History · Jordan

Jordan: The Hashemite Kingdom

Nabataean Petra and Roman Jerash on an ancient caravan land — a country drawn by Britain in 1921, ruled by a dynasty from Mecca, and shaped ever since by war next door and the refugees it sends

By Worldlore Editorial · 19 September 2026

Tall weathered stone columns of a ruined ancient temple on a hilltop under a blue sky with white clouds
The columns of the Temple of Hercules on the Amman Citadel. Jordan is a young state on very old ground. (AliAbuRas / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0)

A new country on very old ground

Jordan is a mostly desert plateau east of the Jordan River, with about 11 million people, a short outlet to the Red Sea at Aqaba, and few natural resources — little water, no oil. The land is ancient, holding Nabataean Petra and the Roman cities of the Decapolis; the state is not. Jordan was drawn on a map by Britain in 1921 and given to a prince from Mecca, and its modern history has been dominated by the conflicts across its borders and the waves of refugees they have driven onto its territory.

A short history

  1. c. 4th century BCE

    The Nabataeans

    An Arab trading kingdom, with Petra as its capital.

  2. 106 CE

    Roman Arabia

    Rome annexes Nabataea; the Decapolis cities flourish.

  3. 1516–1917

    Ottoman rule

    A thinly populated corner of the province of Syria.

  4. 1916–1918

    The Arab Revolt

    Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons rise against the Ottomans.

  5. 1921

    Transjordan

    Britain installs Abdullah as emir, east of the Jordan.

  6. 1946

    Independence

    The Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan.

  7. 1948–1950

    The West Bank

    Jordan takes and annexes it; Palestinians become a majority.

  8. 1967

    The Six-Day War

    Jordan loses the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel.

  9. 1970–1971

    Black September

    The army expels the PLO after a brief civil war.

  10. 1994

    Peace with Israel

    The second Arab state to sign.

Caravans, Rome, and empire

The land east of the Jordan held biblical kingdoms — Ammon, Moab, Edom — and then the Nabataeans, whose caravan wealth built Petra. Rome annexed their kingdom in 106 CE, and cities like Jerash grew into showpieces of the Roman East.

An old black steam locomotive and a yellow diesel engine outside a stone engine shed beside railway tracks, with houses on the hillside behind
Locomotives at the Hejaz Railway station in Amman, photographed in 2016. The Ottoman-era line ran through what was then a small station town. (Bashar Tabbah / Wikimedia Commons)

Crusader castles at Kerak and Shobak, Umayyad desert palaces, and the King's Highway all crossed this land, but by the 19th century it was sparsely populated desert on the edge of the Ottoman Empire, with the Hejaz Railway running through a small station town called Amman.

The making of Jordan

In the First World War, Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons led the British-backed Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. After the war, Britain held the Mandate for Palestine, which included the land east of the river. In 1921 Britain installed Hussein's son Abdullah as Emir of Transjordan, administratively separate from Palestine and explicitly outside the Jewish-homeland provisions.

A formal portrait of King Abdullah I of Jordan in robes and headdress
Abdullah I, made Emir of Transjordan by Britain in 1921 and king on independence in 1946. He was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1951. (Wikimedia Commons)

Transjordan became independent in 1946. In the 1948 war its British-officered Arab Legion occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Jordan annexed in 1950, renaming itself simply Jordan — and roughly tripling its population with Palestinians, who became the majority.

King Hussein's long reign

Abdullah's grandson Hussein became king in 1953 at seventeen and ruled for 46 years, surviving repeated coup and assassination attempts. In the 1967 war Jordan lost the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel and took in another wave of Palestinian refugees. In 1970–71, after the PLO had built an armed state-within-a-state, Hussein's army crushed and expelled it — "Black September". He renounced Jordan's claim to the West Bank in 1988.

King Hussein and Yitzhak Rabin at a desk signing documents at the 1994 peace ceremony
King Hussein and Yitzhak Rabin signing the Israel–Jordan peace treaty, 1994 — the second between Israel and an Arab state. (Yaakov Saar / Government Press Office / Wikimedia Commons)

Jordan now

King Abdullah II, on the throne since 1999, has pursued economic liberalisation and kept Jordan a stable, pro-Western state through the 2011 Arab Spring, which brought protests but no uprising. The defining pressure has been refugees: hundreds of thousands of Iraqis after 2003, and some 1.3 million Syrians since 2011 — one of the highest refugee burdens per head in the world.

An aerial view of the vast grid of shelters and tents of the Zaatari refugee camp in the desert
The Zaatari camp for Syrian refugees in northern Jordan, at times among the country's largest population centres. Jordan depends heavily on foreign aid and remittances. (Planet Labs / Wikimedia Commons)

Water scarcity, public debt and youth unemployment are chronic, and Jordan's stability rests on a careful balance — between its Palestinian-majority population and the Hashemite state, and between its Western alliances and its volatile neighbourhood.

What Jordan carries

Jordan is a made country that has lasted. It has no oil, little water, an artificial border, and a population most of whom trace their roots to somewhere else — and yet, under one durable dynasty, it has stayed intact and comparatively calm while wars consumed almost every neighbour. Managing that fragility, war by war and refugee wave by refugee wave, is essentially what Jordanian statecraft has been.

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