Eastern Arabia

Eastern Arabia is a region stretched from Basra to Khasab along the Persian Gulf coast and included parts of modern-day Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Eastern Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, and Yemen. The entire coastal strip of Eastern Arabia was known as "Bahrain" for a millennium. Until very recently, the whole of Eastern Arabia, from the Shatt al-Arab to the mountains of Oman, was a place where people moved around, settled and married unconcerned by national borders. The people of Eastern Arabia shared a culture based on the sea, as seafaring peoples. The Arab states of the Persian Gulf are all located in Eastern Arabia. The modern-day states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and UAE are the most commonly listed Gulf Arab states; Saudi Arabia is often considered a Gulf Arab state as well, but most of the country's inhabitants do not live in Eastern Arabia, with the exception of the Bahrani people, who live in the oases of Qatif and Al-Aḥsā, and who historically inhabited the entire region of Eastern Arabia before the establishment of the modern day political borders. In Arabic, Baḥrayn is the dual form of baḥr (بَحْر), so al-Baḥrayn means "the Two Seas". However, which two seas were originally intended remains in dispute. The term appears five times in the Qur'an, but does not refer to the modern islandoriginally known to the Arabs as “Awal”but rather to the oases of al-Qatif and Hadjar (modern Al-Aḥsā). It is unclear when the term began to refer exclusively to the archipelago in the Gulf of Bahrain, but it was probably after the 15th century. Today, Bahrain's "two seas" are instead generally taken to be the bay east and west of the coast, the seas north and south of the island, or the salt and fresh water present above and below the ground. In addition to wells, there are places in the sea north of Bahrain where fresh water bubbles up in the middle of the salt water, noted by visitors since antiquity.