8th century - Al-Masjid al-Umawi (mosque) and Al-Qasr Umawi (palace) built.[3]
1879 - Population: 150. English traveller Laurence Oliphant wrote of a visit in 1879 in his The Land of Gilead, suggesting that the area was uninhabited prior to the arrival of the Circassians.[nb 1][4][5]
^Oliphant, Land of Gilead, quote: "...we were quickly surrounded by a group of Circassians who have been settled by the order of the Government amidst these ruins... They said that 500 of them had arrived here about three months previously, but that the majority had speedily become discontented with their prospects and had gone away; 150, including women and children, were all that remained, and these had decided to settle here. The spot had been selected, in the first instance, on account of the shelter which the caverns and old rock-cut tombs afforded... It seems never to have been occupied either by the Saracens or Turks, and consequently from the date of the Arab wars in the seventh century has remained a desolation and a wilderness. It has been reserved for the Circassians to be the first settled population, after an interval of more than a thousand years, to take possession of these crumbling remains of former greatness. It is marvellous that during all that time Ammon should have resisted all attempts permanently to change its name, and be known among the Arabs of the present day by the identical appellation it bore when we first heard of it, 1500 years before the Christian era, as being the repository of the great iron bedstead of Og the king of Bashan..."
Simone Ricca (2008), "Amman", in Michael R.T. Dumper; Bruce E. Stanley (eds.), Cities of the Middle East and North Africa, Santa Barbara, USA: ABC-CLIO
"Butler Archive: Catalogue of Photographs". Archaeological Archives. Princeton University, Department of Art & Archaeology. (Includes depictions of Amman collected by the American Archaeological Expeditions to Syria, etc., 1899-1909)
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