ASIANOVERLAND.NET SYDNEY TO LONDON  DAY 288/127/39: AMMAN TO AQABA,  JORDAN

“26 October, 1980

En route, a loo stop …”

A brief word on loo stops, which are essential, but can take forever when the punters all need to queue up, the loos are filthy and usually have no toilet paper (use your left hand and keep your right hand for eating). On the deckers, we’d usually pull up at a quiet place and the punters would head for the bushes/trees. But on an overland, there are vast distances of desert, and no trees or bushes where the punters can get some privacy. So it’s:

“Gentlemen to the left and ladies to the right.”

The bus itself would then provide some privacy for the punters during their loo stops. Some drivers would delight in moving the bus midstream, leaving the punters doing their business in front of each other. On this particular drive through the desert in Jordan, I happened to pick this moment where a picture’s worth a thousand words……

Present day Jordan was historically controlled by the Assyrians, Nabateans, Persians, Greeks, Romans and the Ottoman Turks until WW1.

Assyria was a large geographical area within the Assyrian Empire from about 25th century BCE to the 7th century BCE. The Assyrian Empire collapsed following an invasion by a coalition of some of its former subject peoples, the Iranian Medes, Persians and Scythians in the late seventh century BCE. Assyria had fallen completely by 609 BCE. when it was overrun by the Persian Empire. It then formed part of the Persian  Achaemenid Empire from 539 to 330 BCE as a military protectorate state.

Assyria mostly incorporated what is now northern Iraq in the upper Tigris, the middle and upper Euphrates, parts of modern-day northwestern Iran, modern-day northeastern Syria, and part of southeast Anatolia (now Turkey). However, Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula, including Palestine (present day Jordan), were separate Achaemenid territories.

The Nabataeans were an ancient Arab people who inhabited northern Arabia and the southern Levant, and controlled much of present day Jordan, even including Damascus for part of the 1st century BCE. Their settlements—most prominently Raqmu (present-day Petra, Jordan)—gave the name Nabatene to the Arabian borderland that stretched from the Euphrates to the Red Sea.

The Nabataeans were one of many nomadic Bedouin tribes that roamed the Arabian Desert in search of pasture and water for their herds. They emerged as a distinct civilization and political entity between the second and fourth century BCE, with their kingdom centered around a loosely controlled trading network that brought considerable wealth and influence across the ancient world.

Described as fiercely independent by contemporary Greco-Roman accounts, the Nabataeans were annexed into the Roman Empire by Emperor Trajan in 106 CE. Nabataeans' individual culture, identified by their finely potted painted ceramics, was adopted into the larger Greco-Roman culture.

Aqaba was part of the Nabatean Empire at the most southern tip of Jordan on the Red Sea, and is Jordan’s only seaport.

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