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The strip of sea that separates Africa from the Arabian peninsula was named so long ago that all that remains are options for all tastes. In the 1st century, when the expression Red Sea was already old, the Roman historian Pliny raised the possibility that the name was a tribute to King Erythras, a character in Persian mythology: at the time, the sea was also called Eritrean and the prefix “ erythro” means red in Greek. “Another explanation is that southern Palestine was known as the land of the Edomites, the Reds,” says zoologist Francis Dov Por, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in Israel. A third hypothesis is based on geography. In the south of the Sinai Peninsula there are mountains rich in iron, a reddish ore. The wind wears away the rocky desert and drags the dust out to sea, staining it red.
As if that were not enough, there is still one more speculation: that this sea would contain the algae Trichodesmium erythraeum. When dying, it gains a reddish hue, changing the color of the water. But Dov Por finds this hypothesis unlikely: “The Red Sea is poor in nutrients, which makes it difficult for algae to proliferate.”