Telephone poles and oil rigs stand silhouetted against an orange-tinted evening sky in Oman. Oman was once considered an Arabian Peninsula backwater, with only about six miles (3 kilometers) of paved roads as recently as 1970. Oil production, however, which began around 1967, quickly catapulted this sultanate of 3 million inhabitants to unimaginable prosperity.

(Text adapted from and photograph shot on assignment for, but not published in, “Oman,” May 1995, National Geographic magazine)