page_title: Amman
section_title: Modern era
hierarchical_section_title: Amman / History / Modern era
caption_attribution_description: A neighborhood in Al Ashrafiyeh, in Amman Jordan.
context_page_description: Amman is the capital and largest city of Jordan and the country's economic, political and cultural centre. With a population of 4,007,526, Amman is the largest city in the Levant region and the fifth-largest city in the Arab world.
  The earliest evidence of settlement in Amman is in a Neolithic site known as 'Ain Ghazal, where some of the oldest human statues ever found dating to 7250 BC were uncovered. During the Iron Age, the city was known as Ammon, home to the Kingdom of the Ammonites. It was named Philadelphia during its Greek and Roman periods, and was finally called Amman during the Islamic period. For much of the early and middle Islamic periods, it served as a center for the Balqa district of Syria. Afterwards, Amman was a largely abandoned site until the late 19th century when Circassian immigrants were settled there by the Ottoman Empire in 1878. The first municipal council was established in 1909. Amman witnessed rapid growth after its designation as Transjordan's capital in 1921, and after several successive waves of refugees: Palestinians in 1948 and 1967; Iraqis in 1990 and 2003; and Syrians since 2011.
context_section_description: Amman began to be resettled in 1878, when hundreds of Circassians arrived following their exodus from the Caucasus; between 1872–1910, tens of thousands of Circassians had relocated to Ottoman Syria after being displaced by the Russian Empire during the events of the Russo-Circassian War. The Ottoman authorities directed the Circassian immigrants, who were mainly of peasant stock, to settle in Amman, and distributed arable land among them. Their settlement was a partial manifestation of the Ottoman statesman Kamil Pasha's project to establish a vilayet centered in Amman, which, along with other sites in its vicinity, would become Circassian-populated townships guaranteeing the security of the Damascus–Medina highway. The first Circassian settlers, who belonged to the Shapsug dialect group, lived near Amman's Roman theater and incorporated its stones into the houses they built. The English traveller Laurence Oliphant noted in his 1879 visit that most of the original Circassian settlers had left Amman by then, with about 150 remaining. They were joined by Circassians from the Kabardian and Abzakh groups in 1880–1892. 
  Until 1900 settlement was concentrated in the valley and slopes of the Amman stream and settlers built mud-brick houses with wooden roofs. The French Dominican priest Marie-Joseph Lagrange commented in 1890 about Amman: "A mosque, the ancient bridges, all that jumbled with the houses of the Circassians gives Amman a remarkable physiognomy". The new village became a nahiye (subdistrict) centre of the kaza of al-Salt in the Karak Sanjak established in 1894. By 1908 Amman contained 800 houses divided between three main quarters, Shapsug, Kabartai and Abzakh, each called after the Circassian groupings which respectively settled there, a number of mosques, open-air markets, shops, bakeries, mills, a textile factory, a post and telegraph office and a government compound (saraya). Kurdish settlers formed their own quarter called "al-Akrad" after them, while a number of townspeople from nearby al-Salt and al-Fuheis, seeking to avoid high taxes and conscription or attracted by financial incentives, and traders from Najd and Morocco, had also moved to the town.
  The British report from 1933 shows around 1,700 Circassians living in Amman. Yet the community was far from insulated. They formed alliances both with local urban and nomadic communities and regional grain merchants to cement their status in the newly established city. Amman's first municipal council was established in 1909, and Circassian Ismael Babouk was elected as its mayor. The city's demographics changed dramatically after the Ottoman government's decision to construct the Hejaz Railway, which linked Damascus and Medina, and facilitated the annual Hajj pilgrimage and trade. Because of its location along the railway, Amman was transformed from a small village into a major commercial hub in the region.
  
  The First and Second Battle of Amman were part of the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I and the Arab Revolt, taking place in 1918. Amman had a strategic location along the Hejaz Railway; its capture by British forces and the Hashemite Arab army facilitated the British advance towards Damascus. The second battle was won by the British, resulting in the establishment of the British Mandate.
  In 1921, the Hashemite emir and later king Abdullah I designated Amman instead of al-Salt to be the capital of the newly created state, the Emirate of Transjordan, which became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1950. Its function as the capital of the country attracted immigrants from different Levantine areas, particularly from al-Salt, a nearby city that had been the largest urban settlement east of the Jordan River at the time. The early settlers who came from Palestine were overwhelmingly from Nablus, from which many of al-Salt's inhabitants had originated. They were joined by other immigrants from Damascus. Amman later attracted people from the southern part of the country, particularly Al Karak and Madaba. The city's population was around 10,000 in the 1930s.
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caption: A neighbourhood in Al Ashrafiya in 1997
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