TLDR Amman was known as Philadelphia which was NOT the city of “brotherly love”. It was named after Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Just like every city named after Alexander the Great was called Alexandria.
“And the city of Philadelphia, ever subject to earthquakes.”
Strabo, Geography, Book 13 IV.11
🧿 Thankfully this was not the Philadelphia we now know as Amman. It was the Philadelphia located in modern Türkiye.
The town was founded by King Attalus II Philadelphus who reigned from 159-138 B.C.
He was given the nickname Philadelphus which comes from the greek φίλος (love) and ἀδελφός (brotherly) because he honoured his brother:
“His motive in acting thus was the belief that he could give his brother no greater gratification, and at the same time would display to the Greeks by this act his own brotherly affection and generosity.”
Polybius, Histories XXVII.18
The town was named Philadelphia after him (Philadelphus + suffix -ia). It could’ve been called Philadelphopolis (similar to the few named Alexandropolis, where Polis πόλις means city in Greek) but I guess the Ancient Greeks didn’t find it too appealing. Turkish Philadelphia kept its name until it was conquered by the Ottomans in 1390 and changed to Alaşehir.
What about Jordanian Philadelphia?
After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C., his empire was divided amongst his generals. The biggest ones were the Macedonian Kingdom, the Seleucid Empire, and The Ptolmaic Kingdom.
The Ptolemaic Kings ruled over most of Egypt and parts of Palestine and Syria.
The city of Rabbath Ammon was changed to Philadelphia after Ptolemy II Philadelphus who reigned from 283 to 246 B.C.
Why was Ptolemy II, son of the general then King Ptolemy I, called Philadelphus? Was it an ironic nickname as he killed most of his brothers to ascend the throne?
No. It was simply because his loved and married his older sister Arsinoe II. Arsinoe II was not his step-sister or half-sister, but “full” sister. Ptolemy II was given the nickname of Philadelphus for his incestuous relationship with his sister.
Like the Habsburgs, there was a lot of inbreeding in the Ptolemaic Dynasty. This is the family from which Queen Cleopatra was born. That’s why Egyptians and Greeks (and Macedonians) are upset at modern depictions of the Ptolemaic Greek Queen.
To get back to etymological roots, the city of Philadelphia (in modern day Jordan) is not the city of brotherly love, nor is it the city of “sisterly love”, it was Philadelphia, the city of Philadelphus (there was also another city named Philadelphia, south of Memphis Egypt).
Where does the term “Brotherly love” come from then?
If one looks into all the Ancient Greek texts, there was never a mention of “brotherly love” written as Φιλαδέλφια. Only mentions of the different cities.
There were other terms used to mean “brotherly love”. They were ἀγαπῶντα (Xenophon Memorabilia I.5.4) and my personal favourite φιλανθρωπίας (cf. Isocrates, XV 133 Antidosis, trans. ed. George Norlin, 1980).
φιλανθρωπίας in Greek is Philanthropias. A word we use today is Philanthropy. It might’ve been male-centric, but philanthropy meant love and goodwill to all MANkind.
So if anything, the city of brotherly love would’ve been best named Philanthropia or Philanthropolis.
The equation “Philadephia = Brotherly Love” came to us from the founder of the modern city of Philadelphia in the United States of America. William Penn penned Philadelphia (maybe he was bad at Ancient Greek?) as he wanted the new city to be one of “brotherly love”. Another famous neologism from Greek (new word creation) is Arachnophobia. That term was created in 1925.
Despite William Penn’s good intentions, scholars after him kept using and mistranslating the terms of brotherly love into philadelphia (cf. Hebrews 13 Westcott and Hort’s edition) ; it became general knowledge and the rest is history.
So what?
This is an example of misinformation becoming so widespread that it is difficult to deny it.
Another example is a scene from the famous show F.R.I.E.N.D.S. where Phoebe and Ross are discussing evolution and Phoebe rebuts with:
Phoebe claims that there was a time where “the brightest minds in the world believed that the Earth was flat?”. Funnily enough no one ever did. They might’ve believed the Earth was at the centre and not the sun (or didn’t care much at all). No mathematician or scholar thought that the earth was flat, according to current research. There even was a famous Greek Mathematician named Eratosthenes (born in modern day Libya and lived in Alexandria, Egypt) who even managed to calculate the Earth’s radius. Muslim Polymath Al-Biruni a millennia later improved on the calculations.
This is a harmless piece of misinformation that won’t hurt.
There could, however, be dangerous ones: Freud’s Oedipus’s complex for example.
Imagine going to a psychiatrist and they would keep insisting that all your problems are due to some sexual frustration with your mother, or for women their father (called Electra’s complex). If the patient denies it, knowing well that what the psychiatrist is saying isn’t true, they might be forced (through medication perhaps) until they convince themselves that they suffer from Oedipus’ complex and start having the wrong thoughts in their heads. The psychological damage will become immense when done at a societal level (as if incest is being justified).
Thankfully modern psychiatry is moving away from this.
So why this presumptuous preposition about Philadelphia and the bad grammar of a few Renaissance scholars? (If any of the readers manage to find anything to contradict my statements, I welcome them in the comments.) Simply because the lawyers are on their summer holiday, and I cannot write anything now without their opinion as it may go against the new cybercrime law.
I know this ruins the image of Amman (and Jordan more generally) as being the city of brotherly love1 where Armenian, Bedouins, Circassian, and from all walks of faith (and their derivatives), be it Christian, and Muslim, live side by side as brothers (and sisters).
Good thing is the city of Philadelphia/Amman had as its Divine Protector Tyche, the Goddess of Fortune. I hope this will be our heritage and legacy.
Amman isn’t Philadelphia, 1977, New York Time https://www.nytimes.com/1977/09/23/archives/long-island-opinion-amman-isnt-philadelphia.html