Aqaba

Aqaba (English: /ˈækəbə/ AK-ə-bə, US also /ˈɑːk-/ AHK-; Arabic: الْعَقَبَة, romanized: al-ʿAqaba, pronounced [ælˈʕæqɑba, ælˈʕæɡæba]) is the only coastal city in Jordan and the largest and most populous city on the Gulf of Aqaba. Situated in southernmost Jordan, Aqaba is the administrative center of the Aqaba Governorate. The city had a population of 148,398 in 2015 and a land area of 375 square kilometres (144.8 sq mi). Aqaba has significant trade and tourism. The Port of Aqaba also serves other countries in the region.

Aqaba's strategic location at the northeastern tip of the Red Sea between the continents of Asia and Africa has made its port important for thousands of years. The ancient city was called Elath, known in Latin as Aela) and in Arabic as Ayla. Its strategic location and proximity to copper mines made it a regional hub for copper production and trade in the Chalcolithic period.

Aela became a bishopric under Byzantine rule and later became a Latin Catholic titular see after Islamic conquest around AD 650, when it became known as Ayla; the name Aqaba is late medieval. In the Great Arab Revolt's Battle of Aqaba Arab forces defeated the Ottoman defenders.

Aqaba's location next to Wadi Rum and Petra has made it one of the major tourist attractions in Jordan. The city is administered by the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority, which has turned Aqaba into a low-tax, duty-free city, attracting several mega projects like Ayla Oasis, Saraya Aqaba, Marsa Zayed and expansion of the Port of Aqaba. They are expected to turn the city into a major tourism hub in the region. However, industrial and commercial activities remain important, due to the strategic location of the city as the country's only seaport. The city sits right across the border from Eilat, likewise Israel's only port on the Red Sea. After the 1994 Israel–Jordan peace treaty, there were plans and hopes of establishing a trans-border tourism and economic area, but few of those plans have come to fruition.

In antiquity, the name of the city was Elath or Ailath. The name is presumably derived from the Semitic name of a tree in the genus Pistacia. Modern Eilat (established 1947), situated about 5 km north-west of Aqaba, also takes its name from the ancient settlement. In the Hellenistic period, it was renamed Berenice (Ancient Greek: Βερενίκη Bereníkē), but the original name survived, and under Roman rule was re-introduced in the forms Aila, Aela or Haila, adopted in Byzantine Greek as Αἴλα Aíla and in Arabic as Ayla (آيلا). The crusaders called the city Elyn.

The present name comes from the identically-named Gulf of Aqaba, named that as early as 150 A.D. (or somewhat later, if added by a subsequent editor), as evidenced by the plotting of a Mt. Acabe ('Ακάβη όρος) in Ptolemy's Geography, which mountain is shown directly across from the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, on the western coast of the Red Sea, probably somewhere in the vicinity of modern Hurghada, Egypt, and ancient Mons Claudianus, both of which placenames could also themselves be derived cognate forms of the word Aqaba, the former by morphological drift, the latter as a translation into Latin, wherein "Claudianus" also suggests limping or stumbling, a perfect semantic overlap for the literal Arabic meaning of "Aqaba" (عقبة), as an "obstacle," "stumbling block," or "spine." Thus the Gulf of Aqaba may've in turn gotten its name from this older region, West of it, around Mt. Acabe (not necessarily a single identifiable mountain), construed as the rough spine of highland that must be crossed, to pass thru the natural trade corridor there, from the Upper Nile to the Red Sea, along modern Egyptian Highway 60.

This name first became mentioned in connection with the city itself of Aqaba, in the 12th century, as ʿaqabat Aylah (عقبة آيلة, 'the mountain-pass of Ayla'), mentioned by Idrisi, at a time when the settlement had been mostly reduced to a military stronghold, properly referring to the pass just to the north-east of the settlement (29°33′32″N 35°05′42″E / 29.559°N 35.095°E / 29.559; 35.095, now traversed by the Jordanian Aqaba Highway).

Excavations at two tells (archaeological mounds) Tall Hujayrat Al-Ghuzlan and Tall Al-Magass, both a few kilometres north of modern-day Aqaba city, revealed inhabited settlements from c. 4000 BC during the Chalcolithic period, with thriving copper production on a large scale. This period is largely unknown due to the absence of written historical sources. University of Jordan archaeologists have discovered the sites, where they found^[where?] a small building whose walls were inscribed with human and animal drawings, suggesting that the building was used as a religious site. The people who inhabited the site had developed an extensive water system in irrigating their crops which were mostly made up of grapes, olives and wheat. Several different-sized clay pots were also found suggesting that copper production was a major industry in the region, the pots being used in melting the copper and reshaping it. Scientific studies performed on-site revealed that it had undergone two earthquakes, with the latter one leaving the site completely destroyed.