A thumb of Arabia where nearly everyone is from somewhere else
Qatar occupies a Persian Gulf peninsula with a sole land border on Saudi Arabia. On 21 June 2026 its population hit 3,180,059—about 3.02 million of them foreign workers—while ranking fourth worldwide in GDP (PPP) per capita under the House of Thani.
Mohammed bin Thani’s 1868 British agreement recognized separate status; after Ottomans and a British protectorate the sheikhdom became a resource state and U. S. non-NATO ally with Al Jazeera amplifying soft power. Islam is official. Pliny’s first-century Catharrei may preserve an early ethnonym; classical folk etymology ties Qatar to muqāṭarah sealed-bargain trading.
People lived on the peninsula some 50,000 years ago, and Ubaid-period Mesopotamian pottery turns up at abandoned coastal camps, most notably Al Da’asa on the west coast. Kassite sherds and crushed snail shells on the Al Khor Islands suggest Qatar may be the earliest known site of shellfish purple-dye making. Some historians have even proposed the area as the Sumerians’ homeland.
Under the Sasanians, who took the Gulf in AD 224, Qatar supplied pearls and purple dye, and Christianity spread with monasteries in a region Syriac writers called Beth Qatraye. In 628 the eastern Arabian ruler Munzir ibn Sawa accepted Muhammad’s call to Islam, and most local tribes followed.
Known for breeding horses and camels under the Umayyads, the peninsula grew into a pearling centre, and Abbasid-era ships sailing from Basra to India and China called at its ports. At Murwab in the ninth century residents built more than 100 stone houses, two mosques and a fort. Finds of Chinese porcelain, West African coins and Thai objects show how far that trade reached, though prosperity faded as the caliphate weakened in Iraq. Local speech says the name with a hard g, close to Gitar.
Source: Qatar
