Amman is one of those capitals that grows on you slowly: at first it can seem chaotic, sprawling and an endless beige of limestone houses climbing the hills, without the obvious postcard view of other capitals. But once you head down to downtown, get lost among the spice and falafel stalls, climb up to the Citadel at sunset and watch the sun turn the Roman theatre and the minarets golden, Amman starts to reveal its character: welcoming, lively, young and surprisingly cosmopolitan, with a café, art and food scene that grows year after year.
The city has a very long history: it was Rabbath Ammon of the Ammonites, the Greco-Roman Philadelphia of the Decapolis, and it was reborn in the 20th century as the capital of the Hashemite kingdom. That past lives alongside the present within a few metres: the Citadel, with its Roman temple and Umayyad palace, looks down on the great Roman theatre in the centre, while all around buzzes a modern metropolis that has taken in waves of Palestinian, Iraqi and Syrian refugees and is today one of the great urban centres of the Arab world.
This guide helps you make the most of Amman: what to see in the old town and the modern neighbourhoods, how to get around its hills, where to eat the best mansaf (the national dish) or downtown falafel, how much admission costs and how to use the city as a base for trips to the north and the Dead Sea. Amman doesn't always win you over at first sight, but it almost always wins travellers over in the end, thanks to the warmth of its people and that rare balance between old and new.
Amman is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world: on Citadel hill there are traces of settlement going back to the Neolithic, and in the Bronze and Iron Ages it was Rabbath Ammon, the capital of the kingdom of the Ammonites mentioned in the Bible. In the 3rd century BC the Egyptian king Ptolemy II refounded it and named it Philadelphia, and as such it was one of the ten cities of the Greco-Roman Decapolis, from which the theatre and the Temple of Hercules survive. Under Umayyad rule (7th-8th centuries) it had a palace and a mosque on top of the Citadel, but it then declined for centuries until it was almost deserted. Its modern revival began in the late 19th century, when the Ottoman Empire settled Circassian colonists there, and it gathered pace in 1921, when Emir Abdullah chose it as the capital of the newly created Emirate of Transjordan. Since then it has grown at a dizzying rate, above all because of the waves of Palestinian refugees after 1948 and 1967, becoming the great metropolis it is today. Its full history, from the Ammonites to the Hashemites, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the country: the capital built on seven hills, and the fertile north of the great Roman Decapolis cities, Jerash and Umm Qais.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before it became a modern capital of high-rises and motorways, Amman was a fortified hill where thousands of years of history piled up. At the top of Jabal al-Qal'a, the Citadel hill, archaeologists have found traces of human settlement going back to the Neolithic. Very close by, at the site of Ain Ghazal, they uncovered one of the oldest farming communities in the world, around 9,000 years old. Its astonishing big-eyed plaster statues are now on display at the Jordan Museum.
In the Bronze and Iron Ages, the hill became Rabbath Ammon, the capital of the kingdom of the Ammonites, a Semitic people who appear again and again in the Hebrew Bible. The Ammonites were neighbours, and often rivals, of the Israelites. The books of Samuel and Kings tell of the wars between them, and according to the biblical account it was at the siege of Rabbath Ammon that King David sent Uriah the Hittite to his death so he could take his wife, Bathsheba. The Ammonite city grew rich on trade and on its strategic position along the routes linking Arabia with Syria, and for centuries it held out against pressure from the great empires of Mesopotamia. It finally fell to the Assyrians, then to the Babylonians and the Persians, but it kept its identity until a new civilisation arrived to change both its name and its face: the Greeks.
After Alexander the Great's conquests in the 4th century BC, the region came under the influence of the Hellenistic world. In the 3rd century BC, the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus rebuilt and beautified old Rabbath Ammon and renamed it in his own honour: Philadelphia, 'the city of brotherly love'. It filled up with colonnaded streets, temples, theatres and Greek-style baths, and became part of the network of trade routes that crossed the region.
In 63 BC, the Roman general Pompey brought the area under Roman rule, and Philadelphia joined the Decapolis, a league of ten Greco-Roman cities with a shared culture (among them Gerasa, today's Jerash, and Gadara, today's Umm Qais). These cities enjoyed a degree of autonomy and prospered through trade. Under Rome, especially in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, Philadelphia enjoyed its golden age. This was when the great theatre that still dominates central Amman was built, with room for six thousand spectators. The city also gained the Odeon, a colonnaded street, a monumental nymphaeum and, at the top of the Citadel, the imposing Temple of Hercules, where giant columns and the remains of a colossal statue still stand.
With the arrival of Christianity and the division of the Empire, Philadelphia remained an important city in the Byzantine era. It was the seat of a bishop, and the remains of its churches can still be seen on the Citadel. But the world was about to change again: from the south, from the Arabian Peninsula, a new faith and a new power were on their way.
In 635, just a few years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslim armies conquered the region and Philadelphia took back a version of its old Semitic name: it was called Amman once again. Under the Umayyad caliphate, ruled from nearby Damascus, the city enjoyed a new period of splendour. In the 8th century the Umayyads built a large palace complex at the top of the Citadel. It had a monumental cross-shaped audience hall with a dome, which has since been rebuilt and is one of the most photographed monuments in Amman, along with a mosque and a system of cisterns. Amman was then a thriving administrative centre on the pilgrimage and trade routes.
That golden age was short-lived. A devastating earthquake in 749 ruined much of the city, and when the centre of Islamic power moved from the Umayyads in Damascus to the Abbasids in Baghdad, Amman was left off the main routes. From then on it fell into a long decline. During the Crusades it was a no man's land. Under the Mamluks and later the Ottomans it was little more than a village, or simply abandoned. For centuries the Roman and Umayyad ruins on the hill stood alone over an almost empty site covered in rubble, visited at most by passing Bedouin. The great Philadelphia of antiquity had become a memory among the stones.
Amman's revival began unexpectedly in the late 19th century. In 1878 the Ottoman Empire, which wanted to repopulate and control the region, settled a group of Circassian refugees among the ruins of the old city. The Circassians were a Muslim people from the Caucasus fleeing the Russian conquest of their homeland. These Circassian settlers, later joined by Chechens, made their homes among the Roman columns, farmed the valleys and built a stable community. After centuries, little Amman had permanent residents again.
The decisive boost came in the early 20th century with the Hejaz Railway, the line the Ottomans built to link Damascus with Medina and make the pilgrimage to Mecca easier. Amman became one of its stations, which brought back trade and people. During the First World War and the Great Arab Revolt (1916-1918), the region saw fighting between Arab and Ottoman forces. The Hejaz Railway was a target of the sabotage raids that involved the famous British officer T. E. Lawrence, 'Lawrence of Arabia'. When the war ended and the Ottoman Empire broke apart, these lands came under British mandate. Their fate was about to change completely, thanks to a dynasty that came from Arabia: the Hashemites.
In 1921, Emir Abdullah bin Hussein arrived in the region and founded the Emirate of Transjordan under British protection, with Amman as its capital. He was a son of the Sharif of Mecca and a member of the Hashemite dynasty, which traces its descent to the Prophet Muhammad. Choosing that small town of a few thousand people, little more than a railway station surrounded by ruins, changed its history for good. In 1946 Transjordan won independence as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and Abdullah became its first king. Amman was now officially the capital of a new country.
From then on the city grew at a dizzying pace, driven above all by the wars in neighbouring Palestine. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Arab-Israeli war, and again after the 1967 war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees settled in and around Amman, completely transforming its size and make-up. In the decades that followed came waves of Iraqi refugees after the Gulf and Iraq wars, and of Syrians after the civil war that broke out in 2011. Each wave left its mark on the city. A century later, the few thousand residents of the early 20th century had become several million across the metropolitan area.
The Hashemite kingdom was ruled by Abdullah I, then for almost half a century by his grandson Hussein, and since 1999 by Abdullah II. It managed to keep Jordan a haven of relative stability in a turbulent region. Today Amman reflects that unusual history. It is a modern, orderly and cosmopolitan metropolis with universities, hospitals, art and a lively cultural scene, built on the hills where Ammonites, Greeks, Romans and Umayyads left their mark. The city rose from its ruins only a century ago and has become one of the great capitals of the Arab world. It still lives up to its old reputation as a welcoming place at the crossroads of Arabia, Syria and the Mediterranean.
