Persian Gulf Persian Gulf The Persian Gulf (), is a mediterranean sea in Western Asia. The body of water is an extension of the Indian Ocean (Gulf of Oman) through the Strait of Hormuz and lies between Iran to the northeast and the Arabian Peninsula to the southwest. The Shatt al-Arab river delta forms the northwest shoreline. The Persian Gulf was a battlefield of the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War, in which each side attacked the other's oil tankers. It is the namesake of the 1991 Gulf War, the largely air- and land-based conflict that followed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The gulf has many
Persian Gulf naming dispute the head of the Persian 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