Jordan's history: a kingdom remade by every war west of its river

Who lived east of the Jordan before kingdoms

Hominid remains in Jordan go back at least 200,000 years, and a Natufian site in the north-eastern desert holds evidence of bread-making dated to about 14,500 years ago. Farming villages followed in the Neolithic. At 'Ain Ghazal, on the eastern edge of modern Amman, excavators found dozens of plaster human figures dating to 7250 BC or earlier. Tulaylat al-Ghassul in the Jordan Valley was a Chalcolithic village whose houses had painted plaster walls, and in the Bronze Age Wadi Feynan was a centre of copper extraction.

In the Iron Age, from about 1200 BC, three small kingdoms held the uplands: Ammon on the Amman plateau, Moab in the highlands east of the Dead Sea and Edom around Wadi Araba in the south. Archaeologists describe them as tribal kingdoms. Their wars with Israel and Judah across the river are recorded on the Mesha Stele, set up by a Moabite king in about 840 BC and found at Dhiban in 1868. It is now in the Louvre.

The Nabataeans, Arabs from south of Edom, founded an independent kingdom in 169 BC while the Ptolemies and the Seleucids fought over the region, and made Petra its capital. They taxed the caravan trade between Arabia and Syria. Pompey's legions arrived in 64 and 63 BC and grouped the Greek cities of the north, among them Philadelphia (Amman), Gerasa (Jerash) and Gadara (Umm Qais), into the league called the Decapolis. Trajan annexed Nabataea in AD 106 and made most of it the province of Arabia, with its capital first at Petra and later at Bosra in Syria. Christianity became lawful in 313, and churches went up across the province; Umm ar-Rasas alone has at least 16 Byzantine churches.

How the east bank fell to the margins

The Muslim armies that came north from the Hejaz were turned back at Mu'tah, in today's Karak Governorate, in 629, and won at the Yarmouk in 636. Under the Umayyad caliphs, who ruled from Damascus from 661 to 750, the desert east of Amman was close to the seat of power, and the caliphs built lodges and palaces there such as Qusayr Amra and Mshatta. When the Abbasids moved the capital to Baghdad, Britannica's account has Jordan becoming a backwater that slowly returned to a Bedouin way of life.

The Crusaders extended the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem across the river after 1099 and set up the lordship of Oultrejordain with its seat at Karak. Saladin defeated them at Hattin in 1187. His Ayyubid successors built the castle at Ajloun, and villages on the road from Syria to the Hejaz became stops for pilgrims bound for Mecca. The Mamluks, who ruled from 1260 to 1516, divided the land between the provinces of Karak and Damascus.

Ottoman forces took the region in 1516. For most of the next three centuries the Ottoman presence came down to an annual visit to collect tax, and Bedouin tribes moving in from Syria and the Hejaz, among them the Adwan, the Bani Sakhr and the Howeitat, divided the country between them. The Ottomans set about strengthening their presence once Egyptian rule over the Levant ended in 1841. Circassians fleeing Russia were settled around the abandoned site of Amman in 1867, revolts at Shobak in 1905 and Karak in 1910 were put down, and in 1908 the Hejaz Railway was finished from Damascus to Medina, running the length of the country.

How a Hashemite prince came to rule Transjordan

The Arab Revolt against the Ottomans began at Medina on 5 June 1916, led by Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons. Its forces cut the Hejaz Railway, took Aqaba in July 1917 and entered Damascus in October 1918, where Faisal set up an Arab government. France ended that government after the battle of Maysalun on 24 July 1920 but occupied only the north of Syria, and the land east of the Jordan was left without a ruler.

The British High Commissioner, Herbert Samuel, told some 600 notables at As-Salt on 21 August 1920 that Transjordan would be kept apart from Palestine. Abdullah arrived at Ma'an three months later with, by Britannica's count, 2,000 armed supporters, intending to raise the tribes against the French. By April 1921 Britain had decided to leave Abdullah where he was, and his brother Faisal was later given the throne of Iraq.

The arrangement was written into the mandate. The League of Nations confirmed the Palestine mandate in July 1922, and in September a memorandum excluded Transjordan from the clauses about a Jewish national home. Britain recognised Transjordan's independence under Abdullah on 25 May 1923, but a treaty and a constitution in 1928 left finance, defence and foreign affairs with a British resident. Abdullah relied on British money, and British officers trained his army, the Arab Legion, which was recruited largely from Bedouin. The emirate had about 225,000 people in 1922, almost half of them nomadic.

The Treaty of London of 22 March 1946 ended the mandate. On 25 May 1946, the day its parliament ratified the treaty, Transjordan became a kingdom with Abdullah as king, and 25 May is still kept as Independence Day.

What the Palestine war added to the kingdom

On 15 May 1948, the day after Israel declared independence and as British forces left Palestine, the Arab Legion under its British commander John Bagot Glubb crossed the river with the armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Britannica records that Abdullah had told Jewish envoys in secret beforehand that his aim was to take the area the United Nations partition plan of November 1947 had assigned to an Arab state. The Legion fought in the hill country now called the West Bank and drove Jewish forces from the Old City of Jerusalem.

The armistice of 3 April 1949 left about 5,400 square kilometres west of the river, East Jerusalem included, under Jordanian rule. In 1949 the country took the name Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. A conference of Palestinian notables at Jericho in December 1948 had voted for union, and on 24 April 1950 Jordan annexed the territory and gave its residents Jordanian citizenship. Britannica writes that almost half a million Palestinians joined half a million Transjordanians, many of them refugees.

Recognition was thin, and the sources differ on who gave it. Britannica names Britain and Pakistan; Wikipedia's history of Jordan names Britain, Iraq and Pakistan. The Arab League declared on 12 June 1950 that Jordan held the territory as a trustee pending a settlement.

Abdullah was shot dead at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on 20 July 1951 by a young Palestinian. His son Talal gave the country the constitution of 1952 and was declared unfit to rule by parliament in August that year. Talal's son Hussein was crowned on his eighteenth birthday, 2 May 1953.

How the population changed with each war

How Hussein kept the throne after losing Jerusalem

Hussein's first years were spent against Arab nationalism at home. Demonstrations kept him out of the Baghdad Pact in 1955. On 1 March 1956 he dismissed Glubb and the senior British officers, the Anglo-Jordanian treaty of 1946 was abrogated, and the last British troops left in 1957. After members of the National Guard, drawn mainly from the West Bank, attempted a coup in April 1957, he purged parliament, banned political parties and set up what Britannica calls a royal dictatorship. A federation with Hashemite Iraq, formed in February 1958, ended when his cousin Faisal II was killed in the Baghdad coup of 14 July 1958, and British paratroops stayed in Jordan until late that year. By the early 1960s the United States was paying about $100 million a year in aid. In 1965 a border exchange with Saudi Arabia lengthened the coast on the Gulf of Aqaba by about 18 kilometres.

In May 1967 Jordan signed a defence pact with Egypt and in June it entered the war. Within 48 hours Israel held everything west of the river, including East Jerusalem, Hebron, Nablus and Jericho. Britannica puts the loss at one third of Jordan's most fertile land. The refugee population of 700,000 counted in 1966 grew by about 300,000.

Palestinian fighters, the fedayeen, then based themselves in Jordan. On 21 March 1968 Israeli forces attacked their camp at Karameh; Jordanian troops and the fedayeen fought them for a day, and both sides claimed victory. By 1970 parts of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were calling for the monarchy's overthrow. On 6 September 1970 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine forced three airliners down at Dawson's Field in the desert and later blew them up. The army moved against the fedayeen in Amman and Irbid on 17 September, and a Syrian armoured force that crossed in the north withdrew on 22 September after Jordanian air and ground attacks. Hussein and the PLO chairman Yasser Arafat signed an agreement in Cairo on 27 September, but fighting resumed in 1971, and the last fedayeen surrendered near Ajloun in July 1971 and left for Lebanon. Arafat claimed 25,000 Palestinians had been killed; other estimates put the number at 2,000 to 3,400. The conflict is remembered as Black September.

Why Jordan let go of the West Bank

Jordan kept its front quiet in the October war of 1973 and sent a brigade to fight in Syria. At Rabat in October 1974 the Arab League named the PLO the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Hussein kept a claim alive through the 1980s, including a joint initiative with Arafat signed in February 1985 and repudiated a year later, until the first intifada broke out in the West Bank in December 1987.

After an emergency Arab League summit in June 1988 gave the PLO control of funds for the Palestinians, Hussein renounced Jordan's claims to the West Bank. Parliament, half of whose members represented the West Bank, was dissolved, salaries stopped for 21,000 West Bank civil servants, and West Bank passports were converted to two-year travel documents. When the Palestine National Council declared independence on 15 November 1988, Jordan recognised the new state at once.

The move came with an opening at home. Riots over price rises broke out in Ma'an and other towns in 1989, and in November that year Jordan held its first parliamentary election in 22 years. Opposition groups led by the Muslim Brotherhood won more seats than pro-government candidates, and martial law, in force since 1967, was fully lifted in July 1991. The Gulf crisis of 1990 cost Jordan dearly. Trade with Iraq had been worth two-fifths of the economy, Hussein leaned towards Baghdad, Kuwait's allies cut off aid and imposed an air and sea blockade, and between 200,000 and 300,000 people were expelled from Kuwait or fled to Jordan.

After the Madrid conference of 1991 Jordan negotiated directly with Israel. A declaration ending the state of war was signed in Washington on 25 July 1994, and the peace treaty followed at the Wadi Araba crossing on 26 October 1994. It fixed the border along the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers, the Dead Sea and Wadi Araba, called the line facing the West Bank an administrative boundary without prejudice to that territory's status, allotted Jordan 50 million cubic metres of water a year from Israel, and recorded Israel's recognition of Jordan's special role at the Muslim holy shrines of Jerusalem. The Knesset approved it 92 to 3.

What the kingdom has faced since the succession

Hussein died on 7 February 1999 after nearly fifty years on the throne, having named his eldest son heir in place of his brother Hassan, who had been crown prince. On 9 November 2005 bombers of al-Qaeda, then led in the region by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, struck the lobbies of three hotels in Amman, killing 60 people and injuring 115.

Protests over prices and corruption began in January 2011. A royal committee drafted constitutional amendments, passed in September 2011, that created a constitutional court and limited the state security court, and opposition groups said the changes did too little to limit the powers of the king and his appointees. At the same time the war in Syria sent refugees south; about 1.4 million Syrian refugees were living in Jordan in 2015. In 2016 proportional representation returned to parliamentary elections, and the Islamic Action Front stood again for the first time in over a decade.

Austerity under an International Monetary Fund programme brought the largest protests since 2011 in the spring of 2018, and the government withdrew an income tax bill. In April 2021 the king's half-brother Prince Hamzah, crown prince from 1999 to 2004, was placed under restriction amid accusations of a plot; two men close to the court were convicted of sedition that July. In the election of September 2024 the alliance led by the Islamic Action Front won nearly a quarter of the seats, which Britannica describes as the opposition's strongest showing since 1989. In April 2025 the government said it had foiled a plot involving rockets and drones, arrested 16 people it linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, and banned the Brotherhood days later.