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In 2024 a team ran radar over the ground in front of the Treasury, mapping it before work to control flood water, and got a hollow back. Underneath was a sealed tomb: twelve skeletons lying as they had been laid, with bronze, iron and pottery beside them. Complete early Nabataean burials are almost unknown here, says Richard Bates of St Andrews.
One of the twelve was holding a vessel. Josh Gates, presenting the Discovery Channel programme that filmed the dig, said everybody froze: it looked like the Grail from the film shot in the building above them. It was the broken top of a jug, probably first century BC.
The carving on the front says tomb. Four eagles at the top to carry souls off, dancing Amazons with axes below them, and at the door Castor and Pollux, the twins who lived half on Olympus and half in the underworld.
The most famous shot of this facade was not the first. The lists go back to Sinbad in 1977, and in February 1988 David Hogan filmed the Sisters of Mercy video for Dominion at Petra, the first music video made in Jordan; the band's singer Andrew Eldritch called it Lawrence of Arabia part two. Indiana Jones arrived on 9 August that year. Since then The Amazing Race has hidden a clue here and Cercle has broadcast a DJ set from it.
Before that film, by Douglas Comer's count, a few thousand people a year made the trip. The 2024 team worked in front of a monument that takes more than a million, and the tomb was under the ground they were all standing on.