The walled coastal town of Al Zubarah in the Persian Gulf flourished as a pearling and trading centre in the late 18th century and early 19th centuries, before it was destroyed in 1811 and abandoned in the early 1900s. Founded by merchants from Kuwait, Al Zubarah had trading links across the Indian Ocean, Arabia and Western Asia. A layer of sand blown from the desert has protected the remains of the site’s palaces, mosques, streets, courtyard houses, and fishermen’s huts; its harbour and double defensive walls, a canal, walls, and cemeteries. Excavation has only taken place over a small part of the site, which offers an outstanding testimony to an urban trading and pearl-diving tradition which sustained the region’s major coastal towns and led to the development of small independent states that flourished outside the control of the Ottoman, European, and Persian empires and eventually led to the emergence of modern day Gulf States.

Brief synthesis The walled coastal town of Al Zubarah in the Persian Gulf flourished as a pearling and trading centre for a short period of some fifty years in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Founded by Utub merchants from Kuwait, its prosperity related to its involvement in trade of high value commodities, most notably the export of pearls. At the height of its prosperity, Al Zubarah had trading links with the Indian Ocean, Arabia and Western Asia. Al Zubarah was one of a long line of prosperous, fortified trading towns around the coast in what is now Qatar, and in other parts of the Persian Gulf, that developed from the early Islamic period, around the 9th century AD, onwards and established a symbiotic relationship with inland settlements. Individually these trading towns probably competed with each other over the many centuries during which the India Ocean trade was plied. Al Zubarah was mostly destroyed in 1811 and finally abandoned in the early 20th century, after which its remaining rubble stone and mortar buildings collapsed and were gradually covered by a protective layer of sand blown from the desert. A small part of the town has been excavated. The property consists of the remains of the town, with its palaces, mosques, streets, courtyard houses, and fishermen’s huts, its harbour and double defensive walls, and, on its land side, of a canal, two screening walls, and cemeteries. A short distance away are the remains of the fort of Qal’at Murair, with evidence of how the desert’s supplies of water were managed and protected, and a further fort constructed in 1938. What distinguished Al Zubarah from the other trading towns of the Persian Gulf is that it lasted a comparatively short space of time, secondly that it was abandoned, thirdly that it has lain largely untouched since being covered by the desert sands, and fourthly that its wider context can still be read through the remains of small satellite settlements and the remains of possibly…