Arabian Gulf: A pearl salesman holding an open pearl oyster shell, Bahrain, 2009. Photo by Jayson De Leon (CC BY License). For thousands of years, most seawater pearls were retrieved by divers working in the Indian Ocean, in areas like the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and in the Gulf of Mannar. In the 14th-century Arabian Sea, the traveller Ibn Battuta provided the earliest known description of pearl diving by means of attaching a cord to the diver's waist. Before the beginning of the 20th century, pearl hunting was the most common way of harvesting pearls.

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