Other Definitions
seven seas (dict)
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Seven SeasMedieval European and Arabian literature often spoke of the Seven Seas. Which seven seas are intended depends on the context. The phrase "seven seas" appears in a translation of one of Enheduanna's hymns to Inanna (Hymn 8), written about 2300 BCE in Sumer (Meador 2001). The "Seven Seas" was a commonplace phrase in many ancient literatures before it was taken up by the Greeks and Romans. The number seven has ancient magic of its own in many traditions, informing many groupings of seven. "Seven as an indefinite number remains for a long time synonymous with "several," as in the Greek Seven Seas," Hopkins 1923. In Greek and western culture, the "seven" seas are arbitrary and changed over time, but were most often: Other sets of seas Not all Roman uses of septem maria (Latin) would strike a responsive chord today. The navigable network in the mouths of the Po river discharge into saltmarshes on the Adriatic shore, these were locally called the "Seven Seas" in ancient Roman times. Pliny the Elder, a Roman author and fleet commander, wrote about these lagoons, separated from the open sea by sandbanks: "All those rivers and trenches were first made by the Etruscans, thus discharging the flow of the river across the marshes of the Atriani called the Seven Seas, with the famous harbor of the Etruscan town of Atria which formerly gave the name of Atriatic to the sea now called the Adriatic." http://penelope.uchicago.edu/holland/pliny3.htmlhttp://www.mysteriousetruscans.com/eng.html. Thus today at the Septem Maria Museum we can trace water civilization from protohistory until today. This early cultural root may be visited at Adria in Rovigo, the modern Atria http://www.museionline.it/eng/cerca/museo.asp?id=8695. John Lightfoot mentions a very different set of seas in his Commentary on the New Testament. A chapter titled The seven Seas according to the Talmudists, and the four Rivers compassing the Land includes the Great Sea (now called the Mediterranean Sea), the sea of Tiberias (Sea of Galilee), the sea of Sodom (Dead Sea), the lake of Samocho, and the Sibbichaean. http://philologos.org/__eb-jl/cent01.htm#four Though the ancient sailors were not aware of all of them, under some classification schemes, there actually are seven oceans in the world: However, Paleogeography demonstrates that this has not always been the case. Related topics Rudyard Kipling titled a volume of poems The Seven Seas (1896) and dedicated it to the City of Bombay (Kipling 1896). A moderately standardized iconography of the Four continents and the Four rivers of the world, which developed from the Renaissance, fixed recognizable images in the European imagination, but the Seven Seas were not identifiably differenced—Neptune ruled all. See also References
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