An ancient city, Amman traces its earliest roots back over five millennia. Although a settlement existed on
Jebel al-Qala'a, the Citadel Hill since about 3500 BC, it was not until two millennia later that a great city emerged on the site as the capital of the Ammonite kingdom founded by the Semitic tribe
beni Ammon. They named their capital city
Rabbat Ammon, which means "house of Ammon". The Ammonite apogee came to end at the hands of the Babylonians in 585 BC sending their city into a period of decline which lasted until after the arrival of Alexander the Great. One of his successors, Ptolemy Philadelphus rebuilt the city in the 3rd century BC and renamed it
Philadelphia, after his own name. While changing hands from Ptolemies to Seleucids to Nabateans, Philadelphia resurged as the southernmost city in the
Decapolis, the ten regional thriving cities encompassing
Damascus and Gerasa. The Romans conquered the city in 30 BC and constructed the many grand
Roman monuments surviving to this day. Philadelphia's importance continued into the Byzantine period, when it briefly became the seat of Christian bishops, and lasted until the destructive Persian invasion in the 7th century AD. The Omayyads then displaced the Byzantines and the Persians, restored the city's Semitic name, albeit modified as
Amman, and gave it another brief revival, but it all came to an end with the great earthquake of 749 AD.
After nature annihilated the ancient city,
Philadelphia and Amman went into oblivion for centuries. It remained a mere settlement of 2000 people through the early 19th century. In 1878, greater life began to return when the fertile valleys between the seven hills of Amman were settled by Circassian emigrants escaping the Russian expansion into the Caucasus region. A few decades later, Amman was put back on the map when the Ottomans made it a stop along the new Hejaz Railway linking
Constantinople with
Medina. Soon afterwards, the re-born city became the capital of a new state the Trans-Jordan, carved by the British out of the Ottoman Empire. Nowadays, Amman is a large sprawling city of 2 million inhabitants made up of Jordanians, Circassians, Palestinians and more recently also Iraqis.