Long before the idea of Jordan existed, the lands east of the Jordan River had been inhabited since the Palaeolithic, and in the Iron Age they saw the rise of three kingdoms that the Hebrew Bible names again and again: Ammon, Moab and Edom. They were not literary inventions. Archaeology has confirmed their existence through walls, temples, inscriptions and pottery, and has made it possible to reconstruct a good deal about those societies of the first millennium BCE.
Ammon spread around its capital, Rabbath Ammon, on the hills where the Citadel of Amman stands today — the name of the Jordanian capital preserves that of the ancient kingdom. Moab occupied the plateau east of the Dead Sea, and it is the source of one of the most famous epigraphic finds in the Near East, the Mesha Stele or Moabite Stone, from the 9th century BCE, in which the Moabite king Mesha recounts his wars against the kingdom of Israel. Edom, further south, in the mountainous region of today's Petra and Wadi Musa, was known for its trade routes and for the copper from its mines.
These kingdoms lived alongside, traded with and fought the Hebrews, the Aramaeans and, above all, the great Mesopotamian empires. First Assyria and then Babylon made them pay tribute and eventually absorbed them between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. By the time the Persian Empire ruled the region, Moab and Edom had already disappeared as political entities, and their territory lay open to the Arab tribes arriving from the south and from the desert. Among them came the people who would change the history of this land forever: the Nabataeans.
Around the 4th century BCE, an originally nomadic Arab people, the Nabataeans, settled in the mountains of what is now southern Jordan and founded what would become one of the most dazzling civilisations of Antiquity. Their capital, Petra — which they called Raqmu — was carved into the pink and reddish sandstone of a hidden valley, reached through a narrow gorge more than a kilometre long, the Siq, which suddenly opens out in front of the façade of the famous 'Treasury' (Al Khazneh).
Nabataean wealth did not come from the land, which was dry and difficult, but from trade. Petra sat at the crossroads of the great caravan routes that brought incense and myrrh from southern Arabia, spices from India and silk from even further away, to be distributed towards the Mediterranean. The Nabataeans charged tolls and protection fees, and with that money they built a monumental city. Their real genius, though, was water: in a desert where it barely rains, they designed a system of dams, channels, cisterns and ceramic pipes that captured every last drop of the flash floods and supplied tens of thousands of inhabitants.
The Nabataean kingdom reached its peak between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE, and spread across much of southern Jordan, the Negev and northern Arabia. In 106 CE, Emperor Trajan annexed it to the Roman Empire without the need for a major war, and turned it into the province of Arabia Petraea. Petra stayed prosperous for a while, but the shift of trade routes towards the sea and a series of earthquakes — the most devastating in 363 CE — gradually emptied it. Over the centuries the West forgot about it, until in 1812 the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt brought it back to public attention. Today it is a World Heritage Site and one of the 'New Seven Wonders of the World'.
The Greco-Roman imprint on Jordan begins with the conquests of Alexander the Great at the end of the 4th century BCE, and with the division of his empire among his generals. Over the following centuries, the region was fought over by the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria, who founded or refounded cities in the Greek style, with their agoras, theatres and temples. The urban layout that the Roman conquest would later develop dates from that period.
When Rome established itself in the East in the 1st century BCE, several of those cities came together in an informal league known as the Decapolis, meaning 'the ten cities', which is even mentioned in the Gospels. They were centres of Greek culture within a Semitic world, with their own autonomy and trade. Many of them lay in present-day Jordan: Gerasa (today's Jerash), Gadara (Umm Qais), Philadelphia — the Greco-Roman name for Amman, in honour of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus — and Pella, among others.
The jewel of this period is Jerash, considered one of the best-preserved Roman provincial cities in the world. Its oval plaza ringed by columns, the long colonnaded street (the Cardo Maximus), the arches, the temples of Zeus and Artemis and its two theatres give a vivid picture of what a prosperous city of the Empire looked like. Gadara, today Umm Qais, stood on a hilltop overlooking the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights, and was the birthplace of Greek poets and philosophers. This urban splendour lasted, with ups and downs, well into the Byzantine era.
With the division of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, present-day Jordan became part of the Byzantine Empire, the eastern half that survived the fall of Rome. Between the 4th and 7th centuries, the region went through a period of intense Christianisation: the old cities of the Decapolis filled up with churches and basilicas, and the land was dotted with monastic communities and pilgrimage sites linked to the biblical stories.
The most extraordinary legacy of those centuries is the mosaics. Madaba, south of Amman, earned the nickname 'city of mosaics' for the huge number of floors it preserves. The most famous lies on the floor of the Greek Orthodox Church of St George: the so-called Madaba Map, from the 6th century, the oldest surviving cartographic depiction of the Holy Land, with Jerusalem at its centre, the Jordan River, the Dead Sea and dozens of places identified by name. A few kilometres away, Mount Nebo — the spot from which, according to tradition, Moses gazed upon the Promised Land before he died — holds a collection of mosaics in the memorial built over the ruins of a Byzantine basilica.
This prosperity was not without its shocks. Earthquakes such as the one in 749, epidemics such as the Plague of Justinian in the 6th century, and the long wars between the Byzantines and the Sasanian Persians gradually wore the region down. When the armies of Islam burst out of Arabia in the 7th century, Byzantine rule over these lands was ripe to fall.
In 636, at the Battle of Yarmouk — fought in the valley of a river that today marks part of the border between Jordan and Syria — the Muslim Arab armies decisively defeated the Byzantines and opened the Middle East to Islam. The region that is now Jordan was incorporated into the young caliphate and began a slow process of Arabisation and Islamisation that, over time, would completely transform its population and culture.
Under the Umayyad dynasty, which ruled from Damascus between 661 and 750, these lands enjoyed a moment of splendour. Being at the heart of the caliphate, close to the capital, they filled up with residences, baths and small forts that historians group together as the 'desert castles'. Scattered across the steppe east of Amman, they served as hunting lodges, caravan stops, agricultural estates and retreats for the Umayyad princes. The most famous is Qusayr Amra, a small palace with baths whose walls preserve frescoes of hunting scenes, human figures and even a map of the sky painted on a dome, something exceptional in early Islamic art; today it is a World Heritage Site. Alongside it are Qasr Kharana, which looks like a compact fortress, and Qasr Azraq, the black basalt fortress built over an oasis.
After the Umayyads fell to the Abbasids in 750, the centre of Islamic power moved to Baghdad and present-day Jordan became a peripheral area. For centuries it was a land that pilgrims crossed on their way to Mecca and a stage for disputes between regional powers, and it did not become a political centre of the first rank again until very recent times.
Between the 11th and 13th centuries, present-day Jordan once again became a frontier and a battlefield. The Crusaders, who had come from Europe to conquer the Holy Land, extended their presence east of the Jordan, into a region they called Oultrejourdain ('Beyond the Jordan'). To control the caravan and pilgrim routes linking Egypt with Syria and Arabia, they built a chain of fortresses, among them the imposing Karak Castle, begun in 1142 on a rocky spur overlooking the King's Highway. Its lord, Raynald of Châtillon, became notorious for raiding Muslim caravans and breaking truces, and his provocations helped trigger Saladin's offensive: in 1187, after the decisive Battle of Hattin, the sultan took control of the region and Karak fell into Muslim hands.
From the 13th century onwards, the region passed to the Mamluks, the dynasty of slave-soldier origin that ruled from Cairo and halted both the Crusaders and the fearsome Mongol invasion. The Mamluks strengthened the castles, organised the pilgrimage route to Mecca and kept the territory as a transit province, in a period of relative calm and also of some stagnation. In 1516 and 1517, the Ottoman sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluks and brought Syria, Palestine, Egypt and, with them, present-day Jordan into the vast Ottoman Empire. This began a period of some four centuries in which these lands were a distant periphery, governed from Damascus and largely depopulated, with life concentrated in a few farming villages in the north and in the Bedouin tribes that dominated the desert and the steppe.
For Istanbul, the region's main value was the pilgrimage route: every year, the great Hajj caravan set out from Damascus for Mecca, crossing what is now Jordan, and the Ottomans built small forts to protect it from tribal raids. Away from that axis, government control was weak and often nominal: much of the territory was governed by the authority of tribal sheikhs rather than by the sultan's officials.
The big change came at the start of the 20th century with the construction of the Hejaz Railway, opened in sections between 1904 and 1908, which linked Damascus with Medina via Amman and Ma'an. The line was meant to make the pilgrimage easier and strengthen Ottoman rule over the region, and along the way it revived towns that had been asleep for centuries. Amman, which was little more than a Circassian village — resettled in the 1870s by refugees from the Caucasus — began to grow thanks to the train. A few years later, that same railway would become the main military target of the revolt that would change the fate of the entire Middle East.
During the First World War, the Ottoman Empire fought on Germany's side, and the British sought to weaken it from within by encouraging an Arab rebellion. In 1916, after an exchange of letters between the British High Commissioner in Egypt and Sharif Hussein bin Ali of Mecca — head of the Hashemite dynasty, which claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad — the Great Arab Revolt broke out. In return for rising up against the Ottomans, Hussein believed he had been promised a great independent Arab kingdom covering much of the Middle East.
Hussein's sons led the revolt, and fighting alongside them was a young British officer and archaeologist, Thomas Edward Lawrence, who would go down in history as 'Lawrence of Arabia'. The fighting in what is now Jordan was intense: the rebels and their British advisers harassed the Hejaz Railway with constant demolitions and used the deserts — among them the spectacular Wadi Rum, which Lawrence described in 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' — as a base of operations. The most famous blow was the capture of Aqaba on 6 July 1917: instead of attacking the port from the sea, the Arab force took it by surprise from the inland desert after a long march, and captured it with almost no losses of its own.
The revolt contributed to the Ottoman collapse in the Middle East, but the promise of independence was only half kept. In secret, Britain and France had already divided the region between them in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 committed London to a 'national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine. The Arabs felt betrayed, and out of that frustration, and the carve-up that followed, the map — and many of the conflicts — of the contemporary Middle East would be born.
Once the war was over, the League of Nations divided the Arab provinces of the defunct Ottoman Empire among the victorious powers under the system of 'mandates'. France took Syria and Lebanon; Britain took Palestine and Iraq. In 1920, the French drove Emir Faisal, Hussein's son, out of Damascus, where he had proclaimed a short-lived Arab kingdom. His brother Abdullah then marched north with armed men, in theory to win back his brother's throne, and reached the desert region east of the Jordan, which had been left in a kind of power vacuum within the British Mandate of Palestine.
In March 1921, at the Cairo Conference, the British Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, solved the problem with a pragmatic arrangement: Abdullah would be recognised as emir of a new territory, the Emirate of Transjordan ('the other side of the Jordan'), administratively separate from Palestine west of the river, where the Jewish national home policy would apply. And so, almost at the stroke of a pen and to satisfy the Hashemite dynasty, the political entity that would become the basis of today's country was born.
Over the next two decades, Transjordan was a semi-autonomous emirate under British tutelage. Abdullah ruled with the backing of London, which funded the administration and organised the military force that would become legendary: the Arab Legion, trained and commanded for years by British officers, among them John Bagot Glubb, 'Glubb Pasha'. Amman, the old village beside the Roman ruins, became the modest capital of this young emirate, which was gradually building the institutions of a state.
The end of the Second World War sped up decolonisation. On 22 March 1946, Britain and Emir Abdullah signed a treaty in London recognising the independence of Transjordan. On 25 May that year — a date now celebrated as Independence Day — the country was raised to the status of a kingdom under the name Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, and Abdullah went from emir to king. In 1949, after the war with Israel and the incorporation of the West Bank, the name was shortened to the one it bears today: Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
The Hashemite dynasty that has reigned ever since is one of the oldest and most prestigious families in the Arab world, and its legitimacy rests on its claimed direct lineage from the Prophet Muhammad. The kingdom's founder, Abdullah I, was assassinated in 1951 at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by a Palestinian nationalist; his grandson Hussein, who was at his side and survived the attack, would take the throne in 1953, aged just 17, and reign for 46 years, until his death in 1999.
Hussein's long reign defined modern Jordan. He had to govern a country poor in resources, without abundant oil, wedged between powerful neighbours and shaped by the Palestinian question. His skill at manoeuvring between the great powers, the Arab countries and Israel, surviving coups, assassination attempts and wars, earned him the nickname 'the survivor king'. On his death in 1999, he was succeeded by his son Abdullah II, the current monarch, who has continued his father's line of stability and alignment with the West.
No factor has shaped the history of independent Jordan more than its bond with Palestine. In 1948, after the British withdrawal and the proclamation of the State of Israel, the first Arab-Israeli war broke out. Jordan's Arab Legion was the most effective Arab army in the conflict and managed to hold on to the West Bank and the eastern part of Jerusalem, including the Old City and its holy sites. In 1950, Jordan formally annexed the West Bank, a move recognised by very few countries, and granted Jordanian citizenship to its Palestinian population. Overnight, the kingdom doubled its population, and Palestinians became a huge share — for many, the majority — of its inhabitants.
The balance broke in June 1967, with the Six-Day War. Jordan entered the conflict on the side of Egypt and Syria and suffered a catastrophic defeat: Israel occupied the whole of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, that is, close to half the territory the kingdom administered and its most sacred and significant sites. A new, massive wave of Palestinian refugees crossed the river to the east bank, joining those who had already arrived in 1948 and putting the country under even greater strain.
That demographic and political pressure would have serious internal consequences. Over time, however, Jordan's relationship with the Palestinian question changed course. In 1988, King Hussein formally renounced Jordan's claims to the West Bank in favour of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). And in 1994, Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel — the second Arab country to do so, after Egypt — which ended the state of war, set the borders and recognised a special role for the Hashemite monarchy in the custodianship of the Muslim holy sites of Jerusalem.
The most painful episode in Jordan's internal history is known as Black September. By the late 1960s, after the 1967 defeat and with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the country, the Palestinian guerrilla organisations, grouped under the PLO, had built a kind of state within a state in Jordan. They controlled refugee camps, carried weapons openly, set up checkpoints and challenged the authority of the government and the king. Tensions with the Jordanian army had been building since 1969.
The trigger was the wave of plane hijackings in September 1970. Militants from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine diverted several commercial aircraft and blew up three of them, already empty, at a desert airstrip in Jordan, in front of the world's cameras. It was a direct challenge to the kingdom's sovereignty. On 16 September, King Hussein declared martial law and ordered the army to take back control. The fighting, concentrated in Amman and the north of the country, was extremely harsh and cost thousands of lives. Death toll estimates vary widely by source, from several thousand up to the higher figures given by Palestinian sources. With no independent counts, the exact number is still debated.
Syrian troops intervened in support of the Palestinians and threatened to turn the conflict international, but they were pushed back. On 27 September, mediation by other Arab leaders in Cairo secured a ceasefire between Hussein and PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Fighting resumed on and off until mid-1971, when the Jordanian army finally drove out the guerrilla forces, which moved to Lebanon. The episode strengthened the monarchy's power inside Jordan. It also left a deep wound in the relationship between the state and its population of Palestinian origin, and it gave its name to the group that would carry out the Munich attack in 1972.
Twenty-first-century Jordan is, above all, an island of stability in a neighbourhood on fire. Surrounded by Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Palestinian territories, it has come through decades of regional wars without collapsing. When the 'Arab Spring' swept across much of the Arab world in 2011, Jordan saw protests over corruption, unemployment and the lack of reform. King Abdullah II responded with changes of government and constitutional adjustments that headed off the kind of upheaval that brought down other regimes.
The country's main structural feature is still the hosting of refugees. The successive waves of Palestinians were followed by hundreds of thousands of Iraqis after the Iraq wars, and then by a huge influx of Syrians from 2011 onwards. Jordan has hosted more than a million Syrian refugees, and Zaatari camp became one of the largest in the world. It is one of the countries with the most refugees per inhabitant on the planet. That puts constant pressure on water (Jordan is one of the most water-scarce states in the world), on public services and on a fragile economy that relies heavily on foreign aid.
With no oil resources to match those of its Gulf neighbours, Jordan relies on services, the phosphate and potash industry, remittances from its workers abroad and, more and more, tourism. Petra, Wadi Rum, the Dead Sea, Jerash, Madaba and the desert castles draw travellers from all over the world, and tourism is one of the main sources of foreign currency and jobs. With a population of around eleven million and a location as strategic as it is awkward, Jordan today keeps doing what it has done throughout its short history as a state: balancing skilfully between powers, absorbing the shocks of the region and keeping afloat a kingdom that was born almost by improvisation.
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Jordan's capital is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and its name gives it away. It comes from Rabbath Ammon, the capital of the biblical kingdom of Ammon, which flourished here in the Iron Age. On its highest hill, the Citadel (Jabal al-Qal'a), layers of history are stacked on top of each other: Ammonite remains, the Roman Temple of Hercules, an 8th-century Umayyad palace and a Byzantine church, all on the same hill. Below it, in the lower town, stands a large Roman theatre cut into the hillside, with room for about six thousand spectators.
In Greco-Roman times the city was called Philadelphia, after the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and it was one of the cities of the Decapolis. After centuries of splendour it declined, and for much of the Ottoman period it was reduced to little more than uninhabited ruins. Its revival began in the 1870s, when the Ottoman government settled Circassian refugees there who were fleeing the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. It picked up speed with the arrival of the Hejaz Railway in the early 20th century.
When Abdullah chose Amman as the capital of his new emirate in the 1920s, it was still a modest town of a few thousand people. From then on, and above all with the waves of Palestinian refugees in 1948 and 1967, the city grew explosively into the metropolis of more than four million people it is today. It is a capital of contrasts, with the old centre and its cafés on one side and the modern districts of shopping malls, universities and towers on the other.
About 50 kilometres north of Amman lies Jerash, ancient Gerasa. It is one of the best-preserved Roman provincial cities in the world, so much so that it has been called the 'Pompeii of the East'. Unlike the Italian city, it was not buried by an eruption. It was slowly abandoned after earthquakes and changing times, which left standing a city of astonishing completeness.
Visitors enter through Hadrian's Arch, built around the year 129 to mark the emperor's visit. Further on is the famous Oval Plaza, a large open space ringed by Ionic columns. From it runs the Cardo Maximus, the main colonnaded street, with the ruts of chariot wheels still visible in the paving. On either side rise the temples of Zeus and Artemis, two theatres, nymphaea, baths and Byzantine basilicas with mosaics, evidence of the shift from paganism to Christianity.
Gerasa belonged to the Decapolis and reached its peak between the 1st and 3rd centuries, thanks to trade and to farming in a fertile region. The Islamic conquest and, above all, the devastating earthquake of 749 gradually diminished it. Over time it was covered by sand and forgotten, until it was rediscovered in the 19th century. Today it is Jordan's second great archaeological attraction after Petra, and every summer it hosts a cultural festival among its columns.
In the far north-west of the country, on a hill overlooking a meeting point of borders and landscapes, stand the ruins of Umm Qais, ancient Gadara. From here you can see the Jordan Valley, the Sea of Galilee (or Lake Tiberias) and the Golan Heights all at once, an exceptional viewpoint over three territories steeped in history.
Gadara was also one of the cities of the Decapolis and an unusual centre of Greek culture. Well-known poets and philosophers of antiquity came from here, such as the epigrammatist Meleager and the satirist Menippus, which earned it a reputation as a little 'Athens of the East'. Its Greco-Roman past has left a black basalt theatre, colonnaded streets, a basilica and the monumental tombs of the necropolis.
The site also has a biblical connection. The 'country of the Gadarenes' mentioned in the Gospels, setting of the story of the possessed man and the swine, is usually linked to this area. Curiously, a 19th-century Ottoman village sits on top of the ancient ruins, built partly with stones reused from the classical city. So in Umm Qais, Greco-Roman Gadara and a village from Ottoman times sit one on top of the other.
Geographically, northern Jordan is very different from the rest of the country. While desert dominates to the south and east, here the Ajloun mountains and the hills around Irbid get more rain and still have pine and oak forests, olive groves and wheat fields. It is no coincidence that the great Decapolis cities (Gerasa, Gadara, Pella, Capitolias) were built in exactly this strip: it was the best land for farming and the most densely populated since antiquity.
In the heart of this region stands Ajloun Castle (Qal'at ar-Rabad), a fortress built from 1184 by one of Saladin's generals to control the routes and watch the movements of the Crusaders settled on the other side of the Jordan. It is a rare example of a purely Islamic castle, not a Crusader one, from the time of the Crusades, and its towers look out over a wide stretch of the valley.
Today Irbid, near the Syrian border, is Jordan's second most populous city and an important university centre. This whole northern area, greener and more agricultural, has historically been the country's 'breadbasket' and its natural gateway to Damascus. For centuries these lands were tied to that city, under both the Umayyads and the Ottomans.
If anything explains Amman today, it is the history of forced migration over the last century. The city Abdullah inherited in the 1920s was small. The one Abdullah II governs today is a metropolis home to almost half the country's population. That leap is largely due to the successive waves of refugees who settled in the capital.
The Palestinians who arrived in 1948 and 1967 transformed the city and Jordanian society. Today a very large share of Amman's population is of Palestinian origin, and their presence has shaped the economy, culture and politics. In the decades that followed they were joined by Iraqis fleeing wars and sanctions, and later by Syrians escaping the conflict that began in 2011. Each wave left its mark on neighbourhoods, shops, dialects and food.
This rapid growth came at a cost: urban sprawl that was sometimes chaotic, enormous pressure on water, which is always scarce, and on services, and the tensions of a city that has had to take in uprooted people again and again. But it also made Amman a cosmopolitan and, for the region, relatively open capital, a meeting point where the many stories that have ended up in Jordan from all over the Middle East live side by side.
The Jordan Valley is part of the Great Rift Valley, the huge geological fault that runs from East Africa to Syria, and in its Jordanian stretch it reaches the lowest point on the Earth's surface: the shore of the Dead Sea, more than 400 metres below sea level and dropping a little further every year. It isn't really a sea but a landlocked lake, fed by the Jordan River, where the water can only evaporate and leaves the salts behind.
That extreme concentration of salt, many times higher than in the ocean, makes life impossible for fish and algae (hence the name). It also produces the effect that amazes every visitor: you float without effort, pushed up by the density of the water. The mineral mud on its shores and its salts have been used for cosmetic and medicinal purposes since ancient times; the Egyptians were already using the bitumen that surfaced in its waters.
This depression also carries deep historical and biblical weight. Tradition places the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah nearby, and to the north, on the bank of the Jordan, lies the site of Jesus's baptism (Bethany Beyond the Jordan, now a World Heritage Site). The great modern drama of the Dead Sea is its retreat. Water from the Jordan River has been diverted for farming and human use, so the lake's level has fallen at an alarming rate, exposing sinkholes and a strip of land where there used to be water.
In the highlands above the valley, south of Amman, lies Madaba, known as the 'city of mosaics'. It was a Moabite town and later a Roman and Byzantine city, and its treasure comes from that Christian period: the largest concentration of Byzantine mosaics in Jordan, which covered the floors of its churches and houses between the 5th and 8th centuries.
The most famous is on the floor of the Greek Orthodox Church of St George: the Madaba Map, from the 6th century. It is the oldest surviving map of the Holy Land, a huge mosaic showing the land from Lebanon to the Nile Delta, with the Jordan River, the Dead Sea (with boats crossing it) and dozens of named cities. Jerusalem sits at the centre, drawn in detail with its walls, its gates and its colonnaded main street, which makes the map an extremely valuable source on the religious geography of the time.
Madaba also stands out socially: it is one of the towns in Jordan with the highest share of Christians, heirs to those ancient Byzantine communities. The city keeps the mosaic tradition alive through workshops and a school that teaches and restores the craft, so the art that made Madaba famous 1,500 years ago is still practised in its streets.
A few kilometres from Madaba rises Mount Nebo. On a clear day you can see the whole Jordan Valley from the top, along with the Dead Sea and, in the distance, the hills of Jerusalem and Jericho. According to the tradition recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy, it was from this summit that Moses saw the Promised Land, which he would never enter, before he died. That is why Mount Nebo is one of Jordan's great pilgrimage sites.
From the 4th century onwards, Byzantine Christian communities built a memorial and a basilica on the summit in honour of Moses. Their remarkably well-preserved mosaics show hunting and herding scenes. Franciscan friars looked after the site and excavated and protected it during the 20th century. In 2000, Pope John Paul II visited Mount Nebo as part of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which strengthened its standing as a sacred place for all three monotheistic religions.
Mount Nebo sums up what makes this region special: geography and religious story laid one on top of the other. Standing on the summit, you can physically see why these lands, on the edge of the valley between the Jordanian plateau and the hills of Palestine, have been a frontier, a biblical setting and a crossing point between civilisations for thousands of years.
The sharp drop between the Jordanian plateau and the Dead Sea depression has carved a series of spectacular canyons into the landscape, through which water flows down towards the lowest point on Earth. The most impressive is Wadi Mujib, a deep gorge that in ancient times was the Arnon River, the old border the Bible describes between the kingdom of Moab and the lands to the north.
Today Wadi Mujib is part of a nature reserve that protects one of the country's most unusual ecosystems. Because it flows straight into the Dead Sea, it is the lowest-lying reserve in the world. Between its rock walls, water that runs all year supports plants and animals adapted to this extreme setting in the middle of the desert. It has also become a canyoning spot, where visitors make their way up the canyon by walking and swimming between the stone walls and pools.
This corner of the country shows another side of the Jordan Valley: the water that, despite the general dryness, has carved gorges, sustained oases and made life and farming possible throughout history. Jordan is one of the most water-scarce countries on the planet, and these canyons and springs are a reminder of how water has always been the most fought-over and most precious resource in this land.
The floor of the Jordan Valley, warm and watered by the river, has been farmland since the dawn of humanity. In this strip of the Rift, farming goes back to the Neolithic, and some of the world's earliest human settlements grew up on the banks of the Jordan. Fertile soil, mild temperatures even in winter and a supply of water made the valley a place where people have lived without a break for thousands of years.
In modern Jordan, the Jordan Valley is the country's great orchard. Thanks to irrigation, much of it through the King Abdullah Canal that carries water along the valley, farmers here grow fruit, vegetables, citrus and bananas that feed the population and are exported. It is the most productive farming area in a country where farmland is scarce and water is a critical resource.
The same valley is also a sensitive border. The Jordan River marks much of the boundary with Israel and the West Bank, so it has seen both conflict and agreement, from the wars of the 20th century to the 1994 peace treaty and the deals on sharing the water. In just a few kilometres, the lowest place on the planet brings together the oldest chapters of Jordanian history, such as the first farming and the biblical stories, and the most current: the geopolitics of water and borders.
East of Amman, where the city gives way to dry, empty steppe, there is a scattered group of buildings that tradition calls the 'desert castles', although very few were actually fortresses. Most were palaces, residences, baths, caravanserais and farming complexes built in the 7th and 8th centuries, mainly under the Umayyad dynasty, which ruled the Islamic world from nearby Damascus.
For a long time, people explained why they stood in the middle of the desert by calling them retreats for Umayyad princes, who came out to hunt and enjoy country life away from the city. Historians now give a more nuanced picture. Besides being pleasure pavilions, many of these buildings were centres for managing farming and herding on the steppe. They were also places to meet the Bedouin tribes whose support the Umayyads needed, and stops on the routes linking Syria with Arabia and Iraq.
What makes these sites unique is that they preserve the art of early Islam in exceptional condition. Their frescoes, stucco, carvings and baths reveal a culture far less austere, and far more open to Byzantine and Persian influence, than people usually imagine. Following the desert castles route means looking into the world of the Umayyads, the first great dynasty of Islam, right where its heart once beat.
The most famous of all the desert castles is Qusayr Amra, a small bathhouse and audience hall built in the first half of the 8th century, probably under the Umayyad caliph al-Walid II. Its modest, pale-stone exterior gives no hint of what is inside. Its walls and vaults are covered in frescoes, which is extremely rare in Islamic art and makes them priceless.
The paintings show hunting scenes, banquets, figures, musicians and bathers, and even human figures and nudes, which comes as a surprise given the idea that Islam rejects images. One room has a famous portrait of 'the enemy kings', thought to show rulers defeated by the Umayyads or rivals of theirs. The dome of the hot bath holds one of the oldest surviving depictions of the sky painted on a curved surface: a star map with the constellations and the zodiac.
Because these frescoes are so exceptional, UNESCO declared Qusayr Amra a World Heritage Site. The site is a unique window onto court life under the first caliphs, with their tastes, their pleasures and their cosmopolitan outlook. It also undermines the image of a rigid, closed Umayyad world: here you can see, in colour, a refined elite that inherited the artistic traditions of Byzantium and Persia and made them its own.
In the middle of a bare plain beside the road heading east stands Qasr Kharana, perhaps the most castle-like of them all: a square, solid two-storey building with high walls, round corner towers and a single entrance. At first sight it looks like a military fort, but scholars agree that its narrow slits weren't really for shooting through and that it had no clear defensive role.
An inscription painted inside dates it to around the year 710, which makes it one of the best-dated early Islamic buildings in the region. Its real purpose is still debated. It may have been a caravanserai (an inn for caravans), a place to meet local tribal leaders or a residence. Dozens of rooms are laid out on two floors around a central courtyard, and some still have their stucco decoration.
Qasr Kharana sums up the mystery around these sites: solid, carefully made buildings, raised with great effort in the middle of nowhere, whose exact purpose isn't always clear. What they do show is how active the Umayyads were on this steppe. It looks empty today, but in the 8th century it was a lively place, crossed by routes, flocks and caravans, and by the comings and goings of a court that didn't want to lose touch with the desert it came from.
Further east, where the desert hides one of the region's few permanent oases, stands Qasr Azraq. This fortress is different from the others. It is built entirely of black basalt, the local volcanic rock, which gives it a dark and unmistakable look. Its position next to water made it strategic for thousands of years. Its origins include Roman remains, the Umayyads altered it, and in the 13th century the Ayyubids and Mamluks rebuilt it to control the desert routes.
Azraq Castle also has a chapter in modern history. In the winter of 1917 to 1918, during the Great Arab Revolt, T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) used it as his headquarters. He settled with the Arab forces in the rooms above the gateway while they prepared the advance on Damascus. Lawrence wrote about those weeks in the black stone fortress in his book 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom'.
The Azraq oasis, the reason the fortress was built there, was for centuries a vital water source in the middle of the desert and a stopover for migratory birds travelling between Africa and Eurasia. In the 20th century, its aquifers were pumped so hard to supply Amman that it nearly dried up completely. Today it survives as a nature reserve thanks to restoration work. Fortress, headquarters and threatened wetland, Azraq brings together the military past and the environmental struggle over water that run through all of Jordan's history.
Beyond the castles, the eastern half of Jordan is a vast stretch of basalt desert and steppe that runs towards Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia. It is the emptiest and harshest part of the country. Historically it has been the land of the Bedouin tribes, whose loyalty has been one of the pillars of the Hashemite kingdom since the state was founded, and many soldiers of the Arab Legion and the Jordanian army came from these tribes.
This desert region is also an area of sensitive borders. Through it run the lines that separate Jordan from Iraq and Syria, drawn largely by the European powers after the First World War, more by geometry than with people in mind. In recent decades, these borders became the entry point for waves of refugees: first Iraqis, and from 2011 huge numbers of Syrians fleeing the civil war.
Here, near the city of Mafraq, the Zaatari refugee camp was set up in 2012. It came to house tens of thousands of Syrians and became one of the largest refugee camps in the world, almost a makeshift city in the desert. Jordan's east brings together two constants of the country's history: the weight of the desert tribes in building the state, and Jordan's role, time and again, as a place of refuge for people displaced by every conflict in the region.
Southern Jordan holds the symbol of the whole country: Petra, capital of the Nabataean kingdom, carved into the pink sandstone of a valley hidden among mountains. The Nabataeans, an Arab people who were originally nomads, settled here around the 4th century BC. Thanks to their mastery of water and of the caravan trade, they turned an inaccessible canyon into a city of tens of thousands of people.
You enter Petra through the Siq, a natural gorge more than a kilometre long with towering walls. It suddenly opens out in front of the façade of the Treasury (Al-Khazneh), carved straight into the rock with Hellenistic-style columns and pediments. But the Treasury is only the beginning. The valley hides hundreds of monumental tombs, a theatre cut into the stone, temples, a great High Place of Sacrifice on top of the mountain and the imposing Monastery (Ad-Deir), reached by climbing hundreds of steps.
After the Roman annexation in AD 106, Petra stayed inhabited for a while. But trade shifted to other routes and earthquakes, especially the one in 363, gradually emptied it. For centuries the West lost track of it, and only the local Bedouin knew it, until 1812, when the Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, disguised as a pilgrim, got himself guided there and revealed it to the world. Today it is a World Heritage Site and one of the 'New Seven Wonders of the World', and its image has more or less become Jordan's brand.
South of Petra lies Wadi Rum, the 'Valley of the Moon', a landscape of red sand with huge granite and sandstone massifs rising out of it. It is one of the most spectacular deserts in the world, and also a place rich in history. Its rock walls carry petroglyphs and inscriptions left by the peoples who lived here over thousands of years, the Nabataeans among them, and Bedouin tribes who keep up their traditional way of life still move across it.
Wadi Rum is forever linked to the Great Arab Revolt of the First World War. It was one of the operating bases of the Arab forces and their British adviser, T. E. Lawrence. From these deserts he planned the attacks on the Hejaz Railway and the daring capture of Aqaba in 1917. Lawrence described these landscapes in his book 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom', and a rock formation in the valley now bears his name.
Protected as a nature area and listed as a World Heritage Site for its cultural and scenic value, Wadi Rum is now one of the country's top tourist destinations. Visitors explore it by four-wheel drive or by camel and sleep in Bedouin camps under one of the starriest skies left in the world. Its otherworldly look has also made it the setting for many films set on Mars and on distant worlds.
At the country's southern tip, on the Red Sea, lies Aqaba, Jordan's only outlet to the sea: barely 27 kilometres of coastline squeezed into the corner where four countries meet (Jordan, Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia). Yet that tiny strip has been strategic since antiquity, because it links the interior with the sea routes of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
Aqaba has a long history. It was Ayla, the Edomite and Nabataean port, a trading centre in Roman and early Islamic times, and a stop for pilgrims. Its most famous moment in modern history came on 6 July 1917. The Arab forces of the Revolt, guided by Lawrence, took it by surprise by attacking from the desert inland instead of from the sea, where its guns were pointing. The fall of Aqaba gave the rebels and the British a key port for supplies as they pushed north.
Today Aqaba is Jordan's main commercial port and also a beach and diving resort. Its waters are warm all year round, and its coral reefs, rich in tropical fish, make it a diving destination. It has been declared a special economic zone to attract investment, and the city combines its logistics role (a large share of the country's trade comes in through here) with resorts facing the gulf that bears its name.
Running through southern Jordan from north to south is one of the oldest roads in the world: the King's Highway. This trade and pilgrimage route is already mentioned in the Bible, and for thousands of years it linked Syria with the Gulf of Aqaba and Arabia. Incense caravans, armies and pilgrims travelled along it, and cities, shrines and fortresses grew up along its course.
The most imposing monument on the route is Kerak Castle, a large Crusader fortress begun around 1142 on a spur overlooking the valley. It was one of the strongholds of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem east of the Jordan, the lordship of Oultrejourdain. From here its notorious lord, Raynald of Châtillon, raided Muslim caravans. His provocations helped spark Saladin's response, and after his victory at Hattin in 1187 Saladin eventually took the fortress. Today Karak still has a maze of vaulted halls, passageways and stone galleries that recall that clash of worlds.
Further south, the King's Highway passes close to another Crusader castle, Shobak (the old Montréal), and to countless historic sites, which makes this road a true journey through time. Travelling it, you come across biblical kingdoms, Nabataean cities, Byzantine mosaics and medieval fortresses within a few hours, all lined up along a route that geography laid out long before history did.
Southern Jordan is not just archaeology and desert. It is also home to the country's largest nature reserve, the Dana Biosphere Reserve. It drops from peaks over 1,500 metres high down to the lowlands near the Rift Valley, crossing several climate zones and a huge variety of landscapes. This diversity makes Dana a refuge for plant and animal species, some of them rare or endangered.
On the edge of the reserve, the stone village of Dana clings to the hillside. It is an Ottoman village of centuries-old houses that was almost abandoned and has partly recovered thanks to ecotourism. Jordan's Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature launched a model here that was the first of its kind in the country: protecting the environment while creating income and jobs for local communities through guesthouses, hiking and crafts.
Dana shows a different and more recent side of Jordanian history: the effort to conserve natural heritage in a country with scarce resources and a tough climate, and to make sustainable tourism a tool for development. Its trails link the cool heights with the canyons that run down towards the desert, and they let you explore on foot one of the most biodiverse areas in the whole Middle East.
Hardly anything that happened to Jordan happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
