2,000-year-old grave containing 12 skeletons found in Petra, where Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed

Archaeologists have discovered a 2,000-year-old tomb containing 12 skeletons beneath the “treasury” in the ancient city of Petra in Jordan.

In Arabic, the treasury is known as “Al-Khazneh,” which translates to “the Pharaoh’s treasury.” The exact purpose of the treasury is unclear, but it may have been a mausoleum for the Nabataean king Aretas IV Philopatris. Film fans may remember the location where the “Holy Grail” – the cup Jesus is said to have used at the Last Supper – was found in the 1989 film “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

While excavating the tomb, archaeologists recently unearthed ceramic remains that were buried with the individuals. They found that one of the skeletons contained a ceramic vessel that resembled a chalice, according to a opinion from the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Sediments and materials from the burials date to the period between the middle of the first century B.C. BC and the early second century AD, according to an analysis by Tim KinnairdResearch Fellow at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of St Andrews.

It is not clear who these twelve people were, and research into the tomb and its remains is ongoing.

Related: 31 ancient temples from all over the world, from Göbekli Tepe to the Parthenon

A ceramic goblet in the dirt

Archaeologists unearth a ceramic chalice in a tomb beneath the treasury in Petra. (Image credit: Discovery's Expedition Unknown)

Fill in the gaps

The grave was discovered during remote sensing work by Richard BatesGeophysicist at the University of St Andrews.

“The discovery is of international significance as very few complete early Nabataean burials have been recovered at Petra,” Bates said in the statement. “It is expected that the burials, their possessions and the human remains will help fill the gaps in knowledge about how Petra came to be and who the (Nabataeans) were.”

The Nabataeans flourished in southern Jordan around 2,000 years ago. Caravan routes passed through their kingdom and Petra became a major city with breathtaking architecture. The Romans took control of their kingdom in the second century AD and Petra fell into decline thereafter American Museum of Natural History.

When the remains of a tomb were discovered, the Jordanian Ministry of Antiquities and the American Center of Oriental Research drew up an excavation plan. Discovery Channel also supported the excavation and produced a documentary about it, which was recently featured in the television series “Excavation unknown.”

Laurent TholbecqA professor at the Archeology and Heritage Research Center at the Free University of Brussels who was not involved in the research told Live Science that “besides this one, two similar tombs were excavated by the Antiquities Department of Jordan about twenty years ago.”

The newly discovered grave, which must be older than the Treasury, will help enable the dating of the Treasury itself, which has long been controversial, he said.

The “dating of the Khazneh, long disputed but now dated to the first quarter of the 1st century AD, should be confirmed by the date of the artifacts found in this tomb,” Tholbecq said in an email to Live Science.

Lucy WadesonAn archaeologist from the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the research, praised the find. “This discovery will hopefully shed light on the little-known burial practices of the Nabataeans, since so few unlooted tombs have been excavated,” she told Live Science in an email. “Using the human remains and grave goods found in their original context, we can finally reconstruct the funerary rituals associated with these magnificent tombs.”

Megan PerryAn anthropology professor at East Carolina University who has done extensive archaeological work in Petra but was not involved in this excavation said that the discovery of this tomb was not a surprise and was somewhat overstated. “An immediately adjacent grave was excavated in 2003, so the discovery of another grave is not particularly unexpected,” Perry told Live Science in an email. Perry also noted that “far more than 12 individuals were found in other excavated tombs (in) Petra, including those I explored.”

Perry said that “surprisingly little of Petra has actually been excavated, so any new data is good data, provided the project is conducted with best practices in mind,” and noted that they may provide more information about Al-Khazneh.

Live Science reached out to the archaeologists who excavated the tomb but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

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