The final scene concerning the Holy Grail in the film "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" takes place in Petra, Jordan, a famous archaeological site in Jordan's southwestern desert. The Holy Grail, it turns out, resides in the ‘Canyon of the Crescent Moon’ (Al Khazneh, the so-called ‘Treasury’, a giant ornately carved sandstone temple facade in the city of Petra in the Edom Mountains of southwest Jordan). The film uses the monumental Treasury, the centrepiece of Jordan's ancient Nabataean city of Petra, as the exterior of The Temple of the Sun in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade".

Wadi Musa is the nearest town to Petra (4 kilometers or 2.5 miles). It is a three-hour drive or bus-ride from the Jordanian capital of Amman (though people have found that they can reach it more easily from Aqaba or from Eilat in Israel). The Lost City is found at the end of a three-quarter-mile trek (on foot, camel, or horse) through the Siq, a narrow rock fissure in the cliffs.

Back around 150 BC, Petra was built by the Nabateans. Their civilization amassed great wealth by trading with their Greek and Persian contemporaries. Additionally, scholarly consensus is that the Nabateans, whose kingdom flourished from about 400 BC to 106 BC and whose capital was Petra in Jordan, were in part the descendants of the earlier inhabitants of southern Jordan. They were apparently ruled by a dynasty which had a north Arabian background.

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