The history of Jordan refers to the history of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the background period of the Emirate of Transjordan under the British Mandate as well as the general history of the region of Transjordan.
There is evidence of human activity in Transjordan as early as the Paleolithic period. The area was settled by nomadic tribes in the Bronze Age, which consolidated in small kingdoms during the Iron Age. In the classic period, Transjordan came under Greek and later Roman influence. Under the Romans and the Byzantines, Transjordan was home to the Decapolis in the north, with much of the region being designated as Byzantine Arabia. Classical kingdoms located in the region of Transjordan, such as the Roman-era Nabatean kingdom, which had its capital at Petra, left dramatic ruins popular today with tourists and filmmakers. The history of Transjordan continued with the Muslim empires starting in the 7th century, partial crusader control in the mid-Middle Ages (country of Oultrejordain) and finally, Mamluk rule from the 13th century and Ottoman rule between the 16th century and the First World War.
With the Great Arab Revolt in 1916 and the consequent British invasion, the area came under the Anglo-Arab ruled Occupied Enemy Territory Administration in 1917,Bennett, Richard Allen. The Anglo-Egyptian Sudanese Influence in the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, South, 1917-1920. 1992, www.proquest.com/openview/399fa319c4a5eda3ad815c378d574c3d/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y. Accessed 27 May 2026. which was declared as the Arab Kingdom of Syria in 1920. Following the French occupation of only the northern part of the Syrian Kingdom, Transjordan was left in a period of interregnum. A few months later, Abdullah, the second son of Sharif Hussein, arrived in Transjordan. With the Transjordan memorandum to the Mandate for Palestine in the early 1920s, it became the Emirate of Transjordan under the Hashemite Emir. In 1946, independent Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan was formed and admitted to the United Nations in 1955 and the Arab League. In 1948, Jordan fought with the newly born state of Israel over lands of former Mandatory Palestine, effectively gaining control of the West Bank and annexing it with its Palestinian population. Jordan lost the West Bank in the 1967 War with Israel, and since became the central base of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in its struggle against Israel. The alliance between the PLO and the Jordanians, active during the War of Attrition, came to an end in the bloody Black September in Jordan in 1970, when a civil war between Jordanians and Palestinians (with Syrian Ba'athist support) took thousands of lives. In the aftermath, the defeated PLO was forced out of Jordan together with tens of thousands of its fighters and their Palestinian families, relocating to South Lebanon.
Stone Age
Evidence of human activity in Jordan dates back to the Paleolithic period. While there is no architectural evidence from this era, archaeologists have found tools, such as flint and basalt hand-axes, knives and scraping implements.
In the Neolithic period (8500–4500 BC) three major shifts occurred. First, people became sedentary, living in small villages, and discovering and domesticating new food sources such as cereal grains, peas and lentils, as well as goats. The human population increased to tens of thousands.
Second, this shift in settlement pattern appears to have been catalyzed by a marked change in climate. The eastern desert, in particular, grew warmer and drier, eventually to the point where it became uninhabitable for most of the year. This watershed climate change is believed to have occurred between 6500 and 5500 BC.Horwitz, Liora Kolska, and Eitan Tchernov. “CLIMATIC CHANGE and FAUNAL DIVERSITY in EPIPALAEOLITHIC and EARLY NEOLITHIC SITES from the LOWER JORDAN VALLEY.” 2000.
Third, beginning sometime between 5500 and 4500 BC, the inhabitants began to make pottery from clay rather than plaster. Pottery-making technologies were probably introduced to the area by craftsmen from Mesopotamia.
The largest Neolithic site in Jordan is at Ayn Ghazal in Amman. The many buildings were divided into three distinct districts. Houses were rectangular and had several rooms, some with plastered floors. Archaeologists have unearthed skulls covered with plaster and with bitumen in the eye sockets at sites throughout Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Syria. A statue discovered at Ayn Ghazal is thought to be 8,000 years old. Just over one meter high, it depicts a woman with huge eyes, skinny arms, knobby knees and a detailed rendering of her toes.
Chalcolithic
During the Chalcolithic period (4500–3200 BC), copper began to be smelted and used to make axes, arrowheads and hooks. The cultivation of barley, dates, olives and lentils, and the domestication of sheep and goats, rather than hunting, predominated. The lifestyle in the desert was probably very similar to that of modern Bedouins.
Tuleitat Ghassul is a large Chalcolithic era village located in the Jordan Valley. The walls of its houses were made of sun-dried mud bricks; its roofs of wood, reeds and mud. Some had stone foundations, and many had large central courtyards. The walls are often painted with bright images of masked men, stars, and geometric motifs, which may have been connected to religious beliefs.
Bronze Age
Many of the villages built during the Early Bronze Age (3200–1950 BC) included simple water infrastructures, as well as defensive fortifications probably designed to protect against raids by neighboring nomadic tribes.
At Bab al-Dhra in Wadi `Araba, archaeologists discovered more than 20,000 shaft tombs with multiple chambers as well as houses of mud-brick containing human bones, pots, jewelry and weapons. Hundreds of dolmens scattered throughout the mountains have been dated to the late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages.Scheltema, H.G. (2008). Megalithic Jordan; an introduction and field guide. Amman, Jordan: The American Center of Oriental Research.
Although writing was developed before 3000 BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was not widely used in Jordan, Canaan and Syria until some thousand years later, even though archaeological evidence indicates that the inhabitants of Transjordan were trading with Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Between 2300 and 1950 BC, many of the large, fortified hilltop towns were abandoned in favor of either small, unfortified villages or a pastoral lifestyle. There is no consensus on what caused this shift, though it is thought to have been a combination of climatic and political changes that brought an end to the city-state network.
During the Middle Bronze Age (1950–1550 BC), migration across the Middle East increased. Trading continued to develop between Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Canaan including Transjordan, resulting in the spread of technology and other hallmarks of civilization. Bronze, forged from copper and tin, enabled the production of more durable axes, knives, and other tools and weapons. Large, distinct communities seem to have arisen in northern and central Jordan, while the south was populated by a nomadic, Bedouin-type of people known as the Shasu.
New fortifications appeared at sites like Amman's Citadel, Irbid, and Tabaqat Fahl (or Pella). Towns were surrounded by ramparts made of earth embankments, and the slopes were covered in hard plaster, making the climb slippery and difficult. Pella was enclosed by massive walls and watch towers.
Archaeologists usually date the end of the Middle Bronze Age to about 1550 BC, when the Hyksos were driven out of Egypt during the 17th and 18th Dynasties. A number of Middle Bronze Age towns in Canaan including Transjordan were destroyed during this time.
Iron Age
During the Iron Age (1200–332 BC), Transjordan was home to the Kingdoms of Ammon, Edom and Moab. The peoples of these kingdoms spoke Semitic languages of the Canaanite group; their polities are considered to be tribal kingdoms rather than states. Ammon was located in the Amman plateau, and its capital was Rabbath Ammon; Moab was located in the highlands east of the Dead Sea with the capital at Kir of Moab (Kerak); and Edom in the area around Wadi Araba in the south, with the capital at Bozrah. The northwestern region of the Transjordan, known then as Gilead, was inhabited by the Israelites. According to the Bible, the Transjordan was home to the Israelite tribes of Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh.
The Transjordanian kingdoms of Ammon, Edom and Moab continually clashed with the neighboring Hebrew kingdoms of Israel and Judah, centered west of the Jordan River. One record of this is the Mesha Stele, erected by the Moabite king Mesha in 840 BC; on it he lauds himself for the building projects that he initiated in Moab and commemorates his glory and victory against the Israelites. The stele, found in Dhiban in 1868, constitutes one of the most important archeological parallels of accounts recorded in the Bible.
At the same time, Israel and the Kingdom of Aram-Damascus competed for control of the Gilead. Around 720 BC Israel and Aram Damascus were conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Meanwhile, the kingdoms of Ammon, Edom and Moab benefited from trade between Syria and Arabia. In 701 BC, they submitted to the Assyrians to avoid retribution. Babylonians took over the Assyrians' empire after its disintegration in 627 BC. Although the kingdoms supported the Babylonians against Judah in the 597 BC sack of Jerusalem, they rebelled against Babylon a decade later. The kingdoms were reduced to vassals, a status they retained under the Persian and Hellenic Empires.
Classical period Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian Empire in 332 BC introduced Hellenistic culture to the Middle East. Little is known about Greek/Macedonian control over the Levantine coast (southern Syria, Lebanon, Palestine) and Transjordan until 301 BCE, when the Ptolemies took control over this area. After Alexander's death in 323 BC, the empire split among his generals, and in the end much of Transjordan was disputed between the Ptolemies based in Egypt and the Seleucids based in Syria. By the late Hellenistic period, the area had a mixed population of Jews, Greeks, Nabataeans, other Arabs, and descendants of Ammonites. One of the best surviving structures from that period is Qasr al-Abd, a Hellenistic palace built by the Jewish Tobiad family, close to the village of Iraq al-Amir.The Nabataeans, nomadic Arabs based south of Edom, managed to establish an independent kingdom in the southern parts of Jordan in 169 BC by exploiting the struggle between the two Greek powers. The Jewish Hasmonean Kingdom also took advantage of the growing geopolitical vacuum, seizing the area east of the Jordan River valley. The Nabataean Kingdom gradually expanded to control much of the trade routes of the region, and it stretched south along the Red Sea coast into the Hejaz desert, up to as far north as Damascus, which it controlled for a short period (85–71) BC. The Nabataeans massed a fortune from their control of the trade routes, often drawing the envy of their neighbours. They also had monopolistic control over the Dead Sea. Petra, Nabataea's barren capital, flourished in the 1st century AD, driven by its extensive water irrigation systems and agriculture. The Nabataeans were also talented stone carvers, building their most elaborate structure, Al-Khazneh, in the first century AD. It is believed to be the mausoleum of the Arab Nabataean King Aretas IV.