The history of Oman

Oman lies at the south-eastern corner of Arabia, facing the Arabian Sea and the mouth of the Gulf, with a mountainous interior watered by ancient irrigation channels and, in the south, the frankincense country of Dhofar. In the Bronze Age it was Magan, the copper supplier of Mesopotamia, and later it fell under the influence of successive Persian empires. After converting to Islam in the seventh century, Oman developed a distinctive Ibadi tradition of elected imams, and in the seventeenth century the Yaruba imams expelled the Portuguese and built a maritime empire reaching to East Africa. Under the Al Said dynasty, which still rules, that empire peaked in the nineteenth century before being divided, and Oman spent a century under British influence and internal conflict until Sultan Qaboos began transforming the country in 1970.

Stone tools found in Dhofar, some resembling tools made in north-east Africa more than 100,000 years ago, show that early humans passed through southern Arabia. By the Neolithic, fishing communities lived along the coast, and shell middens at Ras al-Hamra near Muscat are among the oldest settlements in the region. Around 3000 BCE people of the Hafit period began building beehive-shaped stone tombs on the ridges of the interior, and in the Umm an-Nar period, from about 2600 to 2000 BCE, they built round towers and communal tombs. The tombs and towers at Bat, al-Khutm and al-Ayn are a World Heritage site.

The wealth of these communities came from copper, mined and smelted in the mountains near Sohar. Mesopotamian texts from about 2300 BCE call this land Magan and describe its ships bringing copper and hard stone to the cities of Sumer and Akkad. The Akkadian king Naram-Sin claimed to have defeated the ruler of Magan. The copper trade declined after about 2000 BCE, during the Wadi Suq period. In the Iron Age, after about 1000 BCE, settlements in the interior multiplied, supported by aflaj, underground and surface channels that carry water from aquifers to palm gardens and fields by gravity. Thousands of aflaj are still in use, and five are protected as a World Heritage site.

In the far south, the Dhofar coast produced the finest frankincense in the ancient world. Ports such as Sumhuram, at Khor Rori near Salalah, founded as a colony of the South Arabian kingdom of Hadramawt in the last centuries BCE, shipped incense to Egypt, the Mediterranean and India, and the region's sites are now listed by UNESCO as the Land of Frankincense.

The north fell repeatedly within the orbit of Persia. The Achaemenid Empire listed a land called Maka among its provinces, and the Parthian Empire and then the Sasanian Empire controlled the coast, which the Persians called Mazun, with a governor at Sohar. Persians also probably extended the falaj system. In the early centuries CE Arab tribes migrated into Oman from the south and west, above all the Azd, who according to tradition came from Yemen after the collapse of the great dam at Marib. The Azd family of the Julanda became the leading Arab rulers of the interior, sharing power uneasily with the Persians on the coast.

Around 630 the Julanda brothers Jayfar and Abd received a letter from the Prophet Muhammad, delivered by Amr ibn al-As, inviting them to accept Islam. They did so, and the Persians withdrew. After Muhammad's death in 632 some tribes rebelled, but the Rashidun Caliphate restored control, and Omani soldiers and sailors took part in the early conquests. Under the Umayyad Caliphate Oman was governed from Iraq.

Many Omanis in the garrison city of Basra joined the Ibadi movement, a moderate branch of the Kharijite tradition that held that the leader of the Muslim community should be chosen for his piety and learning, not his lineage, and could be deposed if he became unjust. In 751 Ibadis in Oman elected al-Julanda bin Masud as their imam. He was killed by an army of the new Abbasid Caliphate within two years, but a second imamate was established in 793 and ruled the interior from Nizwa for a century. In 893 an Abbasid army invaded, destroyed the imamate and, according to Omani chronicles, wrecked many aflaj. The imamate idea survived, revived at intervals for a thousand years. Oman is today the only country where Ibadis are a majority.

In the ninth and tenth centuries Sohar was one of the greatest ports of the Islamic world, a centre of the trade that linked the Gulf with India, East Africa and China, and Omani merchants and sailors were active from Basra to Canton. The coast was contested by outside powers, among them the Qarmatians, the Buyids of Iran and the Seljuk Empire. In the interior the Nabhani dynasty, a family of tribal kings rather than elected imams, held power from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, profiting from the frankincense trade, while from the fourteenth century much of the coast, including the port of Qalhat, came under the island kingdom of Hormuz. Marco Polo described Dhofar and Qalhat, and Ibn Battuta visited both around 1331. In the fifteenth century the imamate was restored in the interior, while the Nabhanis held out in some areas.

Soon after Vasco da Gama reached India, the Portuguese Empire moved to control the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean. In 1507 Afonso de Albuquerque's fleet attacked the Omani coast, sacking Qurayyat and Muscat and taking Sohar and other ports as dependencies of Portuguese Hormuz. The Portuguese fortified Muscat, which an Ottoman fleet under Piri Reis briefly seized in 1552.

The fragmented tribes of the interior were united by Nasir bin Murshid, elected imam in 1624, the first of the Yaruba dynasty. He drove the Portuguese from most of the coast, and his successor Sultan bin Saif captured Muscat in 1650, ending Portuguese rule. Sultan bin Saif built the great round tower of Nizwa fort and a war fleet that carried the fight to Portuguese bases in India and East Africa. In 1698 Omani forces took Fort Jesus at Mombasa after a siege of nearly three years, and Oman became the dominant power on the Swahili coast, including the island of Zanzibar. Under Saif bin Sultan (1692 to 1711) the Yaruba also invested heavily in aflaj and plantations.

After 1718 a disputed succession split the tribes into two great factions, the Hinawi and the Ghafiri, a division that shaped Omani politics for two centuries. One claimant invited help from Persia, and armies of Nadir Shah occupied much of the coast in 1737 and again from 1743.

The governor of Sohar, Ahmad bin Said, resisted the Persians, and in 1744 he was elected imam. The Persians withdrew after Nadir Shah's assassination in 1747. Ahmad founded the Al Said (Al Bu Said) dynasty, which still rules Oman. His successors moved their seat to Muscat and stopped seeking election as imam, ruling instead as sayyids and later sultans, while the interior tribes looked to their own religious leaders. In the late eighteenth century the Khan of Kalat granted the port of Gwadar on the Makran coast to an Omani prince, and it remained Omani until it was sold to Pakistan in 1958.

The empire reached its height under Said bin Sultan, who ruled from 1806 to 1856. He signed treaties with Britain and in 1833 with the United States, built up a navy and merchant fleet, and made Zanzibar the centre of his realm in the 1830s, eventually living there more than in Muscat. Zanzibar's clove plantations, worked by enslaved Africans, and its trade in ivory and enslaved people from the African interior made him rich. Omani-ruled ports stretched from Mogadishu to Cape Delgado. Britain, increasingly dominant in the Indian Ocean and committed to suppressing the slave trade, pressed him to sign treaties restricting it.

When Said died in 1856 his sons quarrelled over the succession, and in 1861 the British Viceroy of India, Lord Canning, arbitrated: Zanzibar and the African possessions went to one son as a separate sultanate, and Muscat and Oman to another, which received an annual subsidy from Zanzibar. Cut off from the African trade and hurt by the rise of steamships and the suppression of slavery, Muscat declined. Britain, which governed relations in the Gulf through the British Raj, made the sultanate effectively a protected state, and in 1891 the sultan undertook not to cede territory to any other power.

The interior rejected the sultans' authority. In 1868 an Ibadi revival briefly seized Muscat, and in 1913 the tribes elected a new imam and rose against the coast. The Treaty of Seeb, brokered by Britain in 1920, left the sultan sovereign on the coast while the imamate governed the interior almost independently. Sultan Said bin Taimur, who came to the throne in 1932, kept the country isolated, poor and suspicious of change, with almost no schools, hospitals or roads.

The prospect of oil in the interior ended the compromise. In 1954 the sultan's forces, backed by British-led oil interests, moved into imamate territory, and the imam Ghalib bin Ali, supported by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Arab nationalists, resisted. The Jebel Akhdar War ended in January 1959, when British Special Air Service troops scaled the Green Mountain at night and defeated the last rebels. The imamate was abolished and its leaders went into exile, and the United Nations debated the "Question of Oman" until 1971. Oil was found in commercial quantities in the 1960s and exported from 1967.

In Dhofar, a region with its own languages and grievances, the Dhofar Liberation Front opened an armed revolt in June 1965. After 1967 it was supported by Marxist South Yemen next door, and from 1968 it adopted a revolutionary Marxist programme for the whole Gulf, receiving arms from China and the Soviet Union, a small front of the Cold War. On 23 July 1970, with British support, the sultan's son Qaboos bin Said deposed his father in a palace coup. Qaboos renamed the country the Sultanate of Oman, offered amnesty to rebels and launched development programmes in Dhofar, while British officers, Iranian troops sent by the Shah and a Jordanian contingent fought the insurgents. The rebellion was declared defeated in January 1976, though isolated attacks continued for a few more years.

Qaboos used oil revenue to build a modern state almost from nothing: roads, electricity, schools, universities and hospitals, along with a professional civil service and armed forces. Oman joined the Arab League and the United Nations in 1971 and was a founding member of the Gulf Cooperation Council in 1981. Its foreign policy was cautiously independent: it kept good relations with Iran across the Strait of Hormuz, did not break with Egypt after its peace treaty with Israel, and often served as a quiet mediator. Power remained concentrated in the sultan, who also held the posts of prime minister, foreign minister and defence minister. In 1996 he issued the Basic Statute, Oman's first written constitution, and an elected consultative council, the Majlis al-Shura, gradually gained wider powers. During the Arab uprisings of 2011 protests in Sohar and Muscat over jobs and corruption left several people dead. Qaboos responded with tens of thousands of new public-sector jobs, cabinet changes and legislative powers for the elected council.

Qaboos, who had no children, died on 10 January 2020. The next day the royal family confirmed his cousin Haitham bin Tariq, the choice named in a sealed letter left by the late sultan, as his successor. In 2021 an amended Basic Statute created the post of crown prince, filled by Haitham's eldest son Theyazin, and Oman introduced value added tax as part of a programme to reduce its dependence on oil and its public debt. Oman continued its role as an intermediary: in April and May 2025 it hosted and mediated indirect nuclear talks between Iran and the United States, which were suspended when Israel attacked Iran in June, and in May 2025 it brokered a ceasefire between the United States and the Houthis of Yemen.