Often rehearsed, sometimes parodied, there remains something hauntingly arresting about John William Burgon's sonnet in praise of Petra, Jordon's “rose-red city,” lying at the threshold of the Arabian Peninsula, on the southeastern fringe of ancient Syria-Palestine (the term is used herein to denote the region encompassing the modern political states of Jordon, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria; on the notion of “Syria-Palestine,” a geographic construct popularized by W. F. Albright, see Dever 1997). Now home to a Bedouin community, Petra was once the thriving capital city of the ancient Nabataeans, whose kingdom flourished in the late centuries BC and the early centuries AD.