Kuwait means a little fortress by the water
The State of Kuwait sits at the Persian Gulf’s head with about 500 kilometres of coast on Arabia’s northeast corner. Its Arabic name is a diminutive of kut—a fortress near water—and oil turned that fort into a high-income emirate.
In the Ubaid period, about 5500 to 3700 BC, Kuwait formed the borderland between Mesopotamia and eastern Arabia; site H3 at Subiya has yielded one of the world’s earliest reed boats. Traders from the Sumerian city of Ur settled Failaka island around 2000 BC and built in Mesopotamian style, and the area belonged to the Dilmun civilisation. After Babylon fell, the Achaemenids repopulated the bay following seven centuries of abandonment.
Alexander’s Greeks colonised the bay in the fourth century BC, calling the mainland Larissa and Failaka Ikaros, after the Aegean island it resembled. The Euphrates then entered the Gulf through the Khor Subiya channel in northern Kuwait, about 15 kilometres from Failaka, but that channel had dried up by the first century BC. Later the kingdom of Characene grew around Teredon under Parthian rule, and from 224 AD the Sasanians held the region, known as Meshan.
In 1669 the Bani Khalid emirate expelled the Ottomans from eastern Arabia and took the area. In the early 1700s Kuwait City was a small fishing village; the Bani Utbah settled in the middle of that century and took control after the Bani Khalid declined. The town became the Gulf’s boatbuilding centre and a transit port linking Baghdad, India, Persia, and Muscat, sheltering Basra merchants fleeing Ottoman persecution.
In 1899 Sheikh Mubarak Al Sabah signed an agreement making Kuwait a British protectorate, denying the Ottomans and Germany a Gulf port. A 1913 Anglo-Ottoman convention labelled it an autonomous Ottoman district, but Britain blockaded it during the First World War because Sheikh Salim sided with the Ottomans, and the Kuwait–Najd War of 1919–20 followed Ibn Saud’s attempt at annexation.
Source: Kuwait
