Listed 1 sub titles with search on: History for destination: "OMAN Country PERSIAN GULF".
Satrapy of the ancient Achaemenid empire, modern Oman.
The name Maka is very ancient; in the third millennium, the Akkadians
called it Magan. Later, it was called Qade by the Babylonians; the Assyria king
Assurbanipal (668-627 BCE) mentions a country Pade with a capital Iski, which
must be Izki in Oman. The Persian name Maka is, therefore, an archaism (which
is not uncommon in this period).
The region traded with India in the third millennium BCE; many objects
from the Harappan culture are found in Oman.
The second millennium is something of a 'dark age'. At the end of
the second millenium, the Makans invented the qanats, underground drainage galeries
that bring waterfom an aquifer on the piedmont to the gardens or palm groves in
the valleys. The invention was copied in Iran. The first millennium
is called the 'Iron age' of Oman, but this is unjustified, because no iron objects
have been found (so far). There are, however, many similarities to Iron age cultures
of southern Iran and the valley of the Indus.
Maka was already a part of the Achaemenid empire in 520 BCE, because
it is mentioned in the Behistun inscription. It is possible that it was conquered
by Cyrus the Great (559-530), who is known to have campaigned on the other side
of the Persian Gulf (he seems to have lost an army in the Gedrosian desert).
Maka is also mentioned by the Greek researcher Herodotus, who states
that during the reign of king Darius the Great (522-486), the 'Mykians' belonged
to the same tax district as the Drangians, Thamanaeans, Utians, Sagartians and
'those deported to the Persian Gulf'. All these people seem to have lived on the
northern shore of the Gulf. The same author mentions Mykians and Utians in the
army that king Xerxes led against the Greeks (in 480 BCE); they carried leather
jackets, cane bows and scimitars. The 'men from Maka' are also mentioned in Xerxes'
Daiva inscription.
We should have expected that Maka was mentioned by the Greek historian
Arrian, who wrote a book about the campaigns of the Macedonian king Alexander
the Great (336-323), but he only mentions the Oman promontory, which he calls
'Maketa'. Probably, the men from Maka had become independent; had they been subjects
of the last Persian king Darius III, they would have figured in Arrian's lists
of Persian warriors. Maka did not belong to Alexander's empire and was not subject
to the empire of his successors, the Seleucids.
Jona Lendering, ed.
This text is cited July 2003 from the Livius Ancient History Website URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks.
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