Balqa Zip code

About Balqa

The Balqa, informally referred to as the Balga, is a geographical area in central Jordan typically described as the highlands east of the Jordan Valley, bounded on the north by the Zarqa River and on the south by the Wadi Mujib valley.
The Balqa was a portion of the Byzantine province of Arabia Petraea and was home to the Judham, Lakhm, and Bali Arab tribes. It became a part of Jund Dimashq during the Muslim invasion in the 630s (the military district of Damascus). Prior to the establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), the Umayyad dynasty retained holdings in the area, a time during which the Balqa flourished. The Balqa was allocated its own sub-governor during the time of Caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705). Yazid II and his son al-Walid II resided in the Balqa as princes and caliphs, respectively, and constructed numerous sumptuous palaces. The Balqa became subservient to Jund Filastin in the tenth century (the military district of Palestine). Under the Ayyubids (1170s–1260) and Mamluks (1260–1516), the Balqa continued to operate as a region subject to Damascus, sometimes extending to the south over the Sharat highlands.
Amman had been the Balqa's traditional capital, but the Mamluks relocated it to Hisban. At the time, the Banu Sakhr and Banu Mahdi clans, descended from the Judham, dwelt there. By the 16th century, under Ottoman administration, just four settlements remained in the Balqa, together with the Da'aja Bedouin tribe. In the late 18th–early 19th centuries, the sole permanent settlement was the mixed Muslim–Christian town of Salt, with the remainder of the territory governed by Bedouin tribes, the most powerful of which was the Adwan. The Balqa remained independent of the Ottoman authority until Rashid Pasha's expedition in the late 1860s, when it was integrated into the Nablus Sanjak. Several communities, notably Amman and Madaba, were created or re-formed in the subsequent years by Christians from Salt and Karak, government-sponsored Circassian and Chechen refugees, and Bedouin leaders.
The Balqa's late Ottoman prosperity was broken by the British occupation of the province during World War I. The Banu Sakhr's supremacy over the Adwan and other indigenous tribes was cemented in the ensuing era, precipitating the Adwan Rebellion. Amman was founded in 1923 as the capital of the Emirate of Transjordan and is the capital of the Emirate's successor state, the Kingdom of Jordan. Currently, the area is separated into four governorates: Balqa (focused on Salt), Amman, Zarqa, and Madaba. Palestinians and their descendants made up around 70% of the population of Amman, Zarqa, and Balqa, owing mostly to the inflow of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 Arab–Israeli conflicts. During the same era, the majority of the pre-existing population consisted of descendants of the Balqa, once semi-nomadic Arab tribesmen who continue to identify culturally as Bedouin.