Persian Gulf at its narrowest, in the Strait of Hormuz. The waters are overall very shallow, with a maximum depth of and an average depth of . Countries with a coastline on the Persian Gulf are (clockwise, from the north): Iran; Oman's Musandam exclave; the United Arab Emirates; Saudi Arabia Qatar, on a peninsula off the Saudi coast; Bahrain, on an island; Kuwait; and Iraq in the northwest. Various small islands also lie within the Persian Gulf, some of which are the subject of territorial disputes between the states of the region. The International Hydrographic Organization defines the Persian Gulf's southern limit
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