The Mediterranean Sea

The Akkadian name for the sea, tâmtu elītu, “the Upper Sea,” written with the logogram A.AB.BA for tâmtu, “sea,” and the qualifier elītu, “upper.” From the standpoint of Mesopotamia, looking out along the rivers, the Mediterranean lay up and to the northwest, and it was paired with the tâmtu šaplītu, the “Lower Sea,” the Persian Gulf to the southeast. To reach “the Upper Sea” was the boast of conquering kings: Sargon of Akkad and the Assyrian monarchs after him measured their dominion by having washed their weapons in it.

tâmtu elītu is the Mesopotamian vantage on the sea, named not by color or ownership but by position relative to the rivers that defined the world. Upper and lower, the two seas bracketed the land between them, and to have touched both was to have reached the edges of the earth. The Mediterranean, which the Egyptians saw as a green expanse at their doorstep, is here a far horizon, the upper limit of a kingdom measured from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.

The Egyptian name for the sea, Wꜣḏ-wr, “the Great Green,” from wꜣḏ, “green,” and wr, “great.” It named the great water beyond the papyrus marshes north of the Delta, the Mediterranean as the Egyptians met it at the edge of their land, though the term could also stretch to the Red Sea and large bodies of water generally. The “green” is the color of the sea itself, and perhaps of the marsh-fringe through which an Egyptian reached it.

Wꜣḏ-wr is the Egyptian standpoint on the shared sea, named, characteristically, by its color. Where the Mesopotamians fixed the sea by direction and the Romans by ownership, the Egyptians named it by how it looked, the great green expanse at the northern limit of the black land and the red. It is the first of this page’s many vantage-names, each civilization meeting the one sea at its own shore and naming it for what struck them most: to Egypt, that it was green and vast.

The Hebrew name for the sea, ha-Yām ha-Gādōl, “the Great Sea,” the standard biblical term for the Mediterranean, which formed the western boundary of the land of Israel. It marks the edge of the Promised Land in the territorial descriptions of Numbers and Joshua, “the Great Sea shall be your border,” and the prophets use it for the western limit of the world. The Hebrews, hill-dwellers more than seafarers, knew it chiefly as a boundary, the great water at the back of the land.

ha-Yām ha-Gādōl names the sea by its sheer size, the simplest and most widely shared of the descriptions on this page. The Greek scriptures translate it literally as hē Megálē Thálassa, and the same idea, “the great sea,” recurs in the Egyptian “Great Green” and the Latin Mare Magnum; more peoples called it simply “the big sea” than called it anything else. To Israel, on its eastern shore, it was above all the sea, the one that mattered, large enough to need no other name than that it was great.

The Greek names for the sea, of which the most basic was simply hē thálassa, “the Sea,” for to the Greeks, who lived around it and upon it, it was the sea, needing no qualifier. When one was needed they called it hē Megálē Thálassa, “the Great Sea,” as the Septuagint renders the Hebrew, or hē kath’ hēmâs thálassa, “the sea around us,” or hē hēmetéra thálassa, “our sea.” The Greeks were the sea’s people more than any other, and their casual naming of it reflects that intimacy.

The Greek case is the page’s exception, the one shore for which the sea was not a boundary or a far horizon but home. Where the Egyptians named it by color and the Mesopotamians by direction, the Greeks largely declined to name it at all beyond “the sea,” because for a Greek there was no other sea worth distinguishing it from. That a people could call so vast a thing simply the sea, with no further mark, is the surest sign of how completely the Mediterranean belonged to the Greek world, and how completely the Greek world belonged to it.

The Roman name for the sea, Mare Nostrum, “Our Sea,” beside the more neutral Mare Internum, “the Inner Sea,” and Mare Magnum, “the Great Sea.” The possessive was earned: by the end of the Republic Rome controlled every shore of the Mediterranean, and the sea became, uniquely in its history, the inland lake of a single empire, ringed entirely by Roman provinces. Mare Nostrum is the name of that moment, when one power could call the whole sea its own.

Mare Nostrum is the page’s one name of ownership, and it could be spoken truthfully only once, by Rome at its height. Every other people on these shores named the sea as a neighbor, a boundary, or a horizon; Rome alone named it as a possession, because Rome alone ever possessed it whole. The phrase has rung down history as a slogan of Mediterranean empire, revived in the modern age by powers that wished to claim the sea again; but it was only ever literally true of the Rome that first said it, the one state to which the Mediterranean really did, for a few centuries, entirely belong.

The Latin name that prevailed, Mare Mediterrāneum, “the sea amid the lands,” from medius, “middle,” and terra, “land.” The adjective mediterrāneus in classical Latin meant “inland, away from the sea,” but applied to the sea itself it was understood as “the sea in the midst of the earth,” the sea enclosed by the three continents. It came into use in late antiquity, and Isidore of Seville, in the seventh century, explains the name as given because the sea flows through the middle of the land, per mediam terram.

Mare Mediterrāneum is the name that won, and it won precisely because it claimed nothing. Where Mare Nostrum asserted ownership and Baḥr al-Rūm named a master, “the sea in the middle of the lands” describes only a fact of geography that no one could dispute: that this sea sits at the center of the known world. It was the one name acceptable to all the sea’s heirs because it belonged to none of them, and through Latin and the European languages it became the universal name, Mediterranean, the middle sea of a world that had agreed, at last, only on where it lay.

The Arabic name for the sea, Baḥr al-Rūm, “the Sea of the Romans,” after the Rūm, the Byzantines, whose empire held its northern and eastern shores when the Arabs came to it. The geographers also called it al-Baḥr al-Shāmī, “the Syrian Sea,” for its eastern end, and a part of it the Sea of the Maghreb; in modern Arabic it has become al-Baḥr al-Abyaḍ al-Mutawassiṭ, “the White Middle Sea.” But to the classical Arabic writers it was above all the Romans’ sea, the water of the Christian power across it.

Baḥr al-Rūm names the sea, like Mare Nostrum, by a people, but by the rival’s people rather than one’s own. To the early Islamic world the Mediterranean was the frontier with Byzantium, a contested water whose far shore was enemy ground, and so the Arabs named it not for themselves but for the Romans who still ruled much of it. It is the mirror-image of the Roman name: where Rome had called it our sea, the Arabs called it theirs, the sea of the Romans, naming the same water by the master they had not yet displaced.