Word: petra
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...impressed by her girlish grace and pleasant looks as by her acrobatics and technique. "Peggy is not a fiery skater," said Dick Button. "She is a delicate lady on the ice." And at Davos, it figured to take more than delicacy to surpass Canada's defending champion Petra Burka. Only four times in the 60-year history of the event had a defender failed to repeat. "Petra should do it again," Button predicted, "although Peggy could be her closest challenger...
...Petra Kipphoff, Associate Literary Editor of Die Zeit, while he agreed basically with O'Tuama, felt that moralists should not be universally condemned "because many of them act with the best interests of their communities at heart...
Glueck discovered relics of the Naba-taeans and became fascinated with them. Except for their famous capital, Petra, Poet John William Burgon's "rose-red city half as old as time," the Naba-taeans were almost unknown, but they had prospered mightily. Their cities, roads and forts were all over Trans-Jordan. They knew how to make the most of a water-short land, and when they moved into the Negev, they outdid themselves. Glueck often found their elaborate water systems almost intact, though seldom used or recognized by the modern inhabitants...
Archaeologists came to the rescue. They pointed out that the Nabataeans, who ruled Petra long before the Christian era, were the best hydraulic engineers of antiquity. They, too, suffered from floods racing down the Siq, and they solved the problem in a manner on which modern engineers can hardly improve. In the upper part of the Siq, before it reaches the city, they built a stone dam 45 ft. high and 140 ft. long. The dam was not designed to hold an entire flood, only to check its water and divert it into a system of guide walls...
Pottery Mains. The Nabataean capital, Petra, is a museum of exceptional hydraulic engineering. Besides the Siq dam and diversion system, it has a spreading network of channels cut into the rock to lead water to the city from distant springs. In one detail the Nabataeans were even ahead of the Romans. Instead of high aqueducts, they used carefully sealed pottery pipes to carry water under pressure, as modern water systems use pipes of metal...