From medieval land to 21st century state
As first time visitors to Oman arrive at the international airport and are swept along the tree-lined highway to one of the capital’s luxurious hotels, they almost always remark what an attractive city Muscat is.
Ministry buildings, shopping malls, villas and low-rise apartment blocks line the road, white facades gleaming in the bright Arabian sun. Steep rocky hillsides form a dramatic backdrop to the south and the sparkling waters of the Gulf of Oman lie to the north. Roundabouts and roadsides are softened by trees and flowers.
What the majority of these visitors do not appreciate is that everything around them has been built in the last 40 years. Less than 25 years ago a visitor described the Muscat Intercontinental hotel, now at the heart of capital, as a “hotel in the desert”, surrounded as it was at the time by nothing more than coastal dunes.
Oman has undergone a remarkable transformation since Sultan Qaboos bin Said took power from his father 38 years ago. In 1970, Oman was effectively a medieval land into which the 20th century barely intruded. The sultan inherited a communist-inspired civil war in the south, and tribal tension throughout the country. His father, Sultan Said, had ruled the country for nearly 40 years.
For nearly all of this time Oman was a poor country, with no money for development. Sultan Said was also extremely concerned about the effect that education and modernisation would have on the Omani people, perhaps as a result of witnessing the rapid changes occurring in neighbouring Gulf countries following the discovery of oil.
Therefore, despite oil being finally discovered in Oman in 1964 and the first shipments made in 1967, Sultan Said’s cautious approach to both spending and development meant that by 1970 life had changed little on this corner of Arabian peninsula for hundreds of years.
But all this development has not come at the expense of the country’s rich heritage and environment. This is not another Dubai, although Oman’s brash Emirati neighbour is only four hours drive away. Most Omani men still wear the traditional dress of dish-dasha robe and expertly-tied head coverings or beautifully embroidered caps. They are as proud of their country’s history and culture as they are of the extraordinary progress which has been made over the last four decades.
Even as the site was being chosen for the country’s first international airport, and plans were being made to build schools and clinics across the country, archaeologists were arriving to document the past and conserve and rebuild Oman’s mud brick forts and castles, and botanists and zoologists began studying Oman’s flora and fauna and considering how it could best be protected.
As part of that documentation process, the Royal Geographical Society was invited in 1986 to study the Sharqiyah Sands (as it is now officially known, or the Wahiba Sands as it was then referred to).
In association with
