Long before any sultan or queen entered the picture, the islands had a place in the oldest navigational literature of the Indian Ocean. Ptolemy mentioned them in the second century AD, counting seven small islands lying in Khuriya Muriya Bay near the entrance to what he called the Persian Gulf -- most likely meaning the Gulf of Aden. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant's guide to the Indian Ocean trade routes written between AD 40 and 70, referred to them as the Isles of Zenobios. In antiquity they were also called Doliche. Sailors had been noting these islands for two thousand years before anyone thought to give them away, and for most of that time, the five rocky outcrops served primarily as landmarks: too dry for farming, too exposed for comfortable settlement, useful mainly for their position along the maritime routes connecting Arabia, East Africa, and India.

What the islands lacked in arable land, they made up for in bird excrement. Centuries of seabird colonies had deposited thick layers of guano, a substance prized as fertilizer in 19th-century agriculture. After the cession to Britain, a group of Liverpool entrepreneurs secured monopoly rights to harvest the deposits. Between 1855 and 1860, they extracted some 200,000 tons of guano, and at the peak of operations up to 52 ships crowded the waters around the archipelago. The local inhabitants, however, had not been consulted about any of this. They considered the guano theirs and resisted the miners. Questions arose in the British Parliament about whether granting monopoly extraction rights was wise or even legal. Meanwhile, the Red Sea and India Telegraph Company had its own plans for the islands: a cable station linking Aden to Karachi, established in 1858 but abandoned by 1861 after repeated cable failures. With the guano largely exhausted and the telegraph scheme collapsed, British interest in the islands evaporated almost as quickly as it had materialized.

In 1886, the islands were attached administratively to Aden, but the attachment was nominal at best. A British intelligence report from 1883 found fewer than 40 inhabitants on Al-Hallaniyah, the largest island. They lived in huts of unmortared stone with mat roofs, moving to caves during certain seasons. Their diet consisted of fish, shellfish, and goat's milk. They had no boats and no nets, fishing entirely with hooks, and traded dried fish for dates and rice with passing ships. The remoteness of the islands, their lack of anchorages, and the stubborn insistence of the inhabitants that they were subjects of the Sultan of Muscat meant that for decades British officials only sporadically visited. The islands shuffled between administrators: the Governor of Aden until 1953, then the British High Commissioner until 1963, then the Chief Political Resident of the Persian Gulf based in Bahrain. They were technically British territory, but the empire's grip was feather-light.

On November 30, 1967, Lord Caradon, Britain's Ambassador to the United Nations, announced that in accordance with the wishes of the local population, the Khuriya Muriya Islands would be returned to Muscat and Oman. The announcement drew objections from President Qahtan Muhammad al-Shaabi, who argued the islands should go to the newly formed People's Republic of South Yemen. The formal boundary between Oman and Yemen was not settled until 1992, when both nations agreed the islands fell on Oman's side of the line. Today the archipelago is part of the province of Shalim and the Hallaniyat Islands in the governorate of Dhofar. BirdLife International has designated the island group an Important Bird Area, recognizing breeding colonies of red-billed tropicbirds, tropical shearwaters, masked boobies, Socotra cormorants, sooty gulls, and bridled and greater crested terns. Mourning wheatears are resident, and Jouanin's petrels visit seasonally. The birds have reclaimed what the guano miners briefly disrupted, and the islands have returned to something close to the quiet obscurity they knew before a sultan made an impulsive gift.