ASIANOVERLAND.NET LONDON TO SYDNEY DAY 287: GOLAN HEIGHTS, SYRIA TO AMMAN, JORDAN

The Golan Heights weren’t on the Top Deck overland itinerary, but my Arabic is pretty average and we took a wrong turn out of Damascus. The mountain range looming before us was getting closer and I was worried that we seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were stopped by the Syrian army at a Golan Heights checkpoint. The Syrian army let us know in no uncertain terms that we were in a war zone and didn’t have permission to be there, so we chucked a left and headed to Amman, Jordan.

Settlement in Amman dates to the 8th millennium BC, in a site known as 'Ain Ghazal, where the world's oldest statues of the human form have been unearthed.

During the Iron Age, Amman was known as Rabat Aman and was the capital of the Ammonite Kingdom.

In the 3rd century BC, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, Pharaoh of Ptolemaic Egypt, rebuilt the city and renamed it "Philadelphia", making it a regional centre of Hellenistic culture.

Under Roman rule, Philadelphia was one of the ten Greco-Roman cities of the Decapolis before being directly ruled as part of the Arabia Petraea province.

The Rashidun Caliphate from the Byzantines conquered Amman in the 7th century AD, and renamed it Amman. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, Amman alternated between periods of devastation and abandonment and periods of relative prosperity as the centre of the Balqa region.

Amman was largely abandoned from the 15th century until 1878, when Ottoman authorities increased settlement  there.

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