The Persian Gulf is an oil and tourist paradise

The Persian Gulf is a region where various civilizations have long been emerging. Even at the end of the 4th millennium BC on the shore of the Gulf, at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates (then these rivers flowed into the gulf separately), numerous Sumer cities grew, according to one version, which appeared here from the islands located in the bay. Later on the coast emerged the Elamite state, the Median kingdom. Finally, from the small coastal region of Persia, a huge Achaemenid empire grew up, later crushed by the hoplites of Alexander the Great. "The Persian kingdom," as the Greeks and Macedonians called the empire, stretched from Asia Minor and Bosporus to India, embracing the northern coast of the Persian Gulf. The internal areas of the Arabian Peninsula were not interested in the Persians - there was little natural wealth there, and oil at that time was not of strategic importance.

The Persians established an ideal order and iron discipline on the territory of the giant empire. According to the imaginative observation of contemporaries, a virgin with a bag of gold behind her could go through the empire from end to end without fear for her honor or property. But the Achaemenid empire, populated by a large number of peoples belonging to completely different cultures, could not be sustained for a long time. The nomadic Sakas and Hellenes from the policies of the coast of Asia Minor, hegemon-Persians and related to them, but with a lower social status Medes, remembering the former greatness of the Egyptians and Indians, always more attracted to the related civilizations of Hindustan.

A small, but splendidly unified mono-national army of Alexander the Great over the course of several years broke down the Persian army, disproportionately larger human and economic resources.

The Persian Gulf has often become an arena for the struggle of local residents and various conquerors - not only Greeks and Macedonians, but also Sakas, Arabs, Assyrians and Babylonians, and many others. In the end, the north-eastern coast remained behind the Iranian-speaking peoples, later forming a single Persian ethnos, and on the south-west the Arabs were firmly entrenched.

By the beginning of the XIX century, the Gulf Coast was controlled by the states of the second and even the third echelon - the decrepit Ottoman Empire, Iran and small Arab theocratic monarchies. The Persian Gulf would have remained in the backyard of world history and politics, had it not been for giant hydrocarbon deposits. Oil was used in ancient times, but the boom of mining began in the late XIX century, when in Europe, and then in America, there were the first internal combustion engines.

Since that time the Persian Gulf has acquired a strategic importance and became a zone of close attention of the world's leading powers. It was repeatedly the arena of confrontation of various forces, and sometimes the confrontation from the "cold" phase turned into a "hot" one. It is unlikely that there will be a person whose words "Persian Gulf" are associated primarily with the nature of the tropical sea, and not with the extraction of oil.

Meanwhile, the Persian Gulf, a photo of which can decorate any exhibition of the beauties of nature, is a place where magnificent world-class resorts are located. Fans of tropical relaxation can not be stopped even by the fact that they are in orthodox Muslim countries (the Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait), setting a dress code sometimes even for appearance on the street. Not to mention the use of alcohol.