Amman stacks 9,000 years on seven hills: Ammonite Rabbath Ammon, Hellenistic Philadelphia, Roman colonnades, Umayyad palaces and an Ottoman village that became a Hashemite capital in 1921. Three days follow that sequence hill by hill.
Occupied since the Neolithic, the Citadel holds Ammonite Iron Age walls, the Roman Temple of Hercules (161–166 AD) with its 13m columns and a giant marble hand, plus Byzantine church remains. Open 08:00–19:00 summer, to 16:00 winter.
The 8th-century governor's complex on the Citadel's northern terrace, built around a cruciform audience hall with a reconstructed wooden dome, a colonnaded street, cistern and mosque — the best-preserved Umayyad civil architecture in Jordan.
Built in 1951 inside the Citadel walls, it runs chronologically from 9,000-year-old Ain Ghazal plaster statues — among the oldest human statues ever made — through Ammonite royal sculpture, Nabataean pottery and Dead Sea Scroll copper fragments.
Cut into the hillside under Antoninus Pius (138–161 AD), the 6,000-seat theatre faces north to shade spectators. The 500-seat Odeon beside it hosted council meetings and recitals; both flank the old forum colonnade.
The Ottoman station opened in 1904 on the Damascus–Medina pilgrim line that Lawrence and Faisal's forces repeatedly dynamited in the 1916–18 Arab Revolt. German-built steam locomotives and wooden carriages sit on the original track.
The 1926 palace Emir Abdullah I built as the first seat of Transjordan's government, with Circassian Guard sentries in black cherkesska coats. The compound also holds Abdullah I's tomb and the domed Royal Court.
King Hussein's personal collection traces the kingdom's political history through cars: the 1916 Cadillac of the Arab Revolt era, Abdullah I's 1952 Lincoln, and the Mercedes 300SL and Porsches the king raced. Open 10:00–19:00, closed Tuesdays.
Completed in 1989 as a memorial to Jordan's founding monarch, its 35m blue mosaic dome spans a prayer hall for 3,000 with no interior columns. The only Amman mosque that formally admits non-Muslim visitors.
Three restored 1920s villas on Jabal Al-Weibdeh, one of them the house where T.E. Lawrence is said to have written part of Seven Pillars. The garden encloses the excavated 6th-century Byzantine church of St George.
Amman's first planned residential quarter, laid out in the 1920s for Circassian and Levantine merchant families. Yellow limestone houses with arched triple windows and iron balconies line streets radiating from Paris Circle.
Built in 1924 as Amman's first post office, later the Ministry of Finance and then the Haifa Hotel. Mamdouh Bisharat restored it as a free public salon; the rooms keep original tiled floors, shutters and 1920s photographs of the village Amman was.
Rebuilt by King Abdullah I in 1924 on the foundations of the Umayyad congregational mosque, itself over a Byzantine cathedral. Its pink-and-white striped stone marks the point where Ottoman Amman's market grew back after 1878.