Page 252 - The Tigris Expedition

We Search for a Pyramid and Find Mahan
It was not until my return to Europe that I reread the ancient
Natural is Historia5 written exactly nineteen centuries earlier by Pliny
the Elder, to see if the Romans in their days had any information
about Oman or its people. I was not a little surprised when I found
Pliny referring to an Arabian people called the Macas (gentem
Arabiae Macas), and that their territory was found by crossing a
strait merely five miles wide separating them from the eastern
boundaries of the land ruled by the Persian kings, an area where
copper was mined. The narrow strait was quite clearly the one
known to us as the Hormuz Strait, and the Macas were thus the
people of northern Oman. That the Macas lived in a land known to
themselves and to the Sumerians of Antiquity as Makan would
make perfect sense indeed.

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