Birthplace of Sindbad the Sailor — ancient copper capital of the Indian Ocean
Sohar was once one of the wealthiest ports on earth — the city Sindbad the Sailor set off from, the source of Oman's medieval copper trade that reached as far as Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. Today it is a quiet industrial port town with an excellent fort, a lively fish souk at dawn, and the air of a place that once mattered enormously and knows it. The Batinah coast between Sohar and Muscat is studded with small forts, old falaj systems, and frankincense trees.
Sohar was the capital of ancient Magan — the copper-exporting civilisation mentioned in Sumerian cuneiform tablets as a trading partner of Mesopotamia around 2500 BCE. Arab geographers described it as the largest city in the Islamic world east of Baghdad in the 9th–10th centuries CE. The Portuguese and later Omani conflicts ended its dominance; Muscat eclipsed it permanently. The legend of Sindbad the Sailor is believed to have originated from Sohar's seafaring tradition.