An-Najah Staff

Administratively, the territories of Transjordan (a neutral term for what is now Jordan) have always belonged to different provinces. During the Late Byzantine or Early Islamic periods, the administrative borderlines were imposed by geographic rather than political considerations. They were generally running from east to west (Hitti 1970; Watson 2001). Hence, we can distinguish three major regions in Transjordan: northern, central and southern. While the northern one certainly had privileged relations with north Palestine and Syria, the central region had close relations with Palestine, and the southern played an important role in relations with south Arabia and Egypt. In times of peace as well as in times of war, Transjordan has therefore played an important role as a platform for trade and warfare in both north-south and east-west directions.