With Qatar in the news these days, I decided to revisit the name-origin of this thumb-shaped peninsula in the lower Persian Gulf. I had written about this topic in February 2007[1] in which, faced with a lack of persuasive theories on the subject, I suggested that the name could have come from the word ghāter (ﻗﺎﻄﺮ) or a qatār (ﻗﻄﺍﺮ) (train of beasts of burden such as camels such as ghater (mule, donkey) in Persian as well as in Ottoman Turkish, but not in Arabic. It is time to take a closer look at the subject for a better explanation.

The name of the country known internationally as Qatar, written with a Q, and not with C or K or a G, is relatively speaking a modern development for a name that dates back to antiquity. On the map accompanying the work of the Danish explorer Carsten Neibuhr (d. 1815) the area approximating the present-day location of Qatar is marked as Gattar.[2]  According to the civil servant in the employ of the British India Government, John Gordon Lorimer (d. 1914), Qatar was frequently pronounced Gatar.[3] According to sources cited in Wikipedia’s article on Qatar other spellings of the name have included Katr, Kattar, and Guttur.[4] In French, the name Qatar is given also as Katar.[5]

The transcription of the sound represented by the letter q in Arabic for the Roman c (as a k sound) and the Greek k is not an oddity. For example, Constantinople of the Romans is Qustantiniya in Arabic,[6] and by the same token the Kypros of the Greeks (Cyprus in Roman)[7] is Qubrus in Arabic.[8] This begs the question, therefore, is Qatar the Arabic form of Catar or Katar, or the latter two are respectively the Roman and Greek forms of Qatar? And therefore which one came first?

In Arabic, Qatar in written as (ﻘﻄﺮ), which is a series of three consonants beginning with - ﻕ - which is called ghaf but is often transcribed as q and not gh according to some rule governing the Romanization of Arabic letters and sounds in English. The next letter is (ﻄ), which is called tā and is represented by the Roman letter t. The last letter in the series is (ﺮ), which is called raa and is represented by the Roman letter r. Without diacritical marks the sequence of q-t-r can be pronounced in different ways including, obviously, as qatar. A cursory look at an Arabic dictionary will reveal a variety of pronunciations for the q-t-r sequence, such as qatr/qatara (drips; line of camels in a single file; refine/distill, tug); qatr (train, railroad), qutr (region, tract of land, diameter of a circle), qatran (tar, resin).[9]

It is not surprising to see many sources seek to explain the etymology of Qatar by recourse to the q-t-r sequence and its homophones and homographs as found in the dictionary. For example, a Google search produces references to theories such as the name Qatar deriving from qatr, meaning ‘drip, exude’ with the speculation that this is  possibly connected to the pearling industry, or from qatrān, meaning ‘tar, resin’ with the speculation that this related to the country’s petroleum resources, or from qitar/qetar/qatār, meaning a “train”[of beats of burden like camels or maybe donkeys/mules] with the speculation that this related possibly to Qatar’s role in historical trade routes.[10] None of these possibilities are attested and therefore implausible.

If one were to go down the q-t-r rabbit’s hole there are far more plausible stations to explore when it comes to the connection of the name Qatar with the region’s pearling.  One begins with the notion that Qatar is connected to qatr meaning ‘drip’ in the context of the region’s pearling industry. First up, is the word qutr – in the sense of diameter, which could have related to the diameter of pearls fished in the waters off the peninsula. Yet, nothing in the literature about pearl fisheries in the Persian Gulf points to qutr as a term related to pearls.[11] However, more promising, is qatra which could have alluded to the translucence of the pearls associated with the region being as clear as a tear-drop قطرة دمع (qaratdam).   

The Wikipedia article on Qatar states that “Qatar may have gotten its name from the Arabic word from a type of informal transaction known as “muqāṭarah, in which goods were purchased in sealed containers without measuring or weighing the contents, for a fixed price,” a practice reportedly widespread in the region’s markets.[12] Whether this practice was current in the pearl trade is not known,

In the Arabic lexicon there is also the term qatara (ﻘﺘﺮﺓ), in which the t sound is represented by the latter (ﺖ) (tā) as opposed to the similar-sounding letter (ﻄ). This interchangeability between the letters is a common phenomenon as exemplified by the toponyms ﻄﻨﺐ and ﺗﻨﺐ (Tanb/Tonb Island) and ﻄﻬﺮﺍﻥ and ﺗﻬﺮﺍﻥ (Tehran), but risks distorting the meaning of the term written in its original form. For example: ﻄﻬﺮﺍﻥ (tahran) is a derivative of tahr, meaning “clean, virtuous ” in Arabic, an allusion to a part of Iran that was untouched by the infidel Mongols in the 13^th century; ﺗﻬﺮﺍﻥ on the other hand means nothing in Arabic or Persian!

The term qatara (ﻘﺘﺮﺓ) means “dust”[13] and a qutr (ﻗﻄﺮ), a heteronym of Qatar, means among other things “region, tract of land, zone, country.”[14] When taken together, they may well produce a toponym that relates to a sandy region, a destitute landscape. The following description of Katar by the Arabist William Gifford Palgrave (d. 1888) conveys Qatar’s landscape: “[M]iles on miles of low barren hills, bleak and sun-scorched, with hardly a single tree to vary their dry monotonous outline: [below which hills a] muddy beach extends for a quarter of a mile seaward in slimy quicksands, bordered by a rim of sludge and seaweed … If we look landwards beyond the hills, we see that by extreme courtesy may be called pasture land, dreary downs with twenty pebbles for every blade of grass.”[15]

The Roman scholar Gaius Plinius Secundus (d. 79 AD) aka Pliny the Elder is said to have written of a people in Arabia Felix known as Cataraei, which is probably a reference to a place called Carata (aka Katara) in Arabia Felix.[16] It is also said that the Greek-Roman geographer Caludius Ptolemy (d. ante 180 AD) produced the first known cartographical depiction of the Qatar peninsula, referring to it as Catara.[17]

Whether Ptolemy actually produced a cartographical depiction of the peninsula by that name is a matter of further research and verification, as his original map does not seem yo exists; duplicates from other eras abound! What is even more dubious is that Ptolemy would give the name as Catara. He wrote in Koine Greek in which the name-place would have been written as Katara. Therefore, any association of Ptolemaic map with the term Catara must be viewed as a Roman “enhancement” of latter-day maps attributed to Ptolemy and not to Ptolemy himself.

When placed in the context of the aforementioned words qatara (ﻘﺘﺮﺓ) and qutr (ﻗﻄﺮ), Ptolemy’s Katara assumes greater significance because in Greek the word ἐπικατάρατος  (epikataratose) is an adjective which means “cursed, damned,”[18] an appropriate appellation for a dry and sand-covered region, with minimal amenities, that thus “has been regarded in European literature as desolate and forbidding.”[19]

The spelling of the place-name with a c (as in Catara) is simply the Latin or Roman spelling of the Greek Katara, a place-name whose etymon was in all likelihood the Arabic qatara (ﻘﺘﺮﺓ), which by serendipity or design the Greeks found convenient to embrace, as it was a homophone (thus phonetically familiar) of κατάρα (katara), which they may have found as well to be an apt name for a forbidding landscape back in the day.