Note 566 — Chapter IX · —Oceans And Enclosed Seas
Reading edition
On the southwest margin of Asia, the Red Sea, despite its desert shores, has maintained the influence of its intercontinental location and linked the neighboring elements of Africa and Asia. Identity of climatic conditions on both sides of this long rift valley has facilitated ethnic exchanges, and made it the center of what Ratzel calls the "Red Sea group of peoples," related in race and culture.566 The great ethnic solvent here has been Semitic. Under the spur of Islam, the Arabs by 1514 had made the Red Sea an Arabian and Mohammedan sea. They had their towns or trading stations at Zeila on the African side of the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, at Dalaqua, the port of Abyssinia, at Massowa, Suakin, and other towns, so that this coast too was called Arabia Felix.567