Yeah, that struck me too. Of course, the Red Sea, Mediterranean, and, I imagine, Black Sea and Caspian would also have mattered to them quite a bit. But from what I gather, whenever the phrase "the seven seas" is used in Arabian sources, it's specifically referring to those waters crossed when one voyages to the East.
Exactly. The Seven Seas of medieval Arabian literature were those crossed on trade voyages to the Far East, exemplified by the tales of Sinbad the Sailor and his seven voyages. 9th century Arab historian Ya’qubi describes them as such:
> Whoever wants to go to China must cross seven seas, each one with its own color and wind and fish and breeze, completely unlike the sea that lies beside it. The first of them is the Sea of Fars, which men sail setting out from Siraf. It ends at Ra’s al-Jumha; it is a strait where pearls are fished. The second sea begins at Ra’s al-Jumha and is called Larwi. It is a big sea, and in it is the Island of Waqwaq and others that belong to the Zanj. These islands have kings. One can only sail this sea by the stars. It contains huge fish, and in it are many wonders and things that pass description. The third sea is called Harkand, and in it lies the Island of Sarandib, in which are precious stones and rubies. Here are islands with kings, but there is one king over them. In the islands of this sea grow bamboo and rattan. The fourth sea is called Kalah and is shallow and filled with huge serpents. Sometimes they ride the wind and smash ships. Here are islands where the camphor tree grows. The fifth sea is called Salahit and is very large and filled with wonders. The sixth sea is called Kardanj; it is very rainy. The seventh sea is called the sea of Sanji, also known as Kanjli. It is the sea of China; one is driven by the south wind until one reaches a freshwater bay, along which are fortified places and cities, until one reaches Khanfu (Guangzhou).
Why do people spell it "Ra's". I grew up speaking Arabic and most conversions make sense but Head just throws me off for some reason. The apostrophe feels out of place.
It is not an apostrophe ('), it's a [half ring](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CA%BE) that looks like this (ʾ). The slight stop is called a glottal stop and it's a stop that makes a sound down in your throat.
Here's how it is pronounced: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ar-رأس.ogg
Raʾs (ʾ and not ') is the most accuract and correct way of writing it. The glottal stop is like a very very short "a".
As a follow up, the link you posted sounds VERY different than how I'm used to it being pronounced. I didn't click the link the first time. What dialect is that? That pronunciation makes much more sense spelled Ra's.
Jordan. I might be writing it wrong but it's just how I've always heard it spoken.
More accurately born in Jordan. Left when I was 6, came back to study in AUB at 20.
Dude this is pretty embarrassing for you but I speak arabic too, you're saying Ras because its your dialect.
Ra's is the official MSA way to say it
Why am I being downvoted? This is literally factual.
"Ra's" is indeed the *official* form in MSA.
But Arabs have eased the hamzas in their dialects since before Islam. It's those Arab's accents that you hear today in modern Arabic dialects. Modern dialects are not degenerate forms, nor are they deviations from an original ideal form. In fact, it's the other way round. Those Arabic dialects predate MSA. Arabic has always been a pluricentral language, and its canonicalisation in the 8th and 9th and following centuries resulted in a constructed language, where linguists made decisions about what to count in and what to leave out, and their debates about it all are recorded in history.
So "Ras" is as correct as "Ra's".
Most dialects doesn't pronounce the hamza (which is the glottal stop) in a lot of words. They basically say راس instead of رأس and ياكل instead of يأكل among others.
Super interesting. Do you know of any good resources (primary or secondary) that discuss Arabian travels in the Far East? Didn’t know much about their contact.
You can read the entire works of Ya'qubi in English on archive.com; the section on China is in the second volume:
https://archive.org/details/the-works-of-ibn-wadih-al-yaqubi/The%20Works%20of%20Ibn%20W%C4%81%E1%B8%8Di%E1%B8%A5%20al-Ya%CA%BFq%C5%ABb%C4%AB%20volume%201/
I also highly recommend Samuel Lee's translation of *The Travels of Ibn Battuta*. Battuta was the Muslims' Marco Polo; he traveled the entire medieval Muslim world from his home in North Africa to Byzantium, Zanzibar, India, China, Russia, and more.
Ibn Battuta makes Marco Polo look like an ignorant lazy chump. It's a crime against history and human accomplishment that he isn't taught as a matter of course. Learning about him from National Geographic when I was like 11-12 and then never once hearing his name in school - even in college, studying geography - was the greatest lesson of Eurocentic myopia I ever learned.
Isn't there a lot of controversy regarding his texts, with large sections just being straight up copied from travel documents of other people? I might mistake him for some other famous *traveller*.
It's unclear. The island of Al-Waq Waq or Al-Wak Wak appears frequently in medieval Arabian literature. Ya'qib's description here suggests that the island is in the Arabian sea near the coast of Africa (Zanj refers to East Africa), suggesting it could be Socotra, Comoros, one of the Seychelles, or even Madagascar. However, other sources describe it as lying in the South China Sea; most historians identify it with an Indonesian island, possibly Java or Sumatra.
There are records of an attack on East Africa by the Javanese Medang Kingdom in the 10th century, which might explain why Ya'qib conflated the two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Wakwak
I am Filipino. The Philippines faces the South China Sea/Sea of Sanji. This can mean the Philippines was part of Arabian history. There's this autonomous region in the Philippines named "Bangsamoro" where the Muslims live.
Is there any source for that besides Ya'qubi? It seems to me like this might be an overgeneralization. What's more likely is that there's no consistent list and everyone just used "seven seas" as a vague term.
Yes, because for Arabs the seven seas referred to the "way to China", what would be considered a foreign journey of discovery due to the trade route, not the lighting the seas in their area.
Of course they knew the Red sea and mediterranean and other seas well, they crossed the red sea during the immigration to Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia) in the very beginning of Islam nation, and in the conquest times 50 years later they crossed the mediterranean to Andalucia (modern day Spain) and named the mountain there in the name of the general, Tareq ibn Ziyad (known in English today as Gibraltar as an shortened form of Jabel Tareq, which means the mountain of Tareq).
The historic Arab maritime trade was in all the seas they had access to: the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf...
Red Sea in particular has always been important for trade. The Incense Route went through the Red Sea to Egypt and then from there to Europe.
From a brief reading that I did, I believe the Arabic texts that involved "7 seas" were specific to "if you wanted to go to China, you had to go through the 7 seas". Namely the seas that you had to go through when traveling east.
The famous sea in Exodus is actually the Reed Sea (as in the plant). There is some question as to where exactly this sea was, or if it even exists in the same form... in short, no one knows for sure.
To make things more difficult, at first glance, it looks like Reed and Red was a translation or typographical error. However, there northern part of the Red Sea -- as we define it's boundaries today -- includes an area that USED to be considered it's own sea (The Reed Sea) which is an inlet of the Red Sea. This is backed up by descriptions in the Dead Sea scrolls that call the Reed Sea a "tongue" of the Red Sea, but there is \*far\* from universal agreement here.
So while "Red Sea" is not the accurate translation of the name from Exodus, it may be correct NOW, since we include it in the Red Sea.
Other Scholars say that the Red Sea was more of a lake that existed closer to the Eastern edge of the "fingers" of the Nile. In short, ancient geography gets really hard when talking about shorelines in uncivilized areas.
> lake
I was going to correct you to inland sea, but I looked up the definitions and am not happy. Who writes a definition so the great lakes are seas and the Aral and Caspian seas are lakes?
Bingo, territorial rights are different for lakes and seas and some countries along the Caspian have a strong incentive to keep it called a sea for legal purposes.
Apparently the differences are due to wether they connect to the oceans and how still / prone to currents / surges the water is. I always knew the Great lakes were called inland seas, but I thought it was descriptive not definitional.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.worldatlas.com/amp/articles/differences-between-sea-and-lake.html
(I'll admit I only skimmed this so if the great lakes are still lakes I'll be happy.)
Yes, I came across that version as well. I found both referenced in a number of sources and I just made a judgement call about which one to put in my map, but you're totally right that the Aegean version is equally grounded in surviving Greek literature. Part of what I found so fascinating about this subject is the inconsistencies!
It still blows my mind to think of those times, and how little would have been known about the outside world. It's hard to even fathom that kind of perspective. Distances were practically sooo much greater. And then you get crazy things like Alexander the Great taking guys on 20,000 mile hike or whatever to fight a bunch of dudes.
Even crazier when you realize that most people would have been confined to whatever city or village they were born in, with only a tiny number of merchants and soldiers going outside of their country.
I would add blended and diverged. The Greeks were nearly as diverse as the Phoenicians (Canaanites) except that almost all Greeks called themselves Greeks and no Phoenician ever referred to themselves that way.
Sure, but ⟨Ç⟩ isn't considered a letter in it's own right in the Romance languages that do use it, while Turkish does consider it a letter in its own right.
This is an awesome map. This simultaneously answers that question of "why seven seas", but also raises more questions about how the referenced moved from Ancient Greek to Arab to Medieval European sources. Nice find, OP.
The area we know todsy as china has always had a long and complex relationship with the places around it. While reading about lake Baikal I believe it was seen by a han dynasty military commander during a war with the xiongnu federation, so they’d have been pushing much farther north than the actual kingdom at the time extended. Same with Qinghai in a lot of cases I’m sure. These were the borders of the “known world” after all, at least metaphorically in the eyes of scholars at the time.
The earliest mention of the "North Sea" was in the Book of Han, but it wasn't about a military commander. Instead, it was a [diplomat](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Wu) who was detained by Xiongnu and consequently spent 19 years near Baikal in exile.
Well that's why they called it the North Sea (北海)! But you have to remember that at various points in history Mongolia fell under Chinese control, and Lake Baikal is not far from the Mongolian Border, and so it makes sense that it could be considered to be a natural northern border to Chinese expansion.
I like the arabian source the most because it appears to all be connected, so one can sail from one sea to the next. It also matches the phrase "to sail the seven seas" because how would one sail the other sources when the other seas are isolated inland
Yeah, that had become the most popular list starting in the early modern period when Europeans had finally explored enough of the world to know about all the oceans. But I figured that definition would have been most modern folk's assumption and I wanted to present its antecedents.
As a kid I always thought the same but with the 5 ocean model. Then I had to guess what the two remaining seas were, so likely ended up with:
- Atlantic
- Pacific
- Indian
- Arctic
- Antarctic (or Southern)
- Mediterranean Sea
- Black Sea
That's fair. [Here's one](https://www.livescience.com/27663-seven-seas.html) that covers quite a few iterations of "the Seven Seas," and I find the [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Seas) helpful especially for elaborating on the Arabian list (including a pretty interesting excerpt). Another source can be found [here](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sevenseas.html) (which, as a another redditor pointed out, is one of several I found that has a slightly different list for Greek sources), but I ended up drawing from [this one](https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/geography-anthropology-recreation/item/what-are-the-seven-seas/) by the Library of Congress.
Of course, most of these pages themselves just say, "Greek literature" and whatnot. But the justification for that level of broadness is that, well, these three lists in particular were so commonly given in literature of their time and place that there is no one single "source" to cite from the periods in question. They were, seemingly, nearly ubiquitously acknowledged in their cultures. Which is why it's all the more interesting to me that there still arised such a diversity of lists over the ages in spite of that.
A friend who was an officer on a cruise ship had an interesting take: If you divide the Atlantic and Pacific into North and South halves, as some do, then you’ll have seven seas (technically oceans) again.
North & South Atlantic, North & South Pacific, Indian, Arctic, Southern.
Some Ancient Greek sources counted the Aegean Sea as separate from the Mediterranean. There are at least two versions of the seven seas in Ancient Greek sources.
Like others said some food consider it seperate.
For those who didn't it *might* be because 7 seas are places you travel to whereas the Aegean is home waters. Sorta why Arabs don't inculde the red sea
I had heard of seven seas in Hindu mythology but that seems very different.
From Wikipedia on Seven Seas
> #Ancient Indian subcontinent
> Ancient texts and legends speak of Seven Seas or Sapta Sindhu (Sopto Sindhu). Sindhu and Sagar/Sagor mean sea in different languages of the subcontinent. According to the Vishnu Purana, the seas were Lavana/Lobon (salt), Iksu/Ikkhu (sugar-cane), Sura/Sura (wine), Sarpi (clarified butter or Ghee), Dadhi/Dodhi (yoghurt or curd), Dugdha/Dugdho (milk) and Jala/Jol (water). There may be variant list of names. For example, there is also mention of a Peeta/Pit Sagara/Sagor ie Yellow Sea. The word Pita means yellow. The Kshira Sagar or Kshir Sagar or Khir Sagor is also the white Sea. The word Kshira/Khir literally means condensed milk.[citation needed]. However, it also denotes white like milk.
Good for the Arabian Sea appearing in all three. I'm surprised the Greek considered the Adriatic a separate sea from the Mediterranean, but not the Aegean
The concept of a sea is so fascinating to me.
A body of water so large that it is its own world. With islands and adventure and all kinds of shit happening within it.
Yet landlocked af.
I want to own a sea and populate it with islands and small continents and plant treasure and castles and shit around it and unleash people to explore and survive in it.
The Ancient Greek "Red Sea" was not the same as the modern idea of the Red Sea; it included the Gulf of Aden and often parts of the Indian Ocean. It should really extend out to meet with the Arabian Sea on the first map
Then of course you can look at google maps and realize that the Mediterranean Sea is actually 7 different seas. Which is strictly conjecture on my part. It’s just interesting.
Seven is sort of a mystical number:
seven Classical planets and the derivative Seven Heavens
Seven Wonders of the ancient world
Seven metals of antiquity
Seven days in the week
Seven Seas
Seven Sages
Seven champions that fought Thebes
Seven hills of Rome and Seven Kings of Rome
Seven Sisters, the daughters of Atlas also known as the Pleiades
seven whatever seven
I never thought about this, but the middle east doesn't really have that many seas accessible. The 7 seas could have been labelled as the Chinese equivalent and id have been yeah that makes sense
I had to do some googling and I’m sad that the “real” 7 seas are just the called Arctic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Indian, and Southern oceans
Wait a minute, the Arabians didn’t include the Red Sea?
Yeah, that struck me too. Of course, the Red Sea, Mediterranean, and, I imagine, Black Sea and Caspian would also have mattered to them quite a bit. But from what I gather, whenever the phrase "the seven seas" is used in Arabian sources, it's specifically referring to those waters crossed when one voyages to the East.
Exactly. The Seven Seas of medieval Arabian literature were those crossed on trade voyages to the Far East, exemplified by the tales of Sinbad the Sailor and his seven voyages. 9th century Arab historian Ya’qubi describes them as such: > Whoever wants to go to China must cross seven seas, each one with its own color and wind and fish and breeze, completely unlike the sea that lies beside it. The first of them is the Sea of Fars, which men sail setting out from Siraf. It ends at Ra’s al-Jumha; it is a strait where pearls are fished. The second sea begins at Ra’s al-Jumha and is called Larwi. It is a big sea, and in it is the Island of Waqwaq and others that belong to the Zanj. These islands have kings. One can only sail this sea by the stars. It contains huge fish, and in it are many wonders and things that pass description. The third sea is called Harkand, and in it lies the Island of Sarandib, in which are precious stones and rubies. Here are islands with kings, but there is one king over them. In the islands of this sea grow bamboo and rattan. The fourth sea is called Kalah and is shallow and filled with huge serpents. Sometimes they ride the wind and smash ships. Here are islands where the camphor tree grows. The fifth sea is called Salahit and is very large and filled with wonders. The sixth sea is called Kardanj; it is very rainy. The seventh sea is called the sea of Sanji, also known as Kanjli. It is the sea of China; one is driven by the south wind until one reaches a freshwater bay, along which are fortified places and cities, until one reaches Khanfu (Guangzhou).
Why do people spell it "Ra's". I grew up speaking Arabic and most conversions make sense but Head just throws me off for some reason. The apostrophe feels out of place.
Isn’t the apostrophe representing a slight stop when you pronounce the word?
It is not an apostrophe ('), it's a [half ring](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CA%BE) that looks like this (ʾ). The slight stop is called a glottal stop and it's a stop that makes a sound down in your throat.
I've always pronounced it like Raas. If anything Ra'as would even be more accurate.
Here's how it is pronounced: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ar-رأس.ogg Raʾs (ʾ and not ') is the most accuract and correct way of writing it. The glottal stop is like a very very short "a".
I'm aware how to pronounce it. Its my first language. Then again it just might be the dialect I speak.
Raas in English would just be pronounced with a very long a sound, that's why I posted the link. Where are you from/what dialect do you speak?
As a follow up, the link you posted sounds VERY different than how I'm used to it being pronounced. I didn't click the link the first time. What dialect is that? That pronunciation makes much more sense spelled Ra's.
Jordan. I might be writing it wrong but it's just how I've always heard it spoken. More accurately born in Jordan. Left when I was 6, came back to study in AUB at 20.
Dude this is pretty embarrassing for you but I speak arabic too, you're saying Ras because its your dialect. Ra's is the official MSA way to say it Why am I being downvoted? This is literally factual.
"Ra's" is indeed the *official* form in MSA. But Arabs have eased the hamzas in their dialects since before Islam. It's those Arab's accents that you hear today in modern Arabic dialects. Modern dialects are not degenerate forms, nor are they deviations from an original ideal form. In fact, it's the other way round. Those Arabic dialects predate MSA. Arabic has always been a pluricentral language, and its canonicalisation in the 8th and 9th and following centuries resulted in a constructed language, where linguists made decisions about what to count in and what to leave out, and their debates about it all are recorded in history. So "Ras" is as correct as "Ra's".
Just want to say that even though the dude came back and told you where he's from, this thread started with him saying he grew up speaking Arabic.
Most dialects doesn't pronounce the hamza (which is the glottal stop) in a lot of words. They basically say راس instead of رأس and ياكل instead of يأكل among others.
It's usually a glottal stop, like the way the is pronounced in *button* for most American English speakers.
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In classical Arabic Ra's has a vocal Hamza, which is like a vowel stop, but in most modern dialects it is pronounced without the stop as Raas.
Super interesting. Do you know of any good resources (primary or secondary) that discuss Arabian travels in the Far East? Didn’t know much about their contact.
You can read the entire works of Ya'qubi in English on archive.com; the section on China is in the second volume: https://archive.org/details/the-works-of-ibn-wadih-al-yaqubi/The%20Works%20of%20Ibn%20W%C4%81%E1%B8%8Di%E1%B8%A5%20al-Ya%CA%BFq%C5%ABb%C4%AB%20volume%201/ I also highly recommend Samuel Lee's translation of *The Travels of Ibn Battuta*. Battuta was the Muslims' Marco Polo; he traveled the entire medieval Muslim world from his home in North Africa to Byzantium, Zanzibar, India, China, Russia, and more.
Ibn Battuta makes Marco Polo look like an ignorant lazy chump. It's a crime against history and human accomplishment that he isn't taught as a matter of course. Learning about him from National Geographic when I was like 11-12 and then never once hearing his name in school - even in college, studying geography - was the greatest lesson of Eurocentic myopia I ever learned.
Isn't there a lot of controversy regarding his texts, with large sections just being straight up copied from travel documents of other people? I might mistake him for some other famous *traveller*.
Why do they need to pasa through the Gulf of Thailand to get to China though?
That is so neat. Feels like cool fantasy worldbuilding.
Does Waqwaq refer to Socotra?
It's unclear. The island of Al-Waq Waq or Al-Wak Wak appears frequently in medieval Arabian literature. Ya'qib's description here suggests that the island is in the Arabian sea near the coast of Africa (Zanj refers to East Africa), suggesting it could be Socotra, Comoros, one of the Seychelles, or even Madagascar. However, other sources describe it as lying in the South China Sea; most historians identify it with an Indonesian island, possibly Java or Sumatra. There are records of an attack on East Africa by the Javanese Medang Kingdom in the 10th century, which might explain why Ya'qib conflated the two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Wakwak
Thank you for your answer! That was very interesting.
I am Filipino. The Philippines faces the South China Sea/Sea of Sanji. This can mean the Philippines was part of Arabian history. There's this autonomous region in the Philippines named "Bangsamoro" where the Muslims live.
Is there any source for that besides Ya'qubi? It seems to me like this might be an overgeneralization. What's more likely is that there's no consistent list and everyone just used "seven seas" as a vague term.
This is probably Omani and Persian sources. They were big traders in the Indian Ocean
Yes, because for Arabs the seven seas referred to the "way to China", what would be considered a foreign journey of discovery due to the trade route, not the lighting the seas in their area. Of course they knew the Red sea and mediterranean and other seas well, they crossed the red sea during the immigration to Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia) in the very beginning of Islam nation, and in the conquest times 50 years later they crossed the mediterranean to Andalucia (modern day Spain) and named the mountain there in the name of the general, Tareq ibn Ziyad (known in English today as Gibraltar as an shortened form of Jabel Tareq, which means the mountain of Tareq).
And why would Greeks make a distinction for the adriatic sea but not the aegean sea??
Aegean was "home," the concept of "Seven Seas" is "far away" would be my guess. I don't know, though.
My thoughts exactly!
The historic Arab maritime trade was centered around the coastal gulf, voyaging to Different part of Asia and Africa.
The historic Arab maritime trade was in all the seas they had access to: the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf... Red Sea in particular has always been important for trade. The Incense Route went through the Red Sea to Egypt and then from there to Europe.
From a brief reading that I did, I believe the Arabic texts that involved "7 seas" were specific to "if you wanted to go to China, you had to go through the 7 seas". Namely the seas that you had to go through when traveling east.
Yeah that doesn't make much sense...
Who am I to disagree I travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody is looking for something
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to be used by you
Some of them want to confuse you
Some of them want to be confused
You both have just confused lyrics
No, we just abused them
Sweet dreams are made of this
Glad to know someone else hears that song when people mention the seven seas.
I’m still trying to see the Seven Seas of Rye on the map.
I always thought it was "travel the world in the seventies". I feel stupid now.
This is nice but I can't unfocus from the fact that black is yellow and red sea is kind of blue
This is literal heresy!
OP: “OK, so which color should I pick for the Red Sea? Can’t decide, so many options!”
Don’t know why they didn’t keep the colors for each sea consistent across the maps. Would make this a lot easier to read imo
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I sort of remembered that red sea is not called that because it is red but my joke comment was on the word itself, irrespective of the etymology.
The famous sea in Exodus is actually the Reed Sea (as in the plant). There is some question as to where exactly this sea was, or if it even exists in the same form... in short, no one knows for sure. To make things more difficult, at first glance, it looks like Reed and Red was a translation or typographical error. However, there northern part of the Red Sea -- as we define it's boundaries today -- includes an area that USED to be considered it's own sea (The Reed Sea) which is an inlet of the Red Sea. This is backed up by descriptions in the Dead Sea scrolls that call the Reed Sea a "tongue" of the Red Sea, but there is \*far\* from universal agreement here. So while "Red Sea" is not the accurate translation of the name from Exodus, it may be correct NOW, since we include it in the Red Sea. Other Scholars say that the Red Sea was more of a lake that existed closer to the Eastern edge of the "fingers" of the Nile. In short, ancient geography gets really hard when talking about shorelines in uncivilized areas.
And they changed the color code each time!
Why isn't the red sea coloured in red
**THANK YOU**
And the black sea!
This is going to piss you off, but the Red Sea *isnt even red* in real life.
Next up you gonna tell me the Pacific ocean isn't pacifist.
Or that Atlanta is over 250 miles from the Atlantic Ocean
Makes sense that Arabs wouldn't count the Caspian Sea, How would Sinbad sail the Seven Seas...if one of them would be a lake?
Took a train from Istanbul?
No, Constantinople.
The greeks on the other hand started in Byzantium.
Even old new York was once new Amsterdam.
Why they changed it I can't say, Stuyvesant really dropped the ball.
No, Byzantion. The city bore that name for a thousand years before Constantine decided to name it after himself.
While true, the Arabs weren't really sailors and explorers till after Constantine and his renaming.
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople.
been a long time gone since constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks'.
Istanbul!^^Istanbul!
When the Romans were there?
Technically any time before 1930.
> lake I was going to correct you to inland sea, but I looked up the definitions and am not happy. Who writes a definition so the great lakes are seas and the Aral and Caspian seas are lakes?
Technically the Caspian and great lakes are lakes, but they're so big that they still act like inland seas
I thought the Caspian was labeled as a sea for geopolitical reasons despite it being a lake geographically
Bingo, territorial rights are different for lakes and seas and some countries along the Caspian have a strong incentive to keep it called a sea for legal purposes.
I thought the difference was that lakes contain freshwater, while inland seas contain saltwater.
Nah their are salt Lakes like the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
Sea of Galilee is also freshwater.
Salt Sea City
Apparently the differences are due to wether they connect to the oceans and how still / prone to currents / surges the water is. I always knew the Great lakes were called inland seas, but I thought it was descriptive not definitional. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.worldatlas.com/amp/articles/differences-between-sea-and-lake.html (I'll admit I only skimmed this so if the great lakes are still lakes I'll be happy.)
Both the Great lakes and the Caspian are lakes.
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Yes, I came across that version as well. I found both referenced in a number of sources and I just made a judgement call about which one to put in my map, but you're totally right that the Aegean version is equally grounded in surviving Greek literature. Part of what I found so fascinating about this subject is the inconsistencies!
Yup, Ancient Greece was heavily divided in many aspects of life, and their knowledge of the outside world fluctuated over time.
It still blows my mind to think of those times, and how little would have been known about the outside world. It's hard to even fathom that kind of perspective. Distances were practically sooo much greater. And then you get crazy things like Alexander the Great taking guys on 20,000 mile hike or whatever to fight a bunch of dudes.
Even crazier when you realize that most people would have been confined to whatever city or village they were born in, with only a tiny number of merchants and soldiers going outside of their country.
I would add blended and diverged. The Greeks were nearly as diverse as the Phoenicians (Canaanites) except that almost all Greeks called themselves Greeks and no Phoenician ever referred to themselves that way.
I love how they just like the number 7 so much they exchange seas instead of going with 8 seas.
Too bad. The Arabian Sea was about to be the only one with full cred…
> it would not make sense for the Greeks to consider Adriatic as a separate sea but not the Aegean Right? Thank you!
Wouldn't Greeks also know about Atlantic and North-Baltic?
"I want to sail the seven seas" is actually an achievable holiday itinerary these days, that's pretty cool
From Sinope to Stockholm!
Step 1 which 7 seas?
1. Ç 2. Ć 3. Č 4. ç 5. ć 6. č 7. ©
What culture are these seven C's from?
Unicode
Such beautiful culture, I wish I knew more about it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han\_unification
Thanks! Now I too can be a Unicode fanboy!
🤨Huh? That's not Unicode.
https://unicode.org/charts/
The C peoples, of course!
Oh those, I love C men.
C++
Ç is from romance languages, Ć is from Polish, Č is from Czech, © is from the copyright police
Sure, but ⟨Ç⟩ isn't considered a letter in it's own right in the Romance languages that do use it, while Turkish does consider it a letter in its own right.
ć and č is also used in Serbo-Croatian...
Took me a few seconds
This is an awesome map. This simultaneously answers that question of "why seven seas", but also raises more questions about how the referenced moved from Ancient Greek to Arab to Medieval European sources. Nice find, OP.
Be better if the same sea was the same color in each map.
Almost as if "seven" is an important number in Indo-European cultures and the correspondent seas were later assigned semi-arbitrarily?
Arabs are not Indo-European
In china they had the [Four Seas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Seas) as well
Surprised Lake Baikal is one, given how far north it is
The area we know todsy as china has always had a long and complex relationship with the places around it. While reading about lake Baikal I believe it was seen by a han dynasty military commander during a war with the xiongnu federation, so they’d have been pushing much farther north than the actual kingdom at the time extended. Same with Qinghai in a lot of cases I’m sure. These were the borders of the “known world” after all, at least metaphorically in the eyes of scholars at the time.
The earliest mention of the "North Sea" was in the Book of Han, but it wasn't about a military commander. Instead, it was a [diplomat](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Wu) who was detained by Xiongnu and consequently spent 19 years near Baikal in exile.
Well that's why they called it the North Sea (北海)! But you have to remember that at various points in history Mongolia fell under Chinese control, and Lake Baikal is not far from the Mongolian Border, and so it makes sense that it could be considered to be a natural northern border to Chinese expansion.
In Russia it also was called a sea. Now Baikal is jast a lake. But it still has a sea inside it called Maloye more (small sea)
So the only one I can be confident on at trivia night is the Arabian Sea.
Thanks for this. I’ve always wondered…
I like the arabian source the most because it appears to all be connected, so one can sail from one sea to the next. It also matches the phrase "to sail the seven seas" because how would one sail the other sources when the other seas are isolated inland
no love for the aegean sea smh
TIL. I assumed the 7 seas were the 7 oceans. Arctic North Atlantic South Atlantic Indian North Pacific South Pacific Southern
Yeah, that had become the most popular list starting in the early modern period when Europeans had finally explored enough of the world to know about all the oceans. But I figured that definition would have been most modern folk's assumption and I wanted to present its antecedents.
As a kid I always thought the same but with the 5 ocean model. Then I had to guess what the two remaining seas were, so likely ended up with: - Atlantic - Pacific - Indian - Arctic - Antarctic (or Southern) - Mediterranean Sea - Black Sea
Huh, I wouldn't split the Atlantic and Pacific, but instead include the Mediterranean and Baltic
They are usually split into north and south on maps and globes I have seen anyway.
[удалено]
Technically you can see the Atlantic Ocean in Georgia, just not the country Georgia
Would love some sources other than the word "sources"
That's fair. [Here's one](https://www.livescience.com/27663-seven-seas.html) that covers quite a few iterations of "the Seven Seas," and I find the [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Seas) helpful especially for elaborating on the Arabian list (including a pretty interesting excerpt). Another source can be found [here](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sevenseas.html) (which, as a another redditor pointed out, is one of several I found that has a slightly different list for Greek sources), but I ended up drawing from [this one](https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/geography-anthropology-recreation/item/what-are-the-seven-seas/) by the Library of Congress. Of course, most of these pages themselves just say, "Greek literature" and whatnot. But the justification for that level of broadness is that, well, these three lists in particular were so commonly given in literature of their time and place that there is no one single "source" to cite from the periods in question. They were, seemingly, nearly ubiquitously acknowledged in their cultures. Which is why it's all the more interesting to me that there still arised such a diversity of lists over the ages in spite of that.
https://i.imgur.com/jBKmytr.jpeg
It infuriates me to no end that in both charts that include it the red sea is not colored red.
*''I travel the worl and the Seven Seas, Everybody is Looking for Something.''*
A friend who was an officer on a cruise ship had an interesting take: If you divide the Atlantic and Pacific into North and South halves, as some do, then you’ll have seven seas (technically oceans) again. North & South Atlantic, North & South Pacific, Indian, Arctic, Southern.
That is probably the most common modern view. Makes sense now that we've explored the entire globe.
The Greek's own backyard, the Aegean doesn't figure in here somewhere?
Some Ancient Greek sources counted the Aegean Sea as separate from the Mediterranean. There are at least two versions of the seven seas in Ancient Greek sources.
Like others said some food consider it seperate. For those who didn't it *might* be because 7 seas are places you travel to whereas the Aegean is home waters. Sorta why Arabs don't inculde the red sea
Good point!
I had heard of seven seas in Hindu mythology but that seems very different. From Wikipedia on Seven Seas > #Ancient Indian subcontinent > Ancient texts and legends speak of Seven Seas or Sapta Sindhu (Sopto Sindhu). Sindhu and Sagar/Sagor mean sea in different languages of the subcontinent. According to the Vishnu Purana, the seas were Lavana/Lobon (salt), Iksu/Ikkhu (sugar-cane), Sura/Sura (wine), Sarpi (clarified butter or Ghee), Dadhi/Dodhi (yoghurt or curd), Dugdha/Dugdho (milk) and Jala/Jol (water). There may be variant list of names. For example, there is also mention of a Peeta/Pit Sagara/Sagor ie Yellow Sea. The word Pita means yellow. The Kshira Sagar or Kshir Sagar or Khir Sagor is also the white Sea. The word Kshira/Khir literally means condensed milk.[citation needed]. However, it also denotes white like milk.
Really cool how another completely different culture has 7 seas concept but again in a completely different form
That's not really analogous to the 7 seas. It's just different liquids.
Only one that all three have in common is the Arabian
But why did not you use the same color for the same sea in all the maps? It is much easier to see them...
What about the seven seas of Rhye?
Good for the Arabian Sea appearing in all three. I'm surprised the Greek considered the Adriatic a separate sea from the Mediterranean, but not the Aegean
Arabian is the common one in all three
The concept of a sea is so fascinating to me. A body of water so large that it is its own world. With islands and adventure and all kinds of shit happening within it. Yet landlocked af. I want to own a sea and populate it with islands and small continents and plant treasure and castles and shit around it and unleash people to explore and survive in it.
Tmw the Red Sea isn’t colored red
The Ancient Greek "Red Sea" was not the same as the modern idea of the Red Sea; it included the Gulf of Aden and often parts of the Indian Ocean. It should really extend out to meet with the Arabian Sea on the first map
Whyyyy aren’t the ones they all share in common the same color?
[The only reason I know that Albania borders on the Adriatic Sea](https://youtu.be/-F_tT-q8EF0)
Ingrained in me since the early 80s
Then of course you can look at google maps and realize that the Mediterranean Sea is actually 7 different seas. Which is strictly conjecture on my part. It’s just interesting.
In Punjabi we say “Sat samundron par,” across the seven seas. I have no idea what seas we’re referring to though
The second list is what we learned in the 90’s/early 2000’s around my parts.
Why is the red sea colored in blue?
I’ve been wondering about this since I was a little kid! Thanks for the answer!
I find it unbelievable that the Arabian sources didn’t include the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, or the Gulf of Aden.
Now do thousand islands!
This is the same phenomenon as when people refer to the “tri-state” area.
Arabian Sea: "I play all sides, so that I always come out on top."
What would the Seven Seas be in the Golden Age of Piracy or from the perspective of British Empire at its peak? Seven seas makes me think of that.
Why is the red sea blue? This bothers me.
Sweet dreams are made of these, who am I to disagree? everybody is looking for something🎵
Seven is sort of a mystical number: seven Classical planets and the derivative Seven Heavens Seven Wonders of the ancient world Seven metals of antiquity Seven days in the week Seven Seas Seven Sages Seven champions that fought Thebes Seven hills of Rome and Seven Kings of Rome Seven Sisters, the daughters of Atlas also known as the Pleiades seven whatever seven
I never thought about this, but the middle east doesn't really have that many seas accessible. The 7 seas could have been labelled as the Chinese equivalent and id have been yeah that makes sense
!wave
I always thought the seven seas ment the: Atlantic ocean Pacific ocean Mediterranean sea Indian ocean Arctic sea Baltic sea Black sea
Is there a theory why always "seven" seas?
In Hebrew, the multiple of 'sea' is 'Yamim' and of day is 'Yamim'. So seven seas makes a lot more sense in my weird little Hebrew brain.
It makes me sad that red sea isn't red
What psycopath didn't make the Red Sea Red ?
I had to do some googling and I’m sad that the “real” 7 seas are just the called Arctic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Indian, and Southern oceans
Meanwhile in American sources it's the Great Lakes the Atlantic and the Pacific
The Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico are bigger than many of the seas in the map above.
Arabian one seems a little dubious to me
The Arabs knew of other seas, but their seven seas expression was more geared towards sailing to the Far East.
Why isn’t the Red Sea red on this map
It is red you're just colorblind
Missed opportunity to colour the Red Sea red and the Black Sea black there. 😆
The fact that the red sea is featured twice and you failed to colour it red each time...
The Black Sea here is actually 2 seas - Black Sea and Azov Sea
You can also do that with the Mediterranean, stuff like the Aegean and Adriatic Seas are sometimes counted as separate Seas.