For other uses of Ammonite, see Ammonite (disambiguation)

Ammonite (disambiguation)

Ammonites are an extinct group of marine animals.Ammonite may also refer to:*Ammonite *Amatol#Ammonite, an explosive substance*Ammon , a people of the ancient Levant, mentioned in the Bible, or their Ammonite language...

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The Ammonite language is the extinct Canaanite language of the Ammon

Ammon

Ammon , also referred to as the Ammonites and children of Ammon, was an ancient nation located east of the Jordan River, Gilead, and the Dead Sea, in present-day Jordan. The chief city of the country was Rabbah or Rabbath Ammon, site of the modern city of Amman, Jordan's capital...

ite people mentioned in the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

, who used to live in modern-day Jordan

Jordan

Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan , Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashemiyya) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing...

, and after whom its capital Amman

Amman

Amman is the capital of Jordan. It is the country's political, cultural and commercial centre and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. The Greater Amman area has a population of 2,842,629 as of 2010. The population of Amman is expected to jump from 2.8 million to almost...

 is named. Only fragments of their language survive - chiefly the 9th century BC Amman Citadel Inscription, the 7th-6th century BC Tell Siran bronze bottle, and a few ostraca. As far as can be determined from this small corpus, it was extremely similar to Biblical Hebrew, with some possible Aramaic

Aramaic language

Aramaic is a group of languages belonging to the Afroasiatic language phylum. The name of the language is based on the name of Aram, an ancient region in central Syria. Within this family, Aramaic belongs to the Semitic family, and more specifically, is a part of the Northwest Semitic subfamily,...

influence including the use of the verb ‘bd instead of the more common Biblical Hebrew ‘śh. The only other notable difference with Biblical Hebrew is the sporadic retention of feminine singular -t (eg ’šħt "cistern", but ‘lyh "high (fem.)".)