Sea or bay
Sinus Carmanius
Listen to the story
The Tabula draws the Persian Gulf twice, once without a name and scattered with islands, and a second time labelled Sinus Carmanius, after the Persian region of Carmania. The label has faded almost entirely: only a single letter M can still be made out in the open water above a road stretch, though older copies read the full name and scholars do not doubt it. Oddly, no ancient text uses this name for the gulf; the Roman writer Pliny called it the Persian Sea, while Strabo and Ptolemy spoke of the Persian Gulf.