This post owes a great deal to the wonderful 2018 book by Malcom Shick entitled Where Corals Lie: A Natural and Cultural History (London, Reaction Books). The author takes a global and diachronic view on the ways humans viewed and used corals and provides precious and divers bibliography and some quite unexpected illustrations.
A number of web pages offer comprehensive, yet approachable discussions of corals and their biology and ecology. For instance,
https://icriforum.org/about-coral-reefs/what-are-corals/
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_corals/coral01_intro.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiULxLLP32s
Corals have a multitude of forms, colors and functions. There exists a wide array of coral identification keys and manuals to help scientists, conservationists and interested public to tell them apart. This identification manual on Indian Ocean corals can be found free on the web:
For the complexities of coral taxonomy and biology this review paper is very instructive:
Fautin D. G. and R. W. Buddemeier, 2009. Coral, in Encyclopedia of Islands edited by R.G. Gillespie and D.A. Glague, University of California Press, Berkeley, 197-203. The book can be found free here: https://archive.org/details/encyclopedia-of-islands
The challenges of classifying life, especially marine life in antiquity and on the concept of “dualizers” (not belonging one or the other category but to both) that are discussed in this post in relation to corals see the following paper: Carraro, N. (2019). Dualisers in Aristotle’s Biology. Apeiron, 52(2), 137-165.
Identification of specific types of corals in the written sources of the past comes with challenges. The following paper by Eleni Voultsiadou and Dimitris Vafeidis attempts this for the marine invertebrates (including a type of coral) that appear in the works of Aristotle. Voultsiadou, E. and Vafidis, D. 2007. Marine invertebrate diversity in Aristotle’s zoology. Contributions to Zoology 76 (2): 103-120.
Translation of ancient texts and further research into the natural world flourished in the Abbasid Baghdad. The following paper discussed the issue in detail: Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (New York: Routledge 1998).
A very useful guide to the treatment of coral in geographies, cosmographies, wonders literature, natural histories, and medical texts of the medieval Islamicate world is to be found in the relevant entry of standard scholarly reference work Encyclopaedia of Islam: Albrecht Dietrich, “Mardjān,” Encyclopaedia of Islam New Edition Online (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
On Islamicate bestiaries, see Anna Contadini’s study of the 13th century illuminated bestiary On the Usefulness of Animals, published as A World of Beasts: A Thirteenth-Century Arabic Book on Animals (Kitab Na’t al-Haywanat) in the Ibn Bakhtisu Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
On the tenth book of Evliya’s travelogue, where he provides invaluable and original insights into the physical and human geography of the Nile and the Red Sea, see Robert Dankoff, Nuran Tezcan, and Michael Sheridan, eds., Ottoman Explorations of the Nile: Evliya Çelebi’s “Matchless Pearl /These Reports of the Nile” Map and His Accounts of the Nile and the Horn of Africa in the Book of Travels (London: Ginkgo Press, 2018).
The early modern literature on corals is large and fascinating. In this post we mentioned two books which are representative of that era: Marsigli L. F. 1725. Histoire Physique de la Mer, Amsterdam. The book can be found free on line here: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3116211/f7.item; Lacaze-Duthiers H. 1864. Histoire Naturelle du Corail, Paris. This is also freely available on line: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/43978#page/410/mode/1up)
For the destructive force of coral reefs as they were experienced and understood by 17th and 18th century mariners see the following paper: Lydon, J. (2018). “Visions of Disaster in the Unlucky Voyage of the Ship Batavia, 1647.” Itinerario 42(3), 351–374.
The image is a composition by D. Mylona of a Mediterranean red coral exhibited at the Museum of Natural History, Vienna.