Jordan's white city on seven hills — the best mansaf in the Levant, the busiest hummus street on earth, Roman theatre ruins in the city centre, and the friendliest capital in the Arab world
Amman is the capital of Jordan — a rapidly expanding city of 4 million built across seven (now nineteen) hills, with a downtown of 1940s–50s limestone apartment buildings, a Roman theatre in the valley, and an expanding modern city of malls, restaurants, and boutique hotels climbing every hillside. It is one of the safest and most welcoming capital cities in the Arab world — Jordan's stability and the warmth of its Jordanian-Palestinian population make Amman a city that visitors frequently extend their stays in without meaning to. The food culture is the most compelling reason: mansaf (the na…
Amman (the ancient Rabbath-Ammon) was the capital of the Ammonites in the Iron Age — the city besieged by King David in the Biblical account. It was subsequently Hellenised as Philadelphia by Ptolemy II in the 3rd century BCE and became one of the ten cities of the Decapolis under Rome. The Roman Philadelphia built the theatre (6,000 seats, 2nd century CE), the nymphaeum, and the odeon that survive in the downtown valley. The city was abandoned in the Byzantine period and only reoccupied when the Ottoman government settled Circassian refugees here in 1878 — the modern city's population is des…