and drink in a dead king's honor rather than to house his body.
Whose honor, though? was the argument nobody had actually settled. Were the people in the past even remotely aware of the tomb?
An inscription found near the site in 1990, part of what scholars call a marzeah — the same word, more or less, for the kind of formal drinking association the interior architecture seemed built to host — referenced something called "Obodas the god."
The obvious reference to this was Obodas I, the Nabataean king who'd ambushed Alexander Jannaeus's army near Gadara using camel cavalry in a valley that gave the Hasmoneans no room to maneuver, and who'd killed the Seleucid king Antiochus XII outright at the Battle of Cana a few years later, in 86 BCE — a king whose military record was good enough, by any era's standards, to make deification after death feel like the natural next step for people used to explaining extraordinary success as divine favor.
Except one of the archaeologists Skye's search turned up — a scholar named Wenning, whose argument nobody else in the field had cleanly refuted — pointed out that royal deification among the Nabataeans wasn't otherwise attested until the reign of Aretas IV, nearly a century after Obodas I died.
A king dead that long before the practice existed made for an awkward fit, whatever the inscription of deification seemed to be gesturing at.
Wenning's own candidate was a different, later king who also happened to be named Obodas — the naming conventions themselves a mess of overlapping numerals across surviving inscriptions — which meant the honest state of the field, as of everything Skye could find, amounted to: we know a king named Obodas was worshipped here. We are not certain, at this time, which one.
The name most visitors actually use for the building — El-Deir, the Monastery — has nothing to do with any of that. So who exactly was deified?
The name of the monastery comes from crosses, carved into the back wall centuries after the Nabataeans, left by Byzantine-era Christian hermits who'd made a home of the empty chamber sometime in the fourth to seventh centuries, long after the kings who built it and the gods they'd made of themselves had stopped being anyone's living memory.
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, the Swiss explorer who talked his way into Petra disguised as a Muslim pilgrim in 1812, recorded an inscription on the building's facade that referenced this later occupation — an inscription that had vanished, worn away or deliberately removed, by the time the next serious survey came through in 1865.
Half a millennium of Nabataean religious practice, turned into a name given by monks who'd simply needed somewhere quiet to pray.
I sat with all the information for longer, because it left me with something the archaeologists never understood.
I knew that six Primes had ended themselves in that building, or somewhere very near it, twenty thousand years before Obodas or Aretas or any human king had a name worth carving into stone.
The scholars arguing over which Obodas the marzeah inscription honored weren't wrong to argue. They simply didn't have access to the one fact that would have ended the argument outright, and I was never going to be the one to hand it to them.
"It's strange," I told Skye, the night before the flight, "knowing the actual answer to a question a hundred years of serious people have built careers arguing about."
The answer was - the ancients did know of the mystical existence of the tomb which they worshipped as a sacred space turning it into a monastery. The energon that the primes emitted actually made the monastery a place of devoted meditation.
That means petra was an energon resource that was soaked in energon of primes for almost twenty millennias. If the wrong factions decide to extract energon from these stones, that would be a complete disaster.
I didn't have a better plan than the one I already had.
This meant petra needs to be reinforced and guarded.
That meant covert surveillance or an energon extraction.
- Samuel James Witwicky