A Museum of Royal Cars, King Abdullah I Mosque, The Citadel and The Roman Theatre
Arriving in Amman
06/11/2019
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| Jordan |
We touched down in Jordan on time at 11 pm, made our way through the formalities and met K, who would be our driver for the next week. Queen Alia Airport is 30km south of Amman so it was well after midnight before we checked into our hotel east of the city centre.
07/11/2019
Fortunately, we like a middle eastern breakfast - ful, boiled egg, fermented cheese and a sprinkle of chilli – as there was little else apart from toast and jam.
The Royal Automobile Museum, Amman
K arrived on time at 9.30 and drove us east down Zahran Street, one of Amman’s main thoroughfares…
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| Zahran Street, Amman |
…towards the edge of the city and then north towards the Al Hussein Public Park, where there is a sports stadium, a mosque and the Royal Automobile Museum.
Amman is built on a series of hills – somebody will always claim seven – at a height of 700-850m so moving about always involves going up or down.
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| Towards the Royal Automobile Museum, Amman |
Amman, with a population of 4m, is the capital and largest city of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The Emirate of Jordan emerged as a British Protectorate from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. The British Mandate ended in 1946 and Abdullah bin Al-Hussein of the Hashemite Dynasty became the first king of an independent Jordan. Abdullah was assassinated in 1951, his son Talil was briefly king but abdicated due to serious health problems and Abdullah’s grandson Hussein became king at the age of 17. After a brief regency, King Hussein ruled from 1953 until his death from cancer in 1999 and was succeeded by his son, King Abdullah II. For over 60 years father and son have maintained Jordan as a beacon of peace and stability in a fractious corner of the world.
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| Amman is in north west Jordan. Thanks to Lonely Planet for the loan of the map |
We arrived a little before the museum opened and amused ourselves by looking at King Hussein’s private plane.
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| Lynne and King Hussein's plane, Royal Automobile Museum, Amman |
King Hussein was a qualified pilot and a car enthusiast, hence the picture above and the museum we were about to enter.
In the early years Cadillac took its cars on a year-long trip following the caravan routes from Lebanon to Iraq. Unsurprisingly Cadillac become the car of choice for Middle Eastern rulers.
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| 1915 Type 53 Cadillac, Royal Automobile Museum, Amman |
Despite his forebear's early American aberration, King Hussein had Rolls Royces, quite a lot of them. He had two Phantom Vs, this one was a present from the Emir of Kuwait.
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| 1961 Rolls Royce Phantom V, Royal Automobile Museum, Amman |
Only 17 1952/3 Phantom IVs with Hooper coachwork were made. They were owned almost exclusively by Heads of State; the British Royal family had one, as did the Aga Khan and the Royal families of Kuwait and Iraq. So did General Franco, but let’s keep quiet about that.
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| 1953 Rolls Royce Phantom IV with Hooper, Royal Automobile Musuem, Amman |
Far smaller, far less a projection of brute power, but far more elegant is the 1968 Silver Shadow. This one was for the personal uses of Queen Alia, King Hussein’s third wife (he had four wives, but in series rather than in parallel, polygamy is legal in Jordan but little practised).
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| 1968 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, Royal Automobile Musuem, Amman |
In 1915 Rolls Royce recalled many Silver Ghosts and refitted them with armoured bodies. Some took part in the Arab revolt, though not this one as it is a replica.
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| 1915 Armoured Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, Royal Automobile Museum, Amman |
Enough Rollers, King Hussein was also a biker and here is his Harley Davidson, one of only 2,000 30th anniversary Ultra Glide Classics made.
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| 30th Anniversary Ultra Glide Classic, Royal Automobile Museum, Amman |
Although neither of us are particularly interested in cars we found this museum unexpectedly fascinating.
King Abdullah I Mosque, Amman
K drove us back largely the way we had come, but this time we approached the centre along Suliman El Nabulsi Street. Luckily a parking space appeared almost outside the King Abdullah I mosque.
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| Suliman El Nabulsi Street, Amman |
Amman is hilly, and the mosque, built between 1982 and 1989, is on a platform surrounded by a wall several metres above street level, so it cannot easily be photographed from outside. Once inside you are too close, but I did my best. A blue-domed circular prayer hall accommodating 3,000 worshippers sits in the centre of a courtyard, with minarets at its four corners.
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| King Abdullah I Mosque, Amman |
Offices, a small museum and the extensive shop are outside the courtyard. It is the only mosque in Amman to ‘overtly welcome non-Muslims’ (Lonely Planet) but before entering Lynne had to be properly kitted up. The gown is provided free but she wore her own headscarf, tied by the mosque attendant.
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| Lynne properly dressed for the mosque, Amman |
The interior of the prayer hall is a huge, calm space with subdued lighting….
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| Inside the prayer hall, King Abdullah I Mosque, Amman |
…and the underside of the dome, if not quite as breath-taking as the Sultan Qaboos mosque in Muscat, is impressive.
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| The dome, King Abdullah I Mosque, Amman |
We had been warned we might need to hurry as prayer time was approaching. The days when the muezzin climbed the minaret to give the call to prayer are long gone, and I had assumed that his job now is just to flick a switch and start a recording. Maybe in some places it is, but not here. The dark-robed man standing with his back to us between mihrab and minbar had a microphone in his hand and was singing the call to prayer live.
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| The call to prayer live, King Abdullah I Mosque, Amman |
We were ready to go as the faithful flocked in, but they didn’t. Only three answered the call; at 11.20 on a working day few can make it to the mosque but many will find a quiet corner to pray.
Jordan is a Muslim country, but the constitution guarantees freedom of religion. 4% of Jordanians are Christians; the Coptic Patriarchate and Greek Orthodox Cathedral are just over the road.
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| Coptic, nearer the camera, and Greek Orthodox churches, Amman |
Back among the gifts, Lynne returned her robe and we were given a cup of tea before making a determined effort to buy the shop; once out of Amman opportunities to make purchases would be rare.
The Amman Citadel
Not far away, the Citadel sits atop Amman’s highest hill (850m). Getting out of the car we immediately noticed the flag on the opposite hillside. ‘Biggest flag in the world,’ K said proudly. More precisely it is the 126.8m flagpole in the grounds of the Raghadan Palace that was the tallest in the world when erected in 2003. A spate of competitive flagpole erecting across the Arab world (compensating for something, gentlemen?) means it now ranks only 7th. Jeddah’s 170m flagpole is currently number 1. The 60m-by-30m flag, though enormous is not among the world’s biggest.
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| The Raghadan Palace Flag |
Occupied since the Bronze Age, the citadel is surrounded by a 1.7km wall built, moved and rebuilt many times over the centuries.
Amman claims to be among the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities, but the oldest artefacts come not from the citadel but from what is now the northern suburb of Ain Gahzl. A two-headed plaster and bitumen bust in the citadel museum dates from around 6,500 BCE, in the late stone age and before the development of pottery.
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| Two-headed stone age plaster and bitumen bust, Amman citadel musuem |
The area was rich in copper, so when some bright spark realised you could make a harder more useful metal by mixing copper with tin, the citadel’s inhabitants were well placed to move into the bronze age.
The built themselves tombs by modifying naturally caves…
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| Early bronze age rock tomb (ca 2,250 BCE) near the Temple of Hercules, Amman citadel. There is nothing to see inside |
…and made elegant and practical pottery.
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| Middle Bronze age pottery, Amman Citadel Museum |
The use of iron started around 1200 BCE when the area we now call Jordan was occupied by three kingdoms, Edom in the south, Moab in the middle and Ammon in the north. Ammon’s chief city was Rabbath-Ammon, modern Amman.
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| Strange anthropoid pottery coffins from the early iron age, Amman Citadel Museum |
By allying with other smaller states and paying tribute to more powerful neighbours like the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians, Ammon survived for several centuries through the proto-historic period and into history itself. Then a game-changer arrived from Greece.
Alexander the Great breezed through in 333 BCE, conquering everything in sight, then breezed off to conquer more, leaving others to do the ruling. After Alexander’s death in 323, these 'others' fought for supremacy and Rabbath-Ammon became part of the Egyptian Kingdom of former Macedonian general Ptolemy I Soter. His son Ptolemy II Philadelphus (ruled 308-246) rebuilt the city, renaming it Philadelphia after himself. Americans like to think their Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love, but Ptolemy’s Philadelphus meant lover of his sister, whom he married in 273. This accorded with ancient Egyptian principles, but shocked the Macedonians. The marriage may well have never been consummated, though that was not true of the brother-sister marriages of later Ptolemies.
Macedonian kings ruled North Africa and Asia from Egypt and Central Turkey in the west to India in the east, but in time came under pressure from the Parthians on one side and the Romans on the other.
Little of Greek origin remains above ground in Philadelphia which became a Roman City in 63 BCE.
The citadel’s most impressive ruin is the Roman Temple of Hercules, built 162 -166 CE.
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| Temple of Hercules, Amman citadel |
The temple, which was probably never finished, is believed to be dedicated to Hercules only because some fingers and an elbow from a giant marble statue, assumed to be Hercules, lie at the rear.
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| Remains of a statue that might have been of Hercules, Amman Citadel |
The Roman Empire fractured into Eastern and Western halves in 395 CE. The Western Empire fell in 476 when ‘barbarians’ overran Rome but the Eastern Empire continued for another 1,000 years, until the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453. The emperors considered themselves Roman Emperors and the people called themselves Romans citizens, despite the capital being Constantinople (previously Byzantium) and common language Greek. The word ‘Byzantine’ to describe the Eastern Roman Empire was coined only in 1557 by German historian Hieronymus Wolf, but the term has stuck.
The citadel’s Byzantine church was built in the 5th or 6th century.
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| Byzantine Church, Amman Citadel |
After the death of The Prophet in 632 CE the Rashidun Caliphate expanded Islam throughout Arabia, relieving the Byzantine Empire of its possessions in Asia and north Africa, and turning Philadelphia into Amman. With the Sunni-Shia split in 661, the Rashidun Caliphate morphed into the Umayyad Caliphate which further expanded the reach of Islam.
Amman’s Umayyad Palace is entered through a monumental gateway.
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| Gateway to Umayyad Palace, Amman Citadel |
After archeological debate as to the nature (or existence) of a domed roof, a consensus of sorts was reached and a modern dome constructed to something like the original design.
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| Dome of gateway to the Umayyad Palace, Amman Citadel |
Beyond the gateway, columns lined the avenue to the palace…
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| Avenue to the Umayyad Palace, Amman Citadel |
…though little remains of the palace itself.
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| Umayyad Palace, Amman Citadel |
In 750 the Umayyads gave way to the Abbasid Empire. The Abbasids survived until 1258, though they had to tolerate many powerful local rulers, among them the Ayyubids, the dynasty created by Salah Ad-Din (Saladin) which thrived from 1171 to 1260.
The most recent major building in the citadel (modern constructions apart) is an Ayyubid Watchtower on the southern edge. The watchtower is small and simple as the city's importance had greatly diminished.
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| Ayyubid Watchtower, Amman Citadel |
Amman became a minor settlement and later may have been completely deserted. It is in these relatively recent centuries that its claim to be among the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities may founder. Amman was refounded in 1878 by the Ottoman Empire as a home for Circassian Refugees pushed south from the Caucasus by the expansion of Tsarist Russia. By 1890 the population of the new city was only 1,000, so modern Amman is largely a 20th century construct.
Being a city of incomers, Amman has yet to develop its own dialect, but all Jordians speak variants of Levantine Arabic. Amman is written عمان, last year we visited the Kingdom of Oman in southern Arabia which is also written عمان. The slight, though real, difference in the initial vowel sound reflected in the Latin transliteration comes from the difference between Levantine and Omani Arabic.
The Roman Theatre
Downtown Amman and its 6,000 seat Roman theatre built when Antonius Pius was emperor (138-161 CE) can be seen from the citadel.
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| Looking down on the Roman theatre from the Amman Citadel |
Downtown is literally ‘down’ but whether it is a downtown district in the American sense is more problematic; it is difficult to pick any area in Amman and say confidently ‘here is the city centre’.
Until recently we would have walked into this theatre, looked up at the tiers of seats and immediately climbed to the top. Being a little older and with nothing to prove we only climbed to the top of the lower third.
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| Amman Roman theatre from the top of the lower tier of seating |
Clambering back down, I discovered I still get a buzz from walking onto a stage, even when nobody is looking at me.
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| Amman Roman Theatre from the stage. Lynne is still at the top of the lower tier |
There were two small museums in the wings and a couple of exhibits caught my eye.
The niello bracelets attracted me because I have previously encountered ‘niello’ in crosswords but nowhere else. It is a black mixture of sulphur, silver, copper or lead, used as an inlay on engraved or etched silver. Made locally in the 1920s by Circassian and Armenian silversmiths niello bracelets were mainly worn by Bedouin women.
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| Niello bracelets, Amman Roman theatre |
I also liked the collection of 6th century Christian mosaics. The one below, from a church in Jerash 50km north of Amman, contrasts a caged and a free partridge. In Byzantine symbolism a caged bird represents the soul imprisoned in the human body.
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| Byzantine mosaic, Amman Roamn theatre |
As soon as we were back in the car I regretted not climbing to the top. ‘Next time,’ I said, ‘we will. Definitely.’
Lunch in Amman
K drove us the short distance up to Rainbow Street, Amman’s main café and dining street and to the restaurant where he was determined we would have lunch, even though it was 3 pm. We were unsure if it was what we wanted, but decided to go with the flow.
We ordered mezzes, but failed to realise that all four dishes were deep fried – or maybe they were all like that. The little parcels of cheese were OK, the bulgur wheat balls were dull, the shards of spicy sausage were overcooked and the falafel, Jordan’s signature dish (or maybe that’s hummus?) had been rolled in sesame seeds before frying and tasted suspiciously of burnt sesame. Our first lunch in Jordan was not a success.
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| Mezzes, Amman |
The Jerash Incident
It was nearly 4 before we left the restaurant and then the ten-minute drive back to our hotel took well over an hour. Amman seemed gridlocked in all directions, we would have got out and walked but K twisted and turned so much to avoid the jam, including at least one trip the wrong up a one-way street, that we completely lost our bearings.
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| There's nothing very special about a Jordanian traffic jam! |
Finally reaching the hotel we looked on-line for the cause of the problem. We failed, but instead found a report of eight people, including four tourists being stabbed (fortunately none fatally) in Jerash by a disgruntled Palestinian refugee. We were due to visit Jerash tomorrow. An email popped up from our British travel agents informing us of the incident and adding If you… would like to make any change to your programme,.. please discuss… with your guide… I am sure they will… accommodate any changes you wish to make. Immediately after such an incident Jerash would surely be the safest place in the Middle East, so there seemed no reason to panic – we would see what K said tomorrow.
Snacks in the Bar
After our deep-fried lunch we chose to spend the evening in the hotel bar with salads and a drink. Alcohol is legal in Jordan, if not always easy to find, and the few majority Christian towns in the north are home to an Amstel brewery, the Carakale Microbrewery, several arak distilleries and Jordan’s two wineries. Jordan is expensive and that applies doubly to alcohol. A half-litre of draught beer was 5.50JD (1 Jordanian Dinar = GB£1.10) plus 10% service and 16% sales tax (in large print in the menu) taking it over £7.50.
For the same price we had an arak each – very like Turkish raki and similar to Greek ouzo – good sized measures diluted with the three time the volume of water. The bar was lively, mostly people from the neighbourhood, many arriving in couples and foursomes, the women without headscarves – presumably Christians and also wealthy, no one else could afford to drink there. We enjoyed our salads and a second raki; a good evening but hardly one of great extravagance. It cost nigh on £50.
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