Travel To Middle East

The Jordan Archaeological Museum

The Jordan Archaeological Museum was built in 1951 on the Citadel Hill in Amman. It houses artifacts from all the archaeological sites in the country. The collection is arranged in chronological order and represents ancient items of daily life such as pottery, glass, flint and metal tools, as well as monumental materials such as inscriptions and statuaries. The museum also houses several jewellery inscription statuary and coin collections.

Among the most important exhibits in the museum are the plaster statues from ‘Ain Ghazal, dating back to around 6000 BC, and the Dead Sea bronze scroll written in Aramaic characters.

• The culture of the desert (Bedu).
• The culture of the villages (Reef).
• The culture of the towns and cities(Madineh).

The collection of the museum represents items of daily life from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as:

1. Costumes of the various areas in Jordan.
2. Utensils used for food preparation, making bread, coffee, and tea.
   

The Jordanian Museum of Popular Traditions

The Jordanian Museum of Popular Traditions was established in 1971. The museum is located within the eastern section of the Roman Theater in Amman. Its aims are to collect Jordanian and Palestinian folk heritage from all over Jordan, to protect and conserve this heritage and to present it for future generations. The museum is also concerned with introducing our popular heritage to the world.

The museum has five exhibition halls. The first hall is dedicated to the traditional costumes of the East Bank. In the second hall, the traditional jewellery and cosmetic items of the various regions in he East and West Banks are on display.

The third hall contains a collection of Palestinian costumes and heard-dresses. In the fourth hall there is a collection of pottery and wooden cooking pots and food preparation vessels, as well as a collection of silver jewellery and bridal dresses from the West Bank. The fifth hall, which is in a vault of the Roman Theatre, houses a collection of mosaics from Byzantine churches in Jerash and Madaba.

• To intensify knowledge of Jordan’s culture heritage throughout the ages.
• To organize traveling and temporary exhibits in Jordan and abroad.
• To continually develop the museum in accordance with the scientific status of the university.
• To establish cooperation with national and international scientific departments and institutions.
• Documentation of the museum processes, starting with obtaining the cultural material up to labeling, conserving, displaying and properly storing the objects.
• Preparation of accurate and comprehensive of the objects on display and in storage.
• Teaching of the applied courses in archaeology.
• The museum is an academic center striving to develop to research is archaeology by offering facilities to the teaching staff at the Department of Archaeology at the University.

1. The patronage of contemporary art in Jordan, the Arab countries, and the Third world.
2. Exchange of exhibitions between the gallery and other museums and cultural organizations outside Jordan.
3. Organizing and participating in seminars, conferences, and symposia pertaining to art and culture within and outside Jordan.

Since its establishment, the Gallery has greatly expanded. Its collection which started with around 50 works of art amounts now to almost 2000, consisting of works by 520 artists from 43 Arab and Islamic countries, ranging from Brunei in the Pacific to Morocco on the Atlantic, and from Turkey and Iran on the Caspian Sea to Pakistan on the Indian Ocean. The Society has organized more Sea to Pakistan on the Indian Ocean. The Society has organized more than fifty exhibitions drawn from major drawn from major sources in Europe and America, such as the Center Pompidou in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Geneva Museum of History and Art and the Harvard Semitic Museum, for display in Amman. Turkish museums, the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo, as well as other collections in the Arab World have sent special exhibitions on loan to the Jordan National Gallery.

From its own collection, the Royal Society of Fine Arts has sent major exhibitions abroad to France, Turkey, Poland, and Great Britain.

1. Jordanian coinage throughout the ages, such as Nabataen coins, of the Decapolis and the early Islamic Arabised coins.
2. Coinage of the Islamic periods and of the rulling dynasties in the Muslim World, where inscription replaced the earlier personifications and portraits on the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Sassanid coins. The inscriptions were originally verses from the Holy Quran, and within a century they documented the name of the caliph and date and place of issue.
3. Hashemite coinage and notes, starting with the issues of Sherif Hussein Bin Ali in Hijaz, through the Syrian issues of His Majesty Faysal I in 1920, then the Iraqi issues of their Majesties Faysal I, Ghazi I and Faysal II. Lastly the Jordanian issues from 1949 onwards.