Map of Sheikh Othman by Havildar Niyaz Muhammad Khan 18th Infantry.

£2,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A seemingly unrecorded map of Sheikh Othman and vicinity, the planned modern urban district that for decades served as the commercial centre and army HQ of the British Aden Protectorate, in Southern Yemen. It would have been printed in only a handful of examples for restricted use by senior Indian Army officers and colonial officials which accounts for its low survival rate. Based on a scientific survey conducted by the Islamic cartographer Havildar [Sergeant] Niyaz Muhammad Khan of the 18th Infantry of the Indian Army, in 1913. Two years later, Sheikh Othman played a key role in the British efforts to repel an Ottman attack upon Aden, which not only threatened Britain’s control of South Yemen, but its access to the vital Suez Canal. Aden’s natural harbour, from which it guards the main shipping lanes across the Arabian Sea towards India, and the entrances to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, had historically been controlled by a variety of powers. During the mid-eighteenth century, Aden came under the rule of the newly formed Sultanate of Lahij, a powerful and wealthy state that dominated most of southern Yemen. From the late eighteenth century, the British East India Company (EIC) coveted Aden as a naval base for trade in the Indian Ocean and to suppress the Arab pirates that plagued their shipping. In 1839, the EIC mounted a successful naval expedition to that seize Aden and its vicinity from the Sultanate of Lahij. From that point, the strip of territory around the harbou

• Binding: Hardcover

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