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history of the persian gulf
The Persian Gulf is a unique
geographical phenomenon whose role in human affairs began in
remote antiquity and has continued to our own day.
Traditionally, this role was due to the place it occupies as
an avenue of cultures and trade; today, as the site of a
resource vital not only for the inhabitants of the countries
along its shores but for much of the modem world. The
Persian Gulf's unique geo-strategic position further enhances
its present importance.
The earliest recorded civilizations appeared near its shores
some five millennia ago, when the kingdoms of Elam and Sumer
blossomed at the head of the Persian Gulf in what is today
south-western Iran near the estuaries of the rivers Tigris
and Euphrates. There is evidence that they and their
successors, the Assyrians and Babylonians, had relations
with maritime principalities along the southern coast of the
Persian Gulf, and that trade in precious commodities grew.
By the time the Roman Empire became the great consumer of
Oriental luxuries such as spices, gems and pearls, the Sinus
Persicus functioned as one of the principal routes by which
this commerce moved. The spices and gems came from India and
the Orient further east; the pearls chiefly from the Persian
Gulf. Indeed, pearls were the famous luxury item exported
from there ever since antiquity until, by a curious
coincidence, they were replaced by oil in the first half of
the 20th century.
Even before this flow of Roman specie exchanged for Oriental
luxuries began, a political transformation had occurred in
the entire area. The last great Mesopotamian kingdom of
Babylon had been conquered by the Persians, whose earliest
historical kingdom, that of the Achaemenids, spread its rule
over much of the Middle East. They and their successors, the
Seleucids, Parthians and Sassanians, created an empire which
intermittently controlled the Persian Gulf. They sent
expeditions and acquired coastal regions also on the Arab
side, a process that in turn stimulated mutual interest and
movement of populations and occasional settlement and
dominance of some Persian segments by Arabs. This Arabo-Persian
maritime community asserted itself to an almost legendary
degree after the foundation of the Islamic Abbasid caliphate
at Baghdad in the middle of the 8th century. Masters of a
huge empire, the caliphs and their prosperous elites became
consumers of Oriental luxuries. Their own subjects, Persian
and Arab, were the merchants and mariners who now brought an
ever growing range of commodities not only from India but
even from China. Then as now, the romantic story of this
maritime trade fired the curiosity and imagination of the
public, and the adventures of Sindbad the Sailor became an
indelible part of the Thousand and One Nights cycle. The
texts of this tale, also known as “Arabian Nights,” are in
Arabic, but of a kind that reveals the Arabo-Persian
community from which they had sprung. Sindbad is a Persian
name, as are many basic terms adopted by Arabic: nakhuda for
captain, rahnama for sailing directions for example.
Moreover, ongoing archaeological research suggests that the
port of Siraf on the Persian coast was in the 9th and 10th
centuries among the principal termini of this seagoing
traffic, which included luxury ceramics from China.
The decline and fall of the Abbasid caliphate reduced the
prosperity and importance of this core of the Islamic Middle
East, and there followed a drop in the volume of
long-distance trade with the Orient. A revival, however,
came with the rise of Europe as an avid consumer of Oriental
luxuries, especially spices. Until the end of the Middle
Ages, the shippers and traders were the same Arabs and
Persians, but a fierce contest for this lucrative traffic
opened with the irruption of the Portuguese into the Indian
Ocean and the Persian Gulf at the turn of the 16th century.
The Portuguese seized, among other places, several ports in
the Persian Gulf, of which Hurmuz was the most important. On
the Muslim side, the Ottoman Empire made its entry into the
arena with the conquest of Iraq and attempts to challenge
the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf. Significantly, the Turks
failed where the English and Persians succeeded a century
later. By then—in 1622—the East India Company had sown the
seeds of the British empire of India, and in subsequent
centuries the Persian Gulf functioned as one of the two
arteries of Britain’s trade with its major colony (the other
was the all-maritime route around Africa). Great Britain
found it necessary to control the Persian Gulf for this
reason, and she successfully strove to establish her
dominant position there during the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the first decade of the 20th century Britain added a new
dimension to her efforts: search for oil. This in turn
brings us to the last and most dramatic stage in the history
of the Persian Gulf.
A simple enumeration of the countries sharing the Persian
Gulf's coasts and waters offers an evocative panorama of
contemporary history: Iran, with the longest shoreline and
some of the busiest ports along the northeastern coast; Iraq
at the head of the Persian Gulf, then Kuwait, Saudi Arabia,
Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. All
these countries, in varying degrees, are blessed with vast
oil reserves lying along the coasts both under the ground on
land and below the sea bottom. It is this vital resource
that has propelled the Persian Gulf into the limelight of
world events, and the story of its discovery, development
and struggle over its exploitation makes for fascinating
reading. It began almost a century ago, when in 1908 British
prospectors struck oil at the Persian site of Suleymaniye.
For nearly two generations, until the early 1950s, the
province of Khuzistan was the center of production,
processing and exporting oil, and the Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company had the lion’s share of this lucrative business.
Geologists rightly suspected, however, that oil deposits
might exist in many other parts of the Persian Gulf area.
During the 1930s, a number of finds were made on the Arab
side from Iraq all the way to Oman. This time mainly
American companies seized the initiative, but until World
War II production remained relatively modest. The war and
the quickened pace of consumption in the industrial world,
especially in the United States led to further development
of these sources, but the main stimulus for the sudden and
vertiginous development of oil wells on the Arab side of the
Persian Gulf came from the drama of Iran’s attempt to
acquire a fairer share of its wealth. Great Britain and the
United States thwarted Dr. Mossadegh’s heroic struggle, and
in the process the production and export of oil from Iran
was temporarily halted. That in turn created a windfall for
the companies exploiting the oil fields on the Arab side,
and their prospectors discovered still more deposits whose
yield has led to today’s fabulous wealth of Saudi Arabia and
the other principalities along the Persian Gulf
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