The modern kingdom of Jordan is not the first state to try settling this area. Some experts are sceptical of the plan the Black Desert's only source of water, the Azraq Oasis, previously dried up due to over-pumping and had to be artificially revived. The New City Project aims to create a second capital on the edge of the Black Desert by 2050, using cheap land to lure Amman's population out of the densely congested city centre. However, this may change if the Jordanian government has its way. And out past a certain point, the desert swallows up any sign of mankind barely anyone lives here but nomadic Bedouins, who roam among neolithic " hunting kites" (animal fences set up by prehistoric hunters thousands of years earlier) and ancient Safaitic inscriptions, written in an Arabic dialect that predates the rise of Islam.Īlthough less famous than other Jordanian attractions like Petra and the Pillars of Wisdom, the Black Desert offers visitors millions of years of natural and human history, including a magnificent wetland in the desert fed by a fragile oasis. Roman ruins, half-finished concrete structures, modern military bases and refugee camps dot the highway. The harsh, landscape tells the story of past and present civilisations who have tried to tame it. This is Jordan's Black Desert, also known as Harrat al-Sham, a frontier in more ways than one. A few minutes down the road was the Azraq Wetland Reserve and the Shaumari Wildlife Reserve, where we mingled with gazelles and watched military cargo planes fly over the horizon.
Suddenly, a military drone zoomed overhead, perhaps on its way to surveil a battlefield somewhere in nearby Iraq or Syria. The rolling hills of the Levant had turned into a flat, black volcanic desert. We were 30km out of Qasr Mushash, an ancient Roman frontier post on the eastern outskirts of Amman and the site of Jordan's proposed new capital.
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