Desert coast; stone village of Faghara, close to Ash Shuwaymiyah. Outside each house is a small clearing used for prayer in the absence of a mosque. A single upright stone serves as the qibla, indicating the direction of Makkah. Faghara was occupied until well into the 1970s by Bataharah fishermen.
Scanned from the book The Craft Heritage of Oman; 2003; Neil Richardson & Marcia Dorr
Formerly a tribe small in number (in a tuberculosis survey I carried out in 1978, they were only some 300 people), oral tradition relates that their tribal name, “Bait Bathā” or “Bait Bathār”, comes from the word ‘baṭḥ’, ‘earth, dust’ in their language, a name, they claim, that reflects their much greater original number. Their own history says that ‘wars with the Persians and the Portuguese’ were the principal cause of this drastic drop in number, and point out the extensive burial sites and mounds which are said to be the result of these conflicts. SOURCE
The book The Craft Heritage of Oman also mentions a series of large, unusual graves nearby the stone village, believed to contain the remains of Portuguese invaders killed by the sword in the early 16th century when Albuquerque sailed along the Omani coast seeking conquest.
