The Lost Engravers of Wadi Musa

How a generation of craftsmen near Petra kept the ancient art of copperplate alive against the tide of offset printing

In the winter of 1954, I descended the narrow siq at Petra for the third time that season, but this time I was not looking at the tombs. My guide, a weathered Bedouin named Salem who had spent forty years among the rose-red cliffs, had promised to take me to a workshop that most visitors walked past without noticing. Behind an unmarked doorway in the cliff face, three men sat hunched over copper plates, scratching fine lines into metal with tools that had not changed in two centuries.

The Workshop Behind the Treasury

The eldest of the three, Hajj Musa al-Khalayleh, was seventy-one years old and had been engraving since the age of fourteen. His father had learned the craft in Damascus and brought it south to Wadi Musa in 1908, when the village was still a quiet waystation for pilgrims. By the time the Kingdom issued its first definitive stamp series in 1952, Hajj Musa’s workshop had become the unofficial mint of the southern governorate — not for postage, which was produced in Amman, but for the commemorative covers that collectors across the Arab world coveted.