Petra: The Ancient Rose City Of Jordan: A Virtual Guide Paperback – June 22, 2017

I thought this book would have more info of the area like a travel book. It is not.

Washed out pictures

A real waste of money. Uninformative badly written text with poor quality black and white images.

Wasn’t impressed. Large print make book fatter, but color pictures would have added value.

The author obviously has no idea what he is talking about. On his web site that advertises this book, he says "The sheer scale of these places, along with the fact that the stone is very hard and would require thousands of hardened steel tools to make them, tells us that the Nabateans likely found these sites abandoned, and chose to occupy them."#1 - The stone in Petra is sandstone and limestone -- rather soft stones that can be carved with harder stones and copper -- even your fingernail!!! It is not necessary to have "hardened steel tools" There is no evidence that the Nabataeans had steel tools and the great monuments of Petra were carved centuries before steel was produced in the region.#2 - The statement that because carving in hard stone requires steel tools means that the site was previously unoccupied makes no sense at all. In fact, Petra WAS previously occupied by the Edomites. There is archaeological and historical evidence for this. The Edomites did not carve any of the rock-cut facades, though. Those were carved in the late 1st c BCE through 2nd century CE by the Nabataeans,#3 - Don't waste your money or time.

Is sub-titled a virtual guide...not sure what that means. It is not virtual in a technical sense and is not a guide in any sense. Poorly written with back-and-forth monologue wrapping in a number of other historic locations but not connecting the points. There are numerous grammatical errors and ongoing poor layout with distracting references to irrelevant, poor quality photos. Wish I had not asked for this for a present.