Geography and Naming
Located at the interface between Mediterranean Europe, Africa and Asia, the Red Sea is the saltiest and one of the hottest seas in the world and among its most distinctive maritime spaces.
The world’s northernmost tropical sea, it is a narrow strip of water about 2,000 kilometres long extending from Suez in the north to the Strait of Bab al-Mandab in the south; its average width is about 280 kilometres and it covers an area of approximately 438,000 square kilometres, which is roughly equivalent to the size of Iraq or Sweden. Until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 that connected the Red Sea with the Mediterranean, the basin’s only natural opening was at Bab al-Mandab, a strait about thirty kilometres wide. The climate of its arid littorals is less than pleasant, with torrid mean annual temperatures in the southern coastal areas of the basin. The northern part of the basin is practically rainless, while rainfall in the southern area is light and irregular. All along its coasts are shallow coral reefs and shoals, which make sailing particularly treacherous and require expert navigational skills. Some of its shores are bordered by steep mountains which make its coasts difficult to access from both land and sea, explaining in part the thin inhabitation of its littorals and the absence of large port cities with sizeable populations. No permanent rivers or streams flow into the Red Sea, further contributing to its high levels of salinity. That, coupled with high degrees of humidity, has not favoured the preservation of its urban coastal centres. For example, towns such as Mokha in Yemen, Sawakin in Sudan or Zayla in Somaliland, all of which were relatively important port towns as late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are nowadays partly in ruins and barely inhabited.[502]If, however, one is to consider the basin’s landed surroundings as forming part of the broader Red Sea area, then these arduous and challenging geographic conditions should not mask the more propitious and soundly populated lands behind these barren coasts: the rich Nile Valley, the fertile Ethio-Eritrean and Yemeni highland plateaux, and the Hijazi range of mountains with its oases.
Historically, polities in these hinterlands were not always sea-oriented, though they often established trading communities in outposts on the Red Sea coasts and their economic exigencies and political undertakings were at times played out in the broader Red Sea regional arena.For the sea-centred historian concerned with patterns of maritime mobility, the location of port towns and entrepots and spatial integration, the Red Sea’s single most critical feature is unquestionably its wind regime. It is characterised by northerly and northwesterly winds in the northern part of the basin throughout the year, and variable seasonal southerly winds (in winter) and northerly winds (in summer) in the southern part of the basin.[503] Winds in the Gulf of Aden are governed by the monsoon system: southwest from June to September and northeast from October to May. Inauspiciously impacting water currents, these wind systems made navigation in the Red Sea infamously onerous. In some cases, long-distance merchants went as far as preferring to move goods between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean via the terrestrial trade routes in western Arabia rather than risking the hazards of Red Sea navigation. In other cases, trade goods were moved by sea by local and regional cabotage networks that were relatively slow. All in all, the Red Sea wind regime was critical in shaping shipping patterns, the circulation of goods, trading spheres and the location of port towns. In more than one way it divided the Red Sea into two spheres of navigation with far-reaching historical implications. This held true, at least until the nineteenth-century introduction of steamship navigation (1830s) and opening of the Suez Canal (1869).
The multiple appellations given to the Red Sea are in some cases suggestive of the historical layering of political dominance or hegemonic aspirations, geographic constructions and naming practices, as well as culturally rooted imaginings (both external and local).
In the Hebrew Bible it is called Yam Suf (Heb.), or ‘Sea of Reeds’. In Antiquity, the Greek Erythra thalassa referred to a far broader aquatic space than the Red Sea, and included the entire Indian Ocean from Egypt to China. In the early Christian era some appellations referred to the ‘Persian Gulf’ (Persikds kolpos/jinus Persicus) and to the ‘Arabian Gulf’ (Arabios kolpos/ sinus Arabicus) to designate the Red Sea proper. Interestingly, from the ninth century onwards, Arab cartographers such as al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Hawqal or Yaqut al-Hamawi, named different parts of the Red Sea following their contiguous terrestrial areas, giving Bahr al-Kulzum, or ‘Sea of Clysma’ (ancient Suez), Bahr al-Hijaz, ‘Sea of Hijaz’, Bahr Mekka, ‘Sea of Mecca’, Bahr al-Yaman, ‘Sea of Yemen’, Bahr Habesh, ‘Sea of Abyssinia/Ethiopia’ and so on. Yaqut included the Gulf of Aden (Khalij Barbara) in the Red Sea. In Arabic we also have al-Halij al-'Arabi, ‘The Arabian Gulf’, Khalij Ayla, ‘Gulf of Ayla’ (or the Gulf of Aqaba), and in Turkish, Shab denizi, the ‘Coral Sea’. But our current usage is traced back to the ancient Erythra thalassa, and to the Romans, who translated that to Mare Rubrum. From these came al-Bahr al-Ahmar in Arabic, Bahra Ertora in Ethiopic (Ge'ez) and Qayyah Bahri in Tigrinya. It was only in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that European cartographers applied and fixed the appellation Mare Rubrum (‘Red Sea’) to refer to the maritime space that we now identify by that name (sometimes represented on European medieval maps in vermilion).[504]