Oman’s capital port contested since Albuquerque’s 1507 raid
Muscat, the capital and largest city of Oman, looks out over the Gulf of Oman with the Hajar Mountains rising behind it. It has been an important port linking east and west since at least the first century CE, when Ptolemy may have called it the Hidden Port.
Fishermen were burying their dead with evident ritual at Ras al-Hamra in the sixth millennium BCE, and Harappan pottery found south of the city points to contact with the Indus Valley. The origin of the name is disputed, with suggestions ranging from an Arabic word for an inflated hide to a place of dropping anchor, or an Old Persian term for strong-scented. Sassanid forces under Shapur I took the port in the third century CE, Islam arrived in the seventh century, and the local Azd tribe helped it prosper.
In 1507 the Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque arrived seeking trade, was fired upon, and seized the city, most of which burned. Portugal held Muscat for more than a century despite Ottoman attacks, including captures in 1552 and between 1581 and 1588, and left behind the Al Jalali and Al-Mirani forts. The Omani imam Nasir bin Murshid, elected in 1624, set about reversing that, and his successors’ forces drove the Portuguese out around 1650, helped by the city’s Hindu merchants, a community that had flourished there since roughly the fifteenth century.
By the eighteenth century Muscat was a regional military power reaching as far as East Africa. Said bin Sultan signed a treaty with Andrew Jackson’s envoy Edmund Roberts in 1833 and in 1840 moved his capital to Stone Town in Zanzibar, which split off as a separate sultanate after his death in 1856. Interior tribes attacked Muscat in 1895 and 1915, and unrest led to the Dhofar Rebellion of 1962.
Qaboos bin Said ended that uprising with British help, renamed the country the Sultanate of Oman and built new ministries and the port of Mina Qaboos. The governorate had about 1.72 million people in 2022, and its deep coastal waters form natural harbours at Muscat and Muttrah, near coral reefs of Acropora and Porites.
Source: Muscat
