1 · POSITION
The King’s Highway is one of the oldest roads in the world, in use in Jordan for more than four thousand years. At its greatest it ran from Heliopolis in Egypt across Sinai to Aqaba, north past Petra, Kerak and Madaba to Damascus, Palmyra and Resafa on the Euphrates. The register holds it for the towns, forts and caravanserais strung along it, each of which existed because a traveller had to stop. [1, 2]
2 · KINGDOMS AND CARAVANS
Edom, Moab and Ammon depended on it; the Book of Numbers records the Israelites asking the king of Edom for passage along it and being refused, and King Mesha of Moab wrote that he rebuilt it at the Arnon. The Nabataeans of Petra carried frankincense and spices from southern Arabia along it. The emperor Trajan rebuilt it as the Via Traiana Nova, and some of its Roman milestones still stand. [1, 2]
3 · PILGRIM ROAD
Byzantine pilgrims used it to reach Mount Nebo. From the seventh century it was the main Hajj road from Syria to Mecca, until the Ottomans built a new desert route in the sixteenth century and lined that one with caravanserais instead. A Crusader lord’s raids on its pilgrims are tied by a Jordanian writer to the battle of Hattin in 1187. [1, 2]
4 · THE ROAD TODAY
The modern Highway 35 follows the ancient line, and most visitors to Jordan who travel by road follow it: from Irbid through Jerash, Amman, Madaba, Kerak and Tafileh to Petra and Aqaba, with Mount Nebo, the Madaba mosaic map, Wadi Mujib and Dana on the way. It is, in a Jordanian writer’s words, not an archaeological site but a path. [2]
5 · ⚑ CANDOUR
⚑ Trajan’s rebuilding is dated to AD 108 by one source and given no date by another. The age of more than four thousand years is a Jordanian newspaper’s figure, and the register’s Bronze Age dating rests on it. The road’s full extent is a reconstruction, not a single surviving route. [1–2]
Sources & Further Reading
Sources checked 22 October 2026.