Muscat Flag

The flag of Muscat is the simplest kind of flag there is: a plain red field, with no charge, no border and no lettering. The red is a deep scarlet, catalogued as #DB161B.

It is not a variant of the national flag of Oman. Oman flies white over green with a red band and the national emblem of crossed swords over a khanjar. Muscat flies the plain red cloth that came before all of that.

The meaning is in the history rather than in the design. Plain red was the banner of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, the state that took its name from this city, and the colour is that of the Al Bu Said dynasty that has ruled since the eighteenth century.

Because there is nothing on the cloth, there is nothing to date it by, which is part of why it survived unchanged for so long.

Until 1970 the plain red banner was the flag of the whole Sultanate. That year Sultan Qaboos bin Said deposed his father, and a new national flag was adopted by royal decree on 17 December 1970: the old red field gained white and green bands at the fly and the national emblem in the canton. Between 1970 and 1995 the middle band was narrowed to the proportions used today.

The red cloth stayed attached to the city. The reach of that flag was once considerable: Commons records it in use by Omani sultans in eastern Congo at the end of the nineteenth century, a reminder of how far the Omani maritime empire ran down the east African coast.