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Medieval European and Arabic literature often spoke of the Seven Seas. Which seven seas are intended depends on the context. The phrase "seven seas" appears in a translation of one of Enheduanna's hymns to Inanna (Hymn 8), written about 2300 BC in Sumer (Meador 2001). The "Seven Seas" was a commonplace phrase in many ancient literatures before it was taken up by the Greeks and Romans. The number seven has ancient magic of its own in many traditions, informing many groupings of seven. "Seven as an indefinite number remains for a long time synonymous with "several," as in the Greek Seven Seas," Hopkins 1923.
In Greek and Western culture, the "seven" seas were arbitrary and changed over time, varying depending upon the part of the world and the period of time. However, they were usually seven out of the following list of nine bodies of water:
- Adriatic Sea
- Aegean Sea
- Arabian Sea
- Black Sea
- Caspian Sea
- Indian Ocean
- Merranean Sea
- Persian Gulf
- Red Sea
Other sets of seas
Not all Roman uses of septem maria (Latin) would strike a responsive chord today. The navigable network in the mouths of the Po river discharge into saltmarshes on the Adriatic shore; these were locally called the "Seven Seas" in ancient Roman times. Pliny the Elder, a Roman author and fleet commander, wrote about these lagoons, separated from the open sea by sandbanks:
"All those rivers and trenches were first made by the Etruscans, thus discharging the flow of the river across the marshes of the Atriani called the Seven Seas, with the famous harbor of the Etruscan town of Atria which formerly gave the name of Atriatic to the sea now called the Adriatic." (Historia Naturalis, III 1201.
Thus today at the Septem Maria Museum we can trace water civilization from protohistory until today. This early cultural root may be visited at Adria in Rovigo, the modern Atria 2.
John Lightfoot mentions a very different set of seas in his Commentary on the New Testament. A chapter titled The seven Seas according to the Talmudists, and the four Rivers compassing the Land includes the Great Sea (now called the Merranean Sea), the sea of Tiberias (Sea of Galilee), the sea of Sodom (Dead Sea), the lake of Samocho, and the Sibbichaean. 3
Though the ancient sailors were not aware of all of them, under some geographical classification schemes, there actually are seven oceans in the world:
- Northern Atlantic Ocean
- Southern Atlantic Ocean
- Northern Pacific Ocean
- Southern Pacific Ocean
- Indian Ocean
- Southern Ocean
- Arctic Ocean
However, paleogeography demonstrates that although these oceans have been present as long as humans have been around, some of these oceans were not present millions of years ago.
Related topics
Rudyard Kipling titled a volume of poems The Seven Seas (1896) and dedicated it to the City of Bombay (Kipling 1896).
A moderately standardized iconography of the Four continents and the Four rivers of the world, which developed from the Renaissance, fixed recognizable images in the European imagination, but the Seven Seas were not identifiably differenced—Neptune ruled all.
See also
- Four continents
- seven climes
- karshvar
- StraightDope.com: Seven Seas
- World Atlas Seven Seas
References
- E. Washburn Hopkins, "Origin and Evolution of Religion 1923
- Kipling, Rudyard, 'The Seven Seas, 1896: e-text
- The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 3rd ion. Houghton Mifflin, 2002 merely states that the phrase is a "popular expression for all the world's oceans."
- Betty De Shong Meador, 2001. translator and or, Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart : Poems of the Sumerian High University of Texas. ISBN 0292752423