Dhofari

The Dhofari are the people of Dhofar, monsoon-watered coast and mountains of southwestern Oman around Salalah and Mirbat, once the world's chief frankincense country. Its harbors, first Khor Rori and later medieval Zafar at Al-Baleed, shipped incense across the Indian Ocean as far as China; Marco Polo around 1300 called Zafar a flourishing Muslim city ruled from Aden, and Ibn Battuta and Zheng He later called there.

The mountains hold the Shahri, regarded as the region's original inhabitants, speaking the South Arabian tongue of Jibbali and herding cattle, while coastal towns use the distinctive Dhofari Arabic dialect.

In the Middle Ages Dhofar passed under the Kathiri sultans and then the Qara mountain tribes; Zafar declined in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through silting harbors and Portuguese and Ottoman raids. By the early nineteenth century local sheikhs ruled under the suzerainty of Muscat's sultans.