Rabbath Ammon and the City of the Decapolis

The capital of Jordan sits on ground that has carried a city under three names. The Hebrew Bible calls it Rabbah, the royal seat of the Ammonites, and puts it at the centre of one of the darkest passages in the David narrative: Joab besieges the city, and Uriah the Hittite is placed where the fighting is heaviest so that he will not come home. The prophets return to Rabbah repeatedly when they turn to the nations around Israel, which is a measure of how substantial a neighbour it was rather than an incidental detail.

Under the Ptolemies the city was refounded as Philadelphia, after Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and it entered the Greek and then the Roman world as one of the cities of the Decapolis, the loose league of Hellenised towns east and south east of the Sea of Galilee, of which Philadelphia was the southernmost. The Roman theatre cut into the hillside still seats several thousand and is the largest structure surviving from that period in the city. On the citadel above it, the columns of a temple usually identified with Hercules stand a short walk from a domed Umayyad audience hall, so that two imperial religions of the site are visible from the same platform.

The Arabic name preserves the oldest of the three through the Greek and Roman centuries that displaced it, which is why the city can be found in a concordance under a name that appears on no modern map.