The Persian Gulf

The Akkadian name of the Persian Gulf, tâmtu šaplītu, “the Lower Sea,” written with the logogram A.AB.BA for tâmtu, “sea,” and KI.TA, “lower,” for šaplītu. It is the calque of the Sumerian a-ab-ba sig and its exact counterpart on the page for the Mediterranean, the tâmtu elītu or “Upper Sea.” To rule from one sea to the other was the boast of conquering kings from Sargon of Akkad to the Assyrian monarchs of the first millennium, who recorded washing their weapons in both.

tâmtu šaplītu is the Mesopotamian vantage made permanent, a name fixed not by colour, ownership, or the people on the shore but by position relative to the rivers that organized 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 Gulf that the Greeks would name for Persia and the Arabs for Fāris is, here, simply the lower of the two waters a king at the rivers’ middle could claim.

The Sumerian name of the Persian Gulf, a-ab-ba sig, “the lower sea,” built from a-ab-ba, “sea,” and sig, “low, down.” From the cities of southern Mesopotamia the Gulf lay downstream, at the mouths of the rivers, and it was paired with the a-ab-ba igi-nim, the “upper sea,” the Mediterranean far to the northwest. The pair appears in the royal-inscription formula by which a king claimed to rule the whole earth, from the upper sea to the lower; the Sargonic and Ur III rulers measured their dominion by reaching both.

This is the headwater of the entire “Lower Sea” tradition: the Akkadian tâmtu šaplītu is a direct calque of it, and through Akkadian the upper-lower framing became the standard Mesopotamian way of bracketing the world. Alone among the Gulf’s names, it is the one given by a people who actually lived on its shores, the Sumerians of Ur, Eridu, and Lagash whose boats worked the trade to Dilmun. The sea everyone else would name from a distance, for the empire on its rim, the people at its head named simply for being downstream.

The Akkadian marratu, “bitter,” naming the Persian Gulf for its salt taste. On the Babylonian Map of the World, the clay tablet BM 92687 of about the sixth century BCE, the band of water that rings the habitable earth is labelled nāru marratu, “the Bitter River,” four times, once introduced by the íd-determinative that marks a watercourse. The word is the same one used for the brackish marsh-water of the south, applied to the sea that closed off the world.

Where tâmtu šaplītu names the Gulf by position, marratu names it by sensation, the taste of the water itself, and in doing so it doubles as cosmology: on the map the real Gulf at the foot of the rivers and the world-encircling ocean beyond all lands are the same bitter water. The sea that bounded Mesopotamian trade also bounded the imaginable world, and the Babylonians drew it as a single bitter ring. The edge of the map and the edge of the sea-trade were, for them, one and the same brine.

The Old Persian word for the Gulf is no proper name but the plain drayah, “the sea,” in a relative phrase. On the stele Darius set up beside his canal between the Nile and the Gulf, the Suez inscription DZc, the king says he ordered the channel dug “from the river called Nile that flows in Egypt to the sea that goes from Persia,” drayah tya hacā Pārsā aitiy. The stele is quadrilingual, the Persian standing beside Elamite, Babylonian, and Egyptian versions of the same boast.

Tellingly, the Persians did not call the Gulf “the Persian Sea.” To them it was simply the sea, identified, when it had to be, by the fact that it began at their own coast. The relational phrase betrays the vantage: from inside the empire the water needed no national name, because it was the one the homeland touched. The “Persian” label that the Greeks, Romans, and Arabs fixed on it, and that the modern world still uses, describes a point of view the Persians never occupied.

The Greek name of the Gulf, Persikòs Kólpos, “the Persian gulf,” after Persia, the land on its northern shore. It is the standard term of the Greek geographers: Strabo and Ptolemy set out its bounds, and Arrian’s Indica, drawing on the admiral Nearchus, records the first Greek account of sailing it, the fleet Alexander sent home from the Indus feeling its way up the Persian coast to the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates.

This is the first naming of the Gulf from its far shore. To the Greeks the defining fact of the sea was the empire that ruled its northern coast, so the water became “Persian,” a vantage the opposite of the Mesopotamian “lower sea” and one the Persians themselves did not use. Through its Latin translation the name passed into every European language and became the modern Persian Gulf; the label the world now uses was set by outsiders who knew the sea as the edge of someone else’s empire.

The Latin name of the Gulf, Sinus Persicus, taken straight from the Greek Persikòs Kólpos and keeping its sense; Pliny and Pomponius Mela place it in the Roman world-picture as the great sea east of Arabia. The Romans never sailed it as the Greeks of Alexander’s fleet had, but they inherited the geographers’ name and the trade-knowledge behind it.

Sinus Persicus is the conduit by which the Greek name reached the modern world: through Latin and the European vernaculars built on it, the Gulf is “Persian” in English, French, and the rest. The naming that won out over the Mesopotamian “lower sea” and the Babylonian “bitter sea” was neither the oldest nor the most local but the one a Roman encyclopedist copied from a Greek map. The sea kept the name of an empire that had fallen centuries before the label was fixed for good.

The Arabic name of the Gulf, Baḥr Fāris, “the Sea of Persia,” the standard term of the medieval geographers. Al-Iṣṭakhrī and Ibn Ḥawqal, working in the tenth century, mapped it as the great sea of the eastern caliphate, its head at Baṣra and its coasts the route to India and China; their world maps make it one of the two seas, with the Mediterranean, that frame the Islamic world.

Baḥr Fāris carries the Greco-Roman “Persian” naming into Arabic, still fixing the sea to Fāris on its eastern shore even as its trade now ran to Arab and Persian ports under one caliphate. The continuity is striking: from Greek Persikòs Kólpos through Latin Sinus Persicus to Arabic Baḥr Fāris, three successive world-powers’ geographers all named the Gulf for the same far province, none of them for the Mesopotamian rivers that fed it. The outsiders’ name, once set, simply kept being handed on.