The Omani coast has been an important centre of maritime trade for a very long time. The earliest ocean-going ships constructed there would have been made of reed or papyrus bundles (the same technique was used by Thor Heyerdahl to build the Tigris in 1978, and images of that vessel give a good idea of what these early vessels looked like.)

The evidence suggests, however, that plank-built ships were being constructed in the region by the end of the Bronze Age (c.1200 BCE), and by the eighth century CE, sewn-plank Omani ships, based in what was by then the Abbasid caliphate, were making return sea voyages all the way to the southern ports of Tang China. The remains of one of the vessels involved in this trade, discovered off the shores of an Indonesian island and dubbed the Belitung Wreck, give us an excellent idea of how the ships were made. Analysis of the surviving timber shows it to have come largely from Africa, though some parts were made from rosewood and juniper from the subcontinent.

Vosmer depicts an advanced maritime trade capable of delivering substantial quantities of imported timber to Oman by this period:

Timber resources, plentiful in India, Sri Lanka, and sub-Sahahran Africa, began to be exploited, with evidence for imported timber in Mesopotamia and Arabia appearing in the archaeological records in the late Holocene. By Islamic times, the international trade in timber was thriving.

Similarly, the sailcloth used in this period was made from imported Indian cotton as well as from Arabian wool.

Sources

Regina Krahl et al (eds), Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds (2010)

Tom Vosmer, 'The development of boatbuilding technologies and typologies,' in Abdulrahman Al Salemi and Eric Staples, Oman: A Maritime History (2017)