| Persian Gulf Naming Dispute |
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Since the 1960s, there has been movement in some Arab countries to refer to the Persian Gulf as the " Arabian Gulf ", and it has become an ongoing Naming Dispute . In possibly every map printed before 1960 and in most modern international treaties, documents and maps, this body of water is known by the name "Persian Gulf", reflecting traditional usage since the Greek geographers Strabo and Ptolemy , and the geopolitical realities of the time with a powerful Persian Empire ( Iran ) comprising the whole northern coastline and a scattering of local Emirate s on the Arabian coast. But by the 1960s and with the rise of Arab Nationalism , some Arab countries, including the ones bordering the Persian Gulf, adopted widespread use of the term "الخليج العربي" (''al-Khaleej al-Arabee''; Arab Gulf or Arabian Gulf) to refer to this waterway; this is the standard usage in modern Arabic . This coupled with the decreasing influence of Iran on the political and economic priorities of the English speaking Western World led to increasing acceptance, in regional politics and the mostly Petroleum -related business, of the new alternative naming convention "Arabian Gulf". Until the end of the 19th century, "Arabian Gulf" has been used to refer to what is now known as the Red Sea . This usage was adopted into Europeans maps from, among others, Strabo and Ptolemy who called the Red Sea, ''Sinus Arabicus'' (Arabian Gulf). Both of these Greek geographers reserved "Persian Gulf" to refer to the body of water between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran. In the early Islamic era, Muslim geographers did the same, calling the body بحر فارس (''Bahr Faris''; Persian Sea) or "خليج فارس" (''Khalij Faris''; Persian Gulf). Later, most European maps from the early Modern Times onwards used similar terms (''Sinus Persicus'', ''Persischer Golf'', ''Golfo di Persia'' and the like, in different languages) when referring to the Persian Gulf, possibly taking the name from the Islamic sources. For a short while in the 17th Century , the term "Gulf of Basra" was also being used, which made a reference to the town of Basra (Iraq), an important trading port of the time. |
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