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The
Persian Gulf
Its Past and Present
Svat Soucek
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
geostrategic 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 southwestern 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 Sasanians, 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
This book hopes to offer a balanced version of the history of the Persian
Gulf. The story itself is presented in the natural and anthropological
context of the subject.
Persian Gulf: Its Past and Present
by
Svat Soucek, Svatopluk Soucek
2004:xii+ 145pp., bibl., index
ISBN:1-56859-120-9
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