The volume Revisiting Hormuz gathers the proceedings of a Conference organized in March 2007 by
the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation through its Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris.
The year 2007 exactly five centuries after the Portuguese first landed on the island of Hormuz
seemed to the scientific coordinators Rui Manuel Loureiro and Dejanirah Couto a very
appropriate moment to bring together a large group of specialists who could establish the
current state of the art in field of the history of Portuguese interactions with Hormuz and the
Persian Gulf region. The chronological borders of the Conference quite naturally were
extended to the early decades of the 17th century to include the final departure of the
Portuguese from Hormuz in 1622 and subsequent developments. Although the focus of the Paris
Conference was supposed to be history in any of its political social economic or cultural
variants the complex nature of Portuguese interactions with Hormuz and Safavid Persia and
also the existence of an important monumental heritage of Portuguese origin in the Gulf area
made the presence of art historians architects and archaeologists desirable.
