Jordan

The Dead Sea shore, in Jordan’s part of the Rift Valley, is the lowest dry land on earth, and the water is so dense with salt that nobody sinks. South of it, Wadi Araba runs down to Aqaba and the Red Sea. East of the rift, limestone highlands carry olive groves and the pine woods of Ajloun; beyond them lies desert, ending in the sandstone mountains of Wadi Rum. Rain comes in winter.

Farmers at Ain Ghazal moulded plaster statues of people some nine thousand years ago. In the Iron Age the kingdoms of Ammon, Moab and Edom held the plateau. Nabataean traders grew rich on the incense routes and carved Petra into rose-red cliffs before Rome annexed their kingdom in AD 106. After the Arab Revolt of 1916, Britain set up the Emirate of Transjordan under Abdullah I in 1921; it became an independent kingdom in May 1946, and King Hussein reigned from 1952 to 1999.

Bedouin custom shapes hospitality: guests are poured bitter coffee spiced with cardamom, and a great tray of mansaf, lamb cooked in dried-yoghurt sauce and heaped on rice, marks weddings and feasts. Sunni Islam is the majority faith. Circassians who settled in the 1870s revived Amman from a field of ruins, and a church floor at Madaba holds a sixth-century mosaic map of the Holy Land. Potash, phosphate and Dead Sea cosmetics go abroad, while Petra draws visitors and Aqaba handles the sea trade.