Overview
On almost all maps printed before 1960, and in most modern international treaties, documents and maps, this body of water is known by the name "Persian Gulf". This reflects traditional usage since the Greek geographers Strabo and Ptolemy, and the geopolitical realities of the time with a powerful Persian Empire (Iran) comprising the whole northern coastline and a scattering of local emirates on the Arabian coast. It was referred to as the Persian Gulf in the Arabic Christian writer Agapius, writing in the 10th century.
According to Mahan Abedin of Jamestown Foundation, the first proposal to change the name to the "Arabian" Gulf goes back to the 1930s by Sir Charles Belgrave, then the British adviser to the ruler of Bahrain; however it was rejected immediately by the British government. In 1957, a few years after the nationalization of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, an alleged British MI6 officer named Roderick Owen published a book named "The Golden Bubble of the Arabian Gulf" making it the first literature in modern history to use the term "Arabian Gulf".
Arab countries used the term "Persian Gulf" until the 1960s, but with the rise of Arab nationalism during that decade, some Arab countries, including the ones bordering the Persian Gulf, adopted widespread use of the term "الخليج العربي" (al-Ḫalīj al-ʻArabiyy; Arab Gulf or Arabian Gulf) to refer to this waterway. A senior presenter for Al Jazeera English said "ironically, among the major drivers of the movement for change were Arab perceptions that Iran, driven by Washington, had supported Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973". This, coupled with the decreasing influence of Iran on the political and economic priorities of the English-speaking Western World, led to increasing acceptance, both in regional politics and the mostly petroleum-related business, of the new alternative naming convention "Arabian Gulf" in Arab countries.
The term "Arabian Gulf" (Sinus Arabicus) was formerly used to refer to what is now known as the Red Sea (as illustrated in the map examples with this article). This usage was adopted into European maps from, among others, Strabo and Ptolemy, who called the Red Sea Sinus Arabicus (Arabian Gulf). Both of these ancient geographers also used the name Sinus Persicus to refer to the body of water between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran. In the early Islamic era, Muslim geographers did the same, calling the body بحر فارس (Baḥr Fāris; Persian Sea) or "خليج فارس" (Ḫalīǧ Fāris; Persian Gulf). Later, most European maps from the early Modern Times onwards used similar terms (Sinus Persicus, Persischer Golf, Golfo di Persia and the like, in different languages) when referring to the Persian Gulf, possibly taking the name from the Islamic sources.
The capture of Baghdad by the Ottoman Empire in 1534 gave Turkey access to the Indian Ocean via the port of Basra at the head of the gulf. This coincided with the early mapmaking efforts of Gerard Mercator, whose 1541 terrestrial globe attempts to give the most up-to-date information, naming the gulf Sinus Persicus, nunc Mare de Balsera ("Persian Gulf, now Sea of Basra"). However, on his world map of 1569, the name is changed to Mare di Mesendin (after the peninsula Ra's Musandam, in modern-day Oman), while his rival Abraham Ortelius, for the world atlas of 1570, opted for Mare El Catif, olim Sinus Persicus (after the Arabian port of Al Qatif), but labelled the entrance to the gulf – the present-day Strait of Hormuz – as Basora Fretum (Strait of Basra). Among all this confusion, the old name gradually reasserted itself in the 17th century, but Turkey still uses the name "Gulf of Basra" in Turkish today.
Following British attempts to control the seaway in the late 1830s, the Times Journal, published in London in 1840, referred to the Persian Gulf as the "Britain Sea," but this name was never used in any other context.
Read more about this topic: Persian Gulf Naming Dispute