An Arabian sultanate ranked the UN’s most improved in forty years
Oman, a sultanate on the southeastern Arabian Peninsula, borders Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Yemen, with Iranian and Pakistani maritime neighbours. The Al Bu Said dynasty has ruled since 1744; UNDP in 2010 called Oman the world’s most improved country over the prior four decades.
The oldest known written “Oman” appears on a Mleiha tomb around 220 BCE in Ancient South Arabian and Aramaic scripts. Classical writers knew it too: Pliny the Elder mentions Omana and Ptolemy Omanon, a place nineteenth-century scholars placed at Sohar until archaeology unsettled that view. Arabic tradition usually derives the name from a word for settled people, as opposed to desert nomads. Sumerian tablets call the land Magan and Akkadian ones Makan, names tied to its ancient copper, while Persians called it Mazun, evoking clouds and flowing water.
At Al Aybut Al Awal in Dhofar, researchers found in 2011 more than 100 scatters of stone tools belonging to the late Nubian Complex, an industry otherwise known only from north-east Africa and the Horn. Bronze Age remains of the Umm an-Nar and Wadi Suq periods are especially plentiful, and oral-history studies by John C. Wilkinson suggested the Achaemenids held the peninsula in the sixth century BCE, probably ruling from a coastal centre such as Suhar.
Seventeenth-century Oman expelled Portuguese coastal footholds and built an empire contesting British and Portuguese influence across the Indian Ocean. Qaboos bin Said’s 1970–2020 reign launched the Omani Renaissance: rising living standards, slavery’s abolition, and the end of the Dhofar conflict’s hottest phase.
Oil reserves rank about twenty-second globally; tourism and trade diversify an absolute monarchy where the sultan heads state and government through a Council of Ministers and a bicameral Council of Oman.
Source: Oman
