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Arabian Sea
Coordinates	18°N 66°E / 18°N 66°E / 18; 66
Basin countries	India, Iran, Maldives, Oman, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen
Max. width	2,400 km (1,500 mi)
Surface area	3,862,000 km (1,491,000 sq mi)
Max. depth	4,652 m (15,262 ft)

The Arabian Sea is a region of the northern Indian Ocean bounded on the north by Pakistan and Iran, on the west by northeastern Somalia and the Arabian Peninsula, and on the east by India. An ancient name was the Erythraean Sea.

Alternative names

The Arabian Sea historically and geographically has been referred to by many different names by Arab travelers and European geographers, that include Sindhu Sagar, Erythraean Sea, Sindh Sea, and Akhzar Sea.

Trade routes

The Arabian Sea has been an important marine trade route since the era of the coastal sailing vessels from possibly as early as the 3rd millennium BCE, certainly the late 2nd millennium BCE through the later days known as the Age of Sail. By the time of Julius Caesar, several well-established combined land-sea trade routes depended upon water transport through the Sea around the rough inland terrain features to its north.

These routes usually began in the Far East or down river from Madhya Pradesh with transshipment via historic Bharuch (Bharakuccha), traversed past the inhospitable coast of today's Iran then split around Hadhramaut into two streams north into the Gulf of Aden and thence into the Levant, or south into Alexandria via Red Sea ports such as Axum. Each major route involved transhipping to pack animal caravan, travel through desert country and risk of bandits and extortionate tolls by local potentiates.

This southern coastal route past the rough country in the southern Arabian peninsula (Yemen and Oman today) was significant, and the Egyptian Pharaohs built several shallow canals to service the trade, one more or less along the route of today's Suez canal, and another from the Red Sea to the Nile River, both shallow works that were swallowed up by huge sand storms in antiquity. Later the kingdom of Axum arose in Ethiopia to rule a mercantile empire rooted in the trade with Europe via Alexandria.

See also

• Tropical cyclones in the Arabian Sea
• Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
• Erythraean Sea
• Piracy in Somalia

Notes

1. The Voyage around the Erythraean Sea
2. Geographica Indica - The Arabian Sea
3. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea:Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century

References

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

External links

• Arabian Sea (World Wildlife Fund)
• Al-Hind: Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam 7Th-11th

• Arabian Peninsula
• Marine ecoregions
• Arabian Sea
• India–Pakistan border
• Oman–Yemen border
• Asia
• Bodies of water of India
• Seas of the Indian Ocean