New Al Habtoor Research Centre Study Traces 5,000 Years of Arab Presence on Both Shores of the Strait of Hormuz

DUBAI — The Al Habtoor Research Centre has released a comprehensive historical study of the Strait of Hormuz titled “The Arabness of Hormuz Strait: The Name, the Land, and the People.” The study examines one of the world’s most strategically significant waterways not through the lens of contemporary energy security alone, but across five millennia of toponymy, demography, and political history. Its central conclusion is that the Strait functioned for most of recorded history as a connective maritime highway whose permanent population, on both shores, was overwhelmingly Arab in character — even during the long periods in which a Persian imperial administration claimed nominal sovereignty over its northern coast.

The study is organised around three interlocking questions that recur in regional debate and resolves each on the basis of the documentary and archaeological record. Throughout, it adopts the geographic convention of the Gulf Cooperation Council states, referring to the body of water west of the Strait as the Arabian Gulf.

The Origin of the Name “Hormuz”

The study surveys the principal etymological theories and adjudicates between them. It identifies the earliest attestation of the name in the account of Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander the Great, who in 325 BCE recorded a fertile coastal district the local population already called Harmozeia — nearly a millennium before the events with which the name is sometimes confused. Weighing the evidence, the study favours a position of toponymic convergence: the name most likely originated as a theophoric reference to Ahura Mazda, the supreme deity of Zoroastrianism, whose name evolved through documented phonological stages From (Ahura Mazdā to Auramazdā to Ōhrmazd, and finally Hormoz). As the religious resonance faded after the Islamic conquests, local communities reinterpreted the surviving name through the vernacular phrase Hur-Mogh, “the passage of the palm groves,” which precisely described their estuarine, date-growing environment. The imperial root supplied the genesis of the name; the vernacular descriptor supplied the mechanism of its survival.

Arab Continuity on Both Shores

The core of the study reconstructs the demographic history of the two coasts from the Bronze Age to the twentieth century. It draws a consistent analytical distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of presence: an Arab presence that was popular and demographic — a rooted human substrate of seafaring tribes, pearl divers, and date cultivators — and a Persian presence that, where it existed, was administrative and military when the central authority was strong and absent when it was not.

The study marshals a sequence of evidence for this continuity. The Azd tribal confederation settled Oman permanently from the second century CE, and the Sasanian province of Mazun governed the coast through a thin network of garrisons rather than through settlement – a reading reinforced by the archaeological evidence, which points to economic stagnation rather than dense Persian colonisation. The forced deportation of Arab tribes across the Gulf by Shapur II in the fourth century is presented as an inverse proof of Arab demography: the Persian state had to import an Arab population to settle the northern lands precisely because the region was Arab by nature. The mediaeval Kingdom of Hormuz (c. 1060–1622) is offered as the clearest single illustration — an Arab dynasty of Omani origin ruling a wealthy maritime state on the Iranian shore, with a largely Persian administrative bureaucracy serving Arab sovereigns. At its height the island kingdom became one of the wealthiest commercial entrepôts on earth, a thalassocracy whose destruction in 1622 required an alliance between the Safavid empire and the English East India Company — and what was destroyed was an Arab-founded dynasty, not a Persian one. The pattern persisted into the modern era, when the Qawasim of Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah governed the Iranian port of Bandar Lengeh and the Sultan of Oman leased Bandar Abbas and Qeshm, while in the northern Gulf the Banu Kaʼb and the Emirate of Mohammerah held sway until their forcible annexation in the twentieth century.

Beneath the level of dynasties, the study shows, lay a shared maritime economy — above all, the pearl — that bound the two coasts into a single social world in which tribal affiliation, not imperial subjecthood, was the operative identity. When the natural-pearl economy collapsed in the early twentieth century, the Arab communities of the Iranian coast were among the first to migrate back to the Arabian shore, carrying with them the skills, networks, and capital that would underpin the merchant elites of the future Gulf states.

The Study also points to living witnesses of this continuity: the Huwala Arab tribes who settled the Persian coast and later returned en masse to the Arabian Peninsula; the Shihuh of the Musandam Peninsula; and the Kumzari language – the only language with Iranian grammatical structure indigenous to the Arabian Peninsula, whose hybrid Arab-Persian character, documented in modern linguistic fieldwork, testifies to centuries of sustained exchange across the Strait.

The Battle of Chains in Its Proper Place

The study situates the Battle of Chains (633 CE), in which the Muslim commander Khalid ibn al-Walid defeated and killed the Sasanian commander Hormuz, at its correct chronological position — after the spread of Islam in the Peninsula and immediately before the conquest of Iraq. It corrects a widespread misconception that the Strait was named after this commander. The evidence against that belief is threefold: the name was documented nearly a millennium before the battle; the commander himself was named after the Zoroastrian deity, as were five Sasanian kings; and the toponym was recorded by classical geographers before the Sasanian dynasty even existed. The battle, the study concludes, did not create the name but marked the collapse of the last Persian military barrier on a coast whose population had always been Arab.

Methodology and Sources

The study is grounded in primary classical texts — including Arrian’s preservation of Nearchus and the chronicles of al-Tabari — and in the standard peer-reviewed scholarship of the field, among them the Encyclopædia Iranica, the late-antique studies of Touraj Daryaee, D. T. Potts, Valeria Piacentini and Derek Kennet, the Persian Gulf series of Willem Floor, the medieval studies of Jean Aubin, and the linguistic fieldwork of van der Wal Anonby on Kumzari. It is illustrated with original maps, diagrams, and comparative tables, and includes a consolidated chronology and a full academic bibliography.

“The Strait of Hormuz was never, in any meaningful demographic sense, a frontier dividing an Arab world from a Persian one. Its permanent population on both shores was Arab throughout the recorded past, while Persian power, where it existed, was a governing superstructure that rose and fell with the strength of a distant centre. The modern, rigidly nationalist division of the Strait is, in the long view of its history, the anomaly — not the rule”.