Jordan historical timeline

Origins

The plaster statues found at ‘Ain Ghazal outside Amman are around nine thousand years old and among the earliest large representations of the human figure anywhere. The kingdoms of Ammon, Moab and Edom occupied the highlands in the Iron Age. Then the Nabataeans, an Arab people who grew rich controlling the incense route, carved Petra out of the sandstone from the fourth century BC and engineered a water supply for a desert city of perhaps twenty thousand people. Rome absorbed them in 106 AD, and Jerash, one of its provincial towns, is among the best-preserved Roman cities outside Italy.

Turning points

The Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in 1916 put the Hashemite family at the centre of the region’s politics, and in 1921 Britain made Abdullah emir of Transjordan. Independence came in 1946. The war of 1948 brought the West Bank under Jordanian control and the first large wave of Palestinian refugees; both the territory and the wave recurred in 1967. Confrontation between the state and Palestinian armed factions in 1970 is remembered as Black September. King Hussein ruled for forty-six years through all of it, signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, and was succeeded by his son Abdullah II in 1999. Wars in Iraq and then Syria sent further waves of refugees, and Jordan now hosts one of the largest refugee populations per head of population in the world.

Influential people

Aretas IV, under whom Petra reached its height. Abdullah I, the founding emir and king. King Hussein, whose survival through coups, wars and assassination attempts made him the fixed point of Jordanian politics. Queen Noor and Queen Rania, both unusually public figures internationally. And T. E. Lawrence, whose account of the desert campaign shaped how the outside world reads the country.

Cultural evolution

Bedouin custom still supplies the vocabulary of hospitality: a guest is owed food and protection, and the obligation is taken seriously rather than performed. Mansaf — lamb cooked in fermented dried yoghurt, served on rice and flatbread and eaten communally with the right hand — is the national dish and the centre of any occasion that matters. Tribal structures operate alongside the modern state rather than beneath it. And a large share of the population is of Palestinian origin, alongside long-settled Circassian and Chechen communities who arrived in the nineteenth century.

Present-day significance

Jordan is among the most water-scarce countries on earth, which constrains everything from agriculture to where people can live; the Dead Sea is dropping about a metre a year. It has stayed stable in a region that has not, which is its most valuable asset and the basis of substantial external support. Tourism at Petra, Wadi Rum and the Dead Sea matters disproportionately to the economy, and Aqaba is the country’s only port.