subscribeThis is a three part essay on Oman as seen through the eyes of archaeologist Aram Yardumian. In 2008, Mr. Yardumian was a member of the American team doing research at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat. Various research interests have also taken him to the Caucasus, India, and southern Africa. He is currently involved in research on Turkic-speaking populations, and continues studies in various languages, including Tamil. His paper on photographer Mitchell Payne’s neurosurgery series from the early ’70’s appears in the current issue of Philologie im Netz (PhiN), the German journal for linguistics, literary, and cultural studies.
Dispatch Oman, Part One, The Coast, Interior and Empty Quarter
by Aram Yardumian
Oman: what do you really know about it? To begin with, it is not in the capital of Jordan, nor is it one of the trucial states. It is in an independent Arab nation whose nipple, a rock formation called Ras-al-Jinz, is the easternmost point on the Arabian Peninsula, bordering Yemen to the west, Saudi to the northwest and the Emirates to the north. Separated from all of them by vast stretches of uninviting dune desert, Oman has avoided total domination by Seljuks, Macedonians, Mongols, the British, and—most fortunately—Ottomans, and is therefore quite stable and happy. It is a nation recently opened to the world, one curiously modern and welcoming of the infidel and the things we do and peddle. In Muscat, the capital, we go to Carrefour, Lulu Hypermarket, Baskin Robbins, Borders, and KFC (rather the Omanis go to KFC, I eat at Cafe al-Failaq) to buy things and to remind ourselves that there really is no clash of civilizations. Oman’s motto, as coined by His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said is something like ‘progress with respect for heritage.’ And while these forces cannot always operate concomitantly (the secret police recently built a compound on top of some important grave assemblages in Ras al-Hadd) it’s not a bad way forward.
As archaeologists, we are welcomed especially by the many bureaucrats and officials who live what appear to be painfully boring lives in plain square office warrens. The interminableness of these office buildings cannot be overstated. They are kudzu reaching into a thicket—you may follow and follow and lose your mind before the end. We nearly did. Following a visa mishap (the wrong stamp was used at the airport), I spent long afternoons traveling deeper and deeper into the Heart of Bureaucracy, one office opening into the next, each turbaned man behind each desk more salt-poisoned with boredom and less able to communicate, the maps on succeeding walls less and less resembling anything geographic. I never did find Col. Kurtz. But one sympathetic fourth cousin of the Sultan went so far as to produce a stamp and ink it, and bring it close to my passport—but he just couldn’t bring himself, in the end, to make an expedient move. Ultimately I took matters into my own hands to expedite the process. (In the end, I drove to the United Arab Emirates, had my passport stamped, made a u-turn and immediately re-entered Oman).
The country is divided, historically, between the coast and the Interior, the latter of which reaches up into the Empty Quarter, and down the southern coast of the Peninsula to the border with Yemen. The Interior is slower, more old fashioned and more preposterously friendly than Muscat which has super highways lined with bright flowers, Peugeot dealerships, blocks of mysterious-looking flats, and a desalinated water supply. In the Interior you wave at everyone, young, old, blind, animal and mineral, and they wave back, and if you are invited in for coffee or tea you kindly accept. Camels wander freely along and across the road. And you’ll tie your tubes in knots to keep from hitting one of them in the car. The sheikh of A’Direez died recently in a camel accident—that is to say, he was driving at night in the mountains and hit a camel crossing the road. When this happens, the camel’s legs buckle under its weight, and all its entire body crashes through your windshield, and it is curtains for you, with the horn blaring under the combined suffocating mass until the Bedu find you in the morning.
Geographically the Interior is much like East Africa: savannah with flat topped, thorny acacia trees that grab onto your mutarrh and pull; the fantastic mountains that look as if they were dropped there by cosmic helicopter. Settlements exist wherever there is water available through falaj (or qanat) system and the aqueducts that transport the water for irrigation. Date palm oases exist here and there by the side of the road, and are grown crowded closely to maximize one’s share of the falaj water. The groves are woven together so densely that they become, upon entry, cold and Jurassic, and unwelcoming of the sun. Yet, between the trees, bright green robust grass thrives and strange giant dragonflies move slowly about.
