Photography by SYED FASIUDDIN

It is three in the afternoon on a sunny day, yet here we are relaxing on the hillside overlooking a wadi. The gorge that plunges down is dotted with greenery and the sun seems quite ineffective. That is because we are at the Wadi Bani Habib on Jebel Akhdar, en route to a deserted settlement. Ali al Mahroqi, historical researcher at the Ministry of Heritage and Culture (MoHC), is our guide for the day and has been tasked with teaching us the commonalities that govern the Omani harat or settlement. Our trip that started from Muscat and ended in Jebel Akhdar is not only a journey from the coast to the mountains, but a trip through time as Ali has started our education at a pre-Islamic site and ended it at an Islamic harat.

Our first stop of the day was some 100km away from Muscat on the road to Nizwa, around 5km after the Samail flyover. Ali takes us to the fenced-off area to the left of the highway and on the banks of a wadi. The archaeological site at Manal in the wilayat of Samail (GPS reading: N23 10.922 E57 52.035) is a very good example of a pre-Islamic settlement. This site is believed to date from around the early Bronze Age (also known as the Hafit period – 3100BC-2700BC) and the Iron Age (c. 1300BC). For a brief explanation of the Hafit and Um an Nar periods, refer to OmanToday, April 2010. The location, Ali explains, is a desired one with a wadi to the south providing a permanent water source. Oman at that time would have been a much more fertile land with water in the wadi available throughout the year.

Ali is best suited for educating us on what constitutes a harat and the common features that mark them, as one of his duties at the MoHC includes the listing of all the harat in Oman and classifying them on a predetermined scale. “Despite the differences in size and age, Omani harat share a number of similarities in their geographical location and the building materials used.

Some of the important common features are the presence of communal buildings such as reception rooms (majalis, singular majlis), main entrances or gates (sabahat, singular sabah) and ovens (tannor); private residential buildings; commercial buildings such as shops and souqs; religious buildings such as mosques and traditional Qur’anic schools; and defensive buildings such as towers and fortified gates,” says Ali.

The site at Manal is also in a strategically strong position as it sits on the only natural, easy path from the south to the north of the country, ie, to Muscat and Batinah, and thus would have been of great importance for trading reasons. Another reason that Ali finds the site at Manal interesting is the fact that this is one of the few sites that has both, a settlement and tombs at the same location. Though the site was excavated by a team from Sultan Qaboos University for two seasons, with the first excavation beginning in 2000, it is not fully excavated and thus cannot be definitely classed as a harat.

Ali classifies harat into three types – Harat built of mud brick, harat built of stone and harat built of stone and mud brick. “Harat built of mud bricks represent 50 per cent of the total number of harat in the sultanate. Around 47 per cent of harat in the Dakhiliyah region and 18 per cent of harat in the Batinah region are of this kind. Harat built of mud brick are usually of the Islamic period.”

“Around 24 per cent of the total number of harat in the sultanate are built of stone. Musandam has the maximum of such harat and they make up 37 per cent of the total number of harat in the region. This type of harat is characterised by a lesser number of houses compared to harat that are built of mud bricks. These usually date from around the pre-Islamic era.”

“Harat built of stone and mud bricks represent 26 per cent of the total number in the sultanate. Most of these are found in the Sharqiya region and are characterised by their low ceilings and small-sized rooms. Such harat may have been originally built in pre-Islamic times and occupied through the ages, with mud brick extensions added later,” said Ali.

The site at Manal is of stone with perhaps date palm fronds serving as roofs in its heyday. Ali points out a small house with three rooms, believed to be one of the oldest constructions in Oman. The graves are Hafit period-style, thus establishing the date of the settlement. Ali shows us a midmaken wall – two parallel walls built of boulders, an inch apart and filled in with rocks and mud. As is typical of the period, this site has living quarters that are very small, with only one or two little rooms. The rooms, Ali explains, would have been more for protection from wild animals or rainy weather. Trees would have been more useful to provide a cool refuge from the sun.

The kind of rock used is a very good indicator of the building’s age. While the rocks used at Manal in the Hafit period are the kind found on wadi beds – rounded boulders – the rocks used in our next stop of the day at Harat Istanbol are flat planes, tightly packed to form walls.

Harat Istanbol, in Izki (GPS: N23 00.996 E57 46.633), is set in an idyll in the midst of date palms and crop fields. This is one of Ali’s favourite harat as the site carries the stamp of both pre-Islamic and Islamic architecture and was probably first built in pre-Islamic times and repeatedly used during the Islamic era.

A neighbouring farmer, with the addition of an asbestos roof and carved metal door, is still able to utilise one of the ruins as a storeroom. The entire settlement itself seems to be a source of readymade building material for the neighbourhood, a sad commentary on the passage of time. Modernisation seems to be knocking on the doors of this site; how long would change be resisted here seems to be the question.

The foundations and building techniques are of an earlier age with the style of building evoking the Um an Nar period (Third Millennium BC), with later additions of mud brick and artistic embellishments such as arches. The site does not belong to any tribe, and that Ali explains, means that the site is a very old one. In one of the shelves inside, Ali points out a half-broken contemporary mabkhara (incense burner) – a peace offering to evil spirits that may have bothered some earlier visitor.

The main part of the harat has only single-storey dwellings, consisting of one or two rooms. Openings onto the outside are minimal with protection still the major requirement. The stones used here, as described earlier, are flat stones tightly packed to form a uniform plane wall – a building style similar to that of the Bat Tombs. The absence of mortar or any kind of cementing material, explains Ali, ensures that the buildings breathe thus making them cooler.

The harat’s mosque is a short distance away and very close to a newly built house. Stone is intermixed with mud brick and speaks of repeated renovations over time. The prayer niche is different, a very early style according to Ali, and a precursor to the traditional mihrab. Elements of the pre-Islamic period are seen in the use of stone for even the shelves and pegs in the interiors, and in the absence of the use of sarooj and wood.

The influence of the Islamic style is seen in the use of mud brick with stone; the beginning of the usage of the arch as a decorative technique is seen here. The thickness of the wall is much increased as it now needs to support the weight of more floors. The mosque is small in size but would have been enough for the daily prayers of the few families that lived here.

Both the sites that we have visited have yielded a lot of information on the evolution of architectural styles of harat in the sultanate, but we are only partly done. Islamic-period harat await our arrival. We still have miles to go and sites to see, but that is a story for another issue, another day.

We thank the Ministry of Heritage and Culture for providing us with the information and pictures