The Theater

The Petra Theater is a first-century AD Nabataean monument carved substantially out of solid red sandstone, sitting roughly 600 meters from the city center of the ancient rock city. Following Roman theater conventions, its auditorium is divided into three horizontal seating tiers separated by walkways, with seven stairways providing access — the whole structure estimated to have held around 8,500 spectators, exceeding the capacity of the theater at Amman. The scaena and exterior walls were built rather than hewn, blending two construction traditions in a single monument. From the upper tiers, visitors look directly onto Petra's carved tomb facades, making the setting as visually striking as the structure itself. The natural sandstone shell still produces the superior acoustics that Roman theater design was engineered to achieve.