A nearly landlocked sea once dried for six hundred millennia
The Mediterranean Sea, cupped between Europe, Asia, and Africa across about 2.5 million square kilometres—0.7 percent of the world ocean—links to the Atlantic only through the Strait of Gibraltar. About 5.9 million years ago the Messinian salinity crisis partly or wholly desiccated it for some 600,000 years.
Average depth is about 1,500 metres; Calypso Deep in the Ionian Sea plunges to 5,109 ± 1 metres. West–east length from Gibraltar to the Gulf of Alexandretta nears 4,000 kilometres. Fifteen marginal seas include the Aegean, Adriatic, Tyrrhenian, and Marmara. Romans spoke of Mare Magnum, Mare Internum, then Mare Nostrum; Latin Mare Mediterraneum—“in the middle of land”—is attested by Isidore of Seville in the sixth century after an apparent third-century Solinus use. Only about 14 kilometres of water separate Spain from Morocco at that western gate, and the basin was refilled by the Zanclean flood roughly 5.3 million years ago.
Arabic knows it as the White Middle Sea or older Sea of the Romans; Egyptians said Wadj-wr (“great green”); Hebrew texts call it the Great Sea; Turks say Akdeniz, the White Sea, for the west. Clockwise shores run from Spain through the Levant to Morocco, with Cyprus and Malta as island states. Early advanced societies—Egyptians, Minoans, later Greeks and Phoenicians—used it for trade, food, and war; Darius I linked Red Sea to Nile so triremes could reach these waters.
After the Punic Wars Rome dominated the western basin; for some four centuries the empire controlled virtually the entire coastal ring. The Old English called it the Wendel-sæ, the Vandal Sea, after the tribe that held North Africa's coast, and Norse speakers seem to have named it the Sea of Jerusalem. Rome's grip loosened when the western empire fell around 476, and by the seventh century Umayyad Arabs ruled as far as Iberia. Arab rule carried sugarcane, rice, cotton, oranges, lemons, saffron and aubergines into Spain and Sicily, and the Spanish words for oil and olive still trace to Arabic al-zait. Cairo Geniza papers dated 996 place Amalfi merchants in Cairo, and around 1060 the caliph al-Mustansir let them settle in Jerusalem.
Source: Mediterranean Sea
