Bab al-Mandab

Bab al-Mandab is the name of the straits between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The volcanic island of Mayyun — called Perim by Westerners — divides them into the Large Strait, about 14 km wide and generally used by large vessels, and the Small Strait, about 2.5 km wide. During the south-west monsoon (June to September) water runs out of the Red Sea, and during the north-east monsoon (November to April) into it, creating currents dangerous to sailing craft. The hill of al-Manhali (270 m) rises on the Arabian shore east of the Small Strait, and just north of that strait is the site of al-Shaykh Sa'id, from which, as from Mayyun, entrance into the Red Sea can be controlled. ¹

Arab tradition holds that Asia and Africa were joined until Dhu'l-Qarnayn split them apart here and created the Red Sea. Yakut associates the name al-Mandab ('place of lamentation for the dead') with an Abyssinian crossing over the sea to the Yemen, and al-Hamdani applies it to a not clearly identified stretch of the southern Yemen coast in the territory of Banu Majid, where hashish al-bahr used to be collected. Sabaean inscriptions of the early sixth Christian century (Ry 507 and 508) mention sślt (or sslt) mabn — silsilat al-Mandab — in connection with the conflict between Yusuf As'ar Dhu Nuwas and the Abyssinians; this may have been a chain stretched across the narrow, shallow mouth of the inlet at al-Shaykh Sa'id, if al-Mandab lay that far south, and such a barrier may be the source of the otherwise implausible tradition of a chain across the straits themselves. The variant Bab al-Mandam is probably no more than the familiar substitution of m for b, and is especially current among Arabs. ¹