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Until 2018 knowledge of al‑ʿUlā County’s archaeology had been limited to a few key sites. Since then, an extensive archaeological landscape survey has been conducted on behalf of the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) across a large area (3302 km2) centred in and around the al‑ʿUlā valley (excluding the oasis and the key heritage sites of Dadan, Ḥegrā (al‑Ḥijr), Qurḥ (al‑Mābiyāt), and Old Town), as a part of the broader Identification and Documentation of Immovable Heritage Assets (IDIHA) survey. The IDIHA project aims to identify heritage assets in advance of the anticipated increase in visitors and facilitate further research. Data collected through remote sensing and ground recording of sites has been integrated into a customized heritage geodatabase. Over 16,000 sites have been recorded in the main al‑ʿUlā valley over three years by the ground survey, demonstrating an intensive occupation of the area from the Palaeolithic through to the present, including a rich range of domestic, agro-pastoral (including water management), funerary, defensive, ritual/religious, infrastructure/transport, productive and hunting sites, as well as communication/artistic (rock art and inscriptions — the largest category in terms of overall numbers of sites). In parallel with the survey, targeted excavations explored a selection of mostly late prehistoric sites and feature types in order to develop an understanding of the chrono-cultural development of the landscape, adding considerable data to our knowledge of the archaeology of north-western Arabia.

Abstract This study describes the petrographic and geochemical characteristics of pottery collected from Mugharat al‐Kahf and WTN02 in Wadi Tanuf, north‐central Oman, to clarify interregional similarities and differences in pottery production techniques and examine the existence of interregional trade in pottery with respect to changes in mobile communities. Potsherds from these sites were characterised using thin‐section petrography and instrumental neutron activation analysis. Results revealed that several clay fabrics and tempers were used during the Wadi Suq period (2000–1600 BCE). A region‐wide similarity exists in pottery‐making techniques in terms of the tempering of specific minerals (Oman ophiolite) used in the Early Iron Age (1300–300 BCE). Geochemical results indicate differences in clay sources between the Wadi Suq period and the Early Iron Age in Wadi Tanuf and the unlikelihood of the interregional trade of domestic pottery.

When Jimmy Carter became the U.S. president in January 1977, the United States and Oman did not have any formal security arrangements, apart from occasional landings of U.S. military aircraft on Oman's Masirah Island. Although Oman's leader, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, hoped to establish closer security ties with the United States, the Carter administration chose to continue President Richard Nixon's policy of relying on the “twin pillars” of Iran and Saudi Arabia to reinforce Western security in the Persian/Arabian Gulf region. Oman remained mostly a strategic afterthought until a series of crises unfolded in the greater Middle East: a Communist coup in Afghanistan in April 1978, the fall of the Shah of Iran in January 1979, and a war between Marxist South Yemen and North Yemen shortly thereafter. In November 1979, Iranian terrorists backed by the Islamic regime stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and seized dozens of hostages. This was followed a month later by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. With the fall of the Shah and the collapse of the “twin pillars” policy, the Carter administration began a sustained effort to create a Rapid Deployment Force for the Middle East and to gain access to Oman's strategic military facilities. After several months of arduous negotiations, Carter and his team were able to conclude a Facilities Access Agreement with Oman in June 1980, a transformative process that gave Washington the ability to insert U.S. military personnel into the Gulf and Indian Ocean on a contingency basis. The Carter administration's effort stands as a significant achievement, converting Oman into the most reliable U.S. ally in the Gulf region in the 1980s.

The importance of the medieval city of al-Balīd and its harbour was mentioned in many different sources, and mirrored by a large number of finds and pottery that confirm a primary role of the port as a pivotal hub in Indian Ocean trade during the pre-modern Islamic period (tenth–fifteenth century AD). This paper will examine maritime activities at al-Balīd from a different perspective, combining recent data from the study of ship timbers discovered at the site with the archaeological record, along with evidence of possible harbour facilities. The study of the ship timbers has provided invaluable information about the technology, size, material, type, and function of the watercraft involved in the trade at al-Balīd. The reuse of these timbers in a terrestrial context also alludes to a variety of activities carried out at the site, such as boatbuilding, maintenance, repair, and salvaging. Collectively, this data yields useful insights into the relationship between the different vessels operating at al-Balīd and the structure of the site itself, mainly in connection with one of the most lucrative commercial activities at the port city — the trade of Arabian horses.

During the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Omani government relied heavily on circulating information and entertainment through multiple forms of social media to keep citizens informed and to promote social distancing. This study explores the 2021 Ramadan Instagram campaign created by Be’ah, the Oman Environmental Services Holding Company, which blended performance genres and Omani traditional storytelling. This case study examines ‘multiplex’ hybrid styles of verbal art that mirrored governmental policy and practice across social media and created a forum where citizens discussed identity, national heritage and what it means to be eco-conscious. A central question in this research concerns the possibilities for social media as a space to communicate, preserve and archive local linguistic diversity and vernacular performative genres.

This paper presents a study of the memoirs and letters of Princess Sālima bt. Saʿīd (d. 1922), whose father, Saʿīd b. Sulṭān (d. 1856), was the ruler of Oman and Zanzibar from 1832 to 1856. One hundred and fifty years ago, the princess entered into a relationship with a young German man, Rudolph Ruete. After the princess fell pregnant, putting her in conflict with the stipulations of her Islamic religion, she decided to elope with her lover and to bet on him. The paper argues that the princess was a revolutionary woman in opposition to traditional Zanzibari culture, and that her story highlights clearly the issue of women and the crisis of freedom in Arab and Islamic culture during that time.

This article examines the narrative and literary techniques employed in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllāt Masqaṭ to draw on Omani women’s experiences of writing and speaking as sources of empowerment and narrative identity. Marking a shift from the dominant realistic and historical fiction often associated with male writers, Ḥamad experiments with magical realism, the carnivalesque, intertextuality, and metafiction to reconfigure the novelistic genre beyond the national prescriptions of literary production. Through the voice of the narrator, alongside the voices of other ordinary women, the novel underscores the significance of women’s symbolic practices within the societal and cultural boundaries of Oman. In an allegory of writing—a major thread running throughout the novel—the narrator/writer seeks to combine the composite, multiple, and fictional fragments of various women’s stories into a single readable text that preserves oral and cultural memory. Thus, on the one hand, this article explores the writer’s experimentation with narrative and storytelling within the context of the Omani literary tradition. On the other hand, it examines modes of women’s empowerment that work through articulative and enunciative practices in the face of linguistic frustration.

This book is the first coursebook to deal with the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri. Focussing on Mehri as spoken in Central Dhofar, Oman, the work results from several years' close collaboration with four native speakers of Mehri. The book is multimodal, supported by a large number of audio and audio-visual texts from the Mehri archive housed at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. It comprises twenty lessons and a glossary of all terms occurring in the lessons. Dialogues within the lessons focus as far as possible on aspects of the traditional culture of the Mahrah, thus introducing the student not only to the language, but also to issues of cultural importance.

Abdulaziz Al-Busaidi was the younger son of the Omani ruler Said bin Sultan. He devoted all his life to gain power and secure a source of income for himself. To achieve this, he formed alliances and sought powerful protectors. Among them were the British who supported him for almost fifty years, both as a potential heir to the thrones of Oman and Zanzibar and as a tool in their imperial policy. Although Abdulaziz’ political projects failed because of the British and his inability to cooperate with prospective allies, his actions greatly affected the history of Oman and Zanzibar in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Acts of political violence carried out by Muslim individuals have generated international support for governments that espouse so-called “moderate Islam” as a means of preventing terrorism. Governments also face domestic skepticism about moderate Islam, especially if the alteration of official Islam is seen as resulting from external pressure. By evaluating the views of individuals that disseminate the state’s preferred interpretation of Islam—members of the religious and educational bureaucracy—this research assesses the variation in the resonance of official Islam in three different Arab monarchies: Oman, Jordan, and Morocco. The evidence suggests that if official Islam is consistent with earlier content and directed internally as well as externally, it is likely to resonate. Resonance was highest in Oman, as religious messaging about toleration was both consistent over time and directed internally, and lowest in Jordan, where the content shifted and foreign content differed from domestic. In Morocco, messages about toleration were relatively consistent, although the state’s emphasis on building a reputation for toleration somewhat undermined its domestic credibility. The findings have implications for understanding states’ ability to shift their populations’ views on religion, as well as providing greater nuance for interpreting the capacity of state-sponsored rhetoric to prevent violence.

Once abandoned for more than three decades, vernacular settlements in Oman are now being progressively reinvested in to foster the country’s heritage tourism sector. The present research focuses on the emerging phenomenon of community-led initiatives for vernacular heritage rehabilitation and adaptive reuse in Oman. Through an examination of three case studies, its aim is to describe this process and its modes of action and discuss its effects on vernacular settlement transformations. A mixed research methodology was designed to include (A) analyses of relevant primary and secondary data, (B) documented onsite observations, (C) interviews with local community representatives and key players in the operations of rehabilitation, and (D) extractions and analyses of quantitative data from a hotel booking website. The research sheds light on unsuspected interrelations within and between the projects being implemented in these settlements and their operating modes. It reveals the focal role of a local community in a kind of ‘bottom-up’ management of its built heritage, coupled with a ‘horizontal cooperation’ between the three initiatives studied in this research. Moreover, it shows that a heavily centralised and top-down policy for the field of heritage conservation and management is among the main obstacles that hinder such initiatives. Furthermore, community-led operations of vernacular heritage rehabilitation are being undertaken under insufficient regulations in terms of land use, building restoration and adaptive reuse. In this context, the paper discusses some of the serious threats and concerns faced by such initiatives and proposes actionable solutions to mitigate these hindrances.

This article investigates the use and functions of the active and passive participial forms in the Omani vernacular spoken in al-'Awābī district, in al-Bāṭina region of northern Oman. This dialect was first described by Carl Reinhardt in 1894. No sections of his work, however, deal with the analysis of functions of participial forms in the dialect, although they are common in his texts. The data presented in this article aim to show the uses of the active participle in the everyday speech of my participants living in al-'Awābī district and the different syntactic and semantic functions it conveys. The syntactic functions of the participle in Arabic linguistics has long been debated since it is neither completely a verbal form nor a nominal. This article fits into this discussion as it brings new data and analysis of active and passive participles in Arabic dialectology with regard to the Omani vernacular spoken in al-'Awābī district.

Les réinterprétations critiques des travaux en anthropologie de la parenté ont remis en question les idées antérieures selon lesquelles les relations de parenté reflètent et reproduisent un ordre social dominant. Pourtant, les études consacrées aux nouvelles formes de parenté tendent à montrer que celles‐ci peuvent reproduire des idées traditionnelles concernant la famille, les valeurs et les hiérarchies sociales. Pour résister aux tendances actuelles liant la parenté à une reproduction sociale conservatrice, une piste prometteuse est la meilleure compréhension des circonstances dans lesquelles les relations de parenté reproduisent un ordre social anti‐hégémonique. Parmi les anciens militants du mouvement de libération révolutionnaire, aujourd'hui vaincu, de Dufar, dans le sultanat d'Oman, les pratiques de parenté visualisent des réseaux et relations entre anciens combattants qui transgressent les hiérarchies tribales, ethniques, raciales et genrées dominantes. Ces pratiques montrent comment, même dans les circonstances peu propices de la défaite politique et de la marginalisation, les relations de parenté peuvent reproduire un ordre social anti‐hégémonique, tout en offrant une rémanence sociale à la révolution vaincue.

In the Dhofar Mountains of Oman stakeholders are concerned about the social and ecological sustainability of pastoralism. In this study we used interviews with pastoralists to examine the prevailing drivers of pastoralism and how they are changing. We find that people are committed to pastoralism for sociocultural reasons but also that this commitment is under pressure because of husbandry costs and changing values. We find that capital investment in feedstuff enables pastoralists to overcome the density-dependent regulation of livestock populations. However, high production costs deter investment in marketing and commercialization, and there is little off take of local livestock. Our study reveals how pastoral values, passed down within households, motivate pastoralists in the face of high husbandry costs, modernization and social change.