Jordan

Jordan is a country in Southwest Asia.

Most of it is dry, rocky desert. It has old cities and a very salty sea. The capital city is called Amman.

Jordan is a country in Southwest Asia, on the northern edge of the Arabian Peninsula. More than four-fifths of it is desert, but in the west there are uplands and the deep valley of the Jordan River.

People have lived here for many thousands of years, and the land is full of ancient ruins, such as the rock-carved city of Petra. Jordan is a kingdom, ruled by a king, and has been independent since 1946. Its capital and biggest city is Amman. About 11.5 million people lived in Jordan in 2025, and nearly all of them speak Arabic.

Jordan is an Arab country of Southwest Asia in the rocky desert of the northern Arabian Peninsula, slightly smaller in area than Portugal. Britannica calls it a young state on an ancient land: part of the Ottoman Empire until 1918, then a British mandate, it has been an independent kingdom since 1946, and its official name is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

It has three physical regions from east to west: the desert, which covers more than four-fifths of the country; the uplands east of the Jordan River, averaging 600 to 900 m; and the Jordan Valley, part of the great East African Rift System. The World Bank put the population at 11,520,684 in 2025, and about 90 percent of people live in urban areas (2023). Arabic is the official language.

Petra is a very old city in the rocks.

People carved big buildings right into the pink stone. Amman is the capital. It is a big city with lots of lights at night.

Petra was the capital of the Nabataeans, a people who grew rich from trade more than 2,000 years ago. Its buildings are half built and half carved into red sandstone cliffs, and visitors reach it through a narrow, winding gorge called the Siq. Petra became a World Heritage Site in 1985.

Amman, the capital, is an ancient city too: in Roman times it was called Philadelphia. In the desert east of Amman stands Qusayr Amra, a small palace from the early 700s with painted walls. In the far south, Aqaba is Jordan's only port.

Petra, a World Heritage Site since 1985, was the rock-cut capital of the Nabataeans and, in Hellenistic and Roman times, a major caravan center for the incense of Arabia, the silks of China and the spices of India. UNESCO describes it as half-built, half-carved into the rock, entered from the east through the Siq, with an ingenious water system of channels, dams, cisterns and reservoirs that allowed settlement in an arid area. Its facades, such as the Khasneh (Treasury) and the Deir (Monastery), fuse Hellenistic architecture with Nabataean tradition.

Amman was the capital of the Ammonites in the 13th century BCE and later the Roman city of Philadelphia; today it is the largest city and a major commercial and cultural center. Quseir Amra, built in the early 8th century as a fortress and pleasure palace of the Umayyad caliphs, has frescoes whose domed zodiac is one of the earliest known surviving maps of the heavens on a dome. Al-Aqabah, on 26 km of Gulf of Aqaba coast, is the only port.

The Dead Sea is very, very salty.

It is lower than any other place on land. Most of Jordan is hot, dry desert. In winter, a little rain falls, and sometimes snow on the hills.

The Jordan River flows south into the Dead Sea, at the bottom of a deep valley. The shore of the Dead Sea is about 430 meters below sea level, the lowest natural point on Earth's surface.

Most of Jordan is desert. Rain falls only in the short, cool winters: about 400 millimeters a year in the northwest, but less than 100 in the south. In Wadi Rum, in the south, weathering and erosion have shaped sandstone into gorges, natural arches and tall cliffs. Hot, dusty winds called the khamsin often blow in from the Arabian Peninsula.

The Jordan Valley, the northwest end of the East African Rift System, drops to about 430 m below sea level at the Dead Sea, the lowest natural point on Earth's surface. The Jordan River, about 300 km long, drains the Sea of Galilee and the Yarmouk River into it; its lower soils are highly saline and the Dead Sea's shores are salt marsh without vegetation.

The climate runs from Mediterranean in the west to desert in the east and south. Rain falls in short, cool winters, from 400 mm a year in the northwest to under 100 mm in the south; monthly average temperatures range from 8 to 26 °C in Amman and 16 to 33 °C in Al-Aqabah. Hot, dusty khamsin winds from the southeast bring the most uncomfortable weather, and water shortages in the towns are a crucial problem. UNESCO describes Wadi Rum, 74,000 ha near the Saudi border, as sandstone landforms of narrow gorges, natural arches, towering cliffs and caverns shaped by uplift, faulting and erosion over millions of years.

Camels live in Jordan's desert.

Many herders keep camels, sheep and goats. Ibex live in the rocky gorges. Golden eagles live in Jordan too.

Jordan's wild animals include ibex and wild goats in rocky gorges, gazelles, foxes, jackals, hyenas, wolves and leopards. Birds include the golden eagle and vultures, and scorpions and many kinds of lizards live there too.

In the east, many Bedouin herders breed camels, while in the west they herd sheep and goats. In the higher uplands grow oaks, pines, pistachio trees and wild olives. Jordan's national flower is the black iris.

Britannica lists wild boars, ibex and a wild goat in the gorges and the Azraq oasis, along with hares, jackals, foxes, wildcats, hyenas, wolves, gazelles, blind mole rats, mongooses and leopards; birds include the golden eagle and vultures, and there are centipedes, scorpions and many lizards.

Vegetation falls into Mediterranean, steppe and desert types. Only a tiny portion of the land is forested, mostly in the rocky highlands, with Aleppo and kermes oaks, Aleppo pine, Palestinian pistachio and eastern strawberry trees, plus wild olives and Phoenician juniper where rain is lower; the government gives farmers free seedlings to reforest. In the desert, plants grow mainly in depressions and valleys after the winter rains. Eastern Bedouin are principally camel breeders, western Bedouin herd sheep and goats, and the national flower is the black iris (Iris nigricans).

About 11.5 million people live in Jordan.

Most people live in cities. Almost everyone speaks Arabic. People dance the dabkah at happy times.

About nine out of ten people in Jordan live in towns and cities, and the biggest are Amman, Zarqa and Irbid. Nearly everyone speaks Arabic. Most people are Arabs, and there are also smaller Circassian, Armenian and Chechen communities.

Many families came to Jordan as refugees, including Palestinians and, more recently, Syrians. Less than one in ten people today live as Bedouin herders in tents, but more than a third of Jordanians have Bedouin roots. On festive occasions, people dance the dabkah, stamping their feet to mark the rhythm. Football and basketball are the most popular team sports.

The great majority of people are Arabs, mainly Jordanians and Palestinians; most Jordanian citizens are of Palestinian origin, and Jordan is the only Arab country to grant wide-scale citizenship to Palestinian refugees. Large numbers arrived after the wars of 1948–49 and 1967, and later Iraqis and Syrians fled wars in their own countries. Smaller Circassian, Chechen, Armenian and Turkmen communities also live there. Nearly everyone speaks Arabic; Modern Standard Arabic is the written form, while the spoken dialects are Levantine. Nearly all people are Sunni Muslim, and Christians, mostly Greek Orthodox, make up most of the rest.

About nine-tenths live in towns; tent-dwelling Bedouin are under one-tenth, though more than a third of Jordanians trace their roots to Bedouin. More than a third of people are under 15. Traditional arts include embroidery, pottery and striped wool and goat-hair rugs; dabkah line dances mark festive occasions, and the sahjah is a well-known Bedouin dance.