This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Seas gathers nine enclosed or semi enclosed bodies of water the atlas records as corridors for a specific religious history rather than as settings for one, and between them they touch every inhabited continent but Antarctica and Australia.
The Red Sea carries one of the most repeated images in Western religion, a sea divided so a people could walk through it, and beyond that story it carried Christianity to Ethiopia in the fourth century and pilgrims to Mecca ever since. The Mediterranean Sea's shipping lanes carried monotheism and Greco-Roman religion in both directions for three thousand years, Phoenician shrines from Tyre to Cadiz along its rim and Alexandria giving the Jewish diaspora the Septuagint. The Aegean Sea held Delos, treated as the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis and kept ritually pure, and the eastern waters where the book of Revelation is set.
The Black Sea moved from the Greeks' inhospitable edge of the world to a Christian sea, with the apostle Andrew credited to its northern shore, and then an Ottoman lake. The Sea of Marmara held the front door of Constantinople for eleven centuries and the Princes' Islands where deposed emperors and patriarchs were sent. The North Sea joined rather than divided the peoples around it, with matching ship burials on both its shores. The Dead Sea, the lowest exposed land on earth, gave up the Dead Sea Scrolls from caves on its northwestern shore in 1947. The Arabian Sea carried Islam to India's Konkan and Malabar coasts and carried Zoroastrians fleeing Iran to become the Parsis. The Sea of Japan carried Buddhism and Chinese writing to Japan from Korea, a naming dispute the atlas records rather than settles.