Muttrah

1 · POSITION

Muttrah was the commercial heart of Oman before oil: Muscat kept the navy, and Muttrah the trade. Its harbour, its souq, its merchant quarter and its port are the register’s reason to read Muscat first as a port of reception and only afterwards as a hotel market. [1]

2 · A HARBOUR TOWN

The diplomat Edmund Roberts counted about 8,000 people in Muttrah in the early 1830s. Its market, the souq known as Al Dhalam, is one of the oldest in Oman, and the register holds it under its own code. Beside it stands Sur al-Lawatiya, the quarter of a merchant community that arrived from Sindh between 1780 and 1880 and traded in incense, jewellery and cloth. [1]

3 · THE PORT

In 1974 Sultan Qaboos founded Mina Qaboos at Muttrah, run by the Port Services Corporation from November 1976. By 2017 the harbour was being turned into a tourism project — the commercial port becoming a port of arrival for visitors. [1, 2]

4 · WHAT MUTTRAH CONNECTS

Muttrah is the Muscat end of an Omani world the register follows across the Indian Ocean: in 1824 the sultan moved his seat from Muscat to Zanzibar, and Stone Town, which the register holds under its own code, became the capital of the Sultanate of Oman and Zanzibar. [1, 3]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ Checked on 22 October 2026. The customs house was not found. The fort was: the Portuguese built one at the eastern end of Muttrah in the 1620s, not the 1580s, under Ruy Freyre de Andrada, to stop duty being evaded by the mountain tracks and to keep enemies from the harbour; its razing was a term of the peace of 1648, and the fort standing now is probably a later Ya‘rubi work. The note is corrected. The move of the sultan’s seat to Zanzibar is dated 1824 by one source and 1840 by another. [1–4]