Asia ( , ) is the largest continent in the world by both land area and population. It covers an area of more than 44 million square kilometres, about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of Earth's total surface area. The continent, which has long been home to the majority of the human population, was the site of many of the first civilisations. Its 4.7 billion people constitute roughly 60% of the world's population.
Asia shares the landmass of Eurasia with Europe, and of Afro-Eurasia with both Europe and Africa. In general terms, it is bounded on the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Indian Ocean, and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. The border of Asia with Europe is a historical and cultural construct, as there is no clear physical and geographical separation between them. A commonly accepted division places Asia to the east of the Suez Canal separating it from Africa; and to the east of the Turkish straits, the Ural Mountains and Ural River, and to the south of the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian and Black seas, separating it from Europe. "Europe" (pp. 68–69); "Asia" (pp. 90–91): "A commonly accepted division between Asia and Europe is formed by the Ural Mountains, Ural River, Caspian Sea, Caucasus Mountains, and the Black Sea with its outlets, the Bosporus and Dardanelles."
Since the concept of Asia derives from the term for the eastern region from a European perspective, Asia is the remaining vast area of Eurasia minus Europe. Therefore, Asia is a region where various independent cultures coexist rather than sharing a single culture, and its boundary with Europe is somewhat arbitrary and has moved since its first conception in classical antiquity. The division of Eurasia into two continents reflects East–West cultural differences, some of which vary on a spectrum.
China and India traded places as the largest economies in the world from 1 to 1800 CE. The Silk Road became the main east–west trading route in the Asian hinterlands while the Straits of Malacca stood as a major sea route. Asia has exhibited economic dynamism as well as robust population growth during the 20th century, but overall population growth has since fallen. Asia was the birthplace of most of the world's mainstream religions including Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and many other religions.
Asia varies greatly across and within its regions with regard to ethnic groups, cultures, environments, economics, historical ties, and government systems. It also has a mix of many different climates ranging from the equatorial south via the hot deserts in parts of West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, and East Asia and tropical jungles in Southeast Asia, temperate areas in the east and the continental centre to vast subarctic and polar areas in North Asia.
Etymology
The term "Asia" is believed to originate in the Bronze Age toponym () which originally referred only to a portion of northwestern Anatolia. The term appears in Hittite records recounting how a confederation of Assuwan states including Troy unsuccessfully rebelled against the Hittite king Tudhaliya I around 1400 BCE.Bossert, Helmut T., Asia, Istanbul, 1946. Roughly contemporary Linear B documents contain the term (), seemingly in reference to captives from the same area..
Herodotus used the term in reference to Anatolia and the territory of the Achaemenid Empire, in contrast to Greece and Egypt. He reports that Greeks assumed that Asia was named after the wife of Prometheus, but that Lydians say it was named after Asies, son of Cotys, who passed the name on to a tribe at Sardis.Book IV, Article 45. In Greek mythology, "Asia" ( or ) was the name of a "Nymph or Titan goddess of Lydia". The Iliad (attributed by the ancient Greeks to Homer) mentions two Phrygians in the Trojan War named Asios (literally 'Asian');Μ95, Π717. and also a marsh or lowland containing a marsh in Lydia as .Β461.
The term was later adopted by the Romans, who used it in reference to the province of Asia, located in western Anatolia. One of the first writers to use Asia as a name of the whole continent was Pliny.
Etymological Dictionary of the Persian Language — p. 66
118 Asia / ās.yā / “a device that grinds grains” (speech): Although the mouse should be greatly lamented about Asia
Undoubtedly, one day the head of the mouse of Asia will be crushed (Naser Khusraw 17 / 294). The rest of the earth is the fold of Asia, both the [Zebrīn] and the lower stones rotate (Behr al-Lāvand 14 / 395); “a device in which a set of flouring tools is located” (speech): One of his companions who had taken wheat to Asia arrived (Nizamat al-Ans 3 / 1407).
Asiah (definite): The sky rotates around a pole because the pole is Asia and that pole is on the shoulders of an angel (Rūd al-Janān, vol. 16-17 / 124) He went to the city, happy with the army - the dark night came to Asia (Shahnameh Dictionary, Sheikh Abdul Qadir Baghdadi, with the help of K. Zalman, Petersburg, 1895, p. 23).
> Middle Persian: asyāg “Asia (stone)” (MacKenzie CPD 13).
On the suffix -āg / -āk and its variant -ah, see Horn NPSSpr. 175.
Qs. Ashtiani: asūa “Asia” (Sadegh Kia, Ashtian Dialect, p. 2); see also As (sh. 98), Asiameh (n. 2190)
Definition
Asia–Europe boundary
The threefold division of the Old World into Africa, Asia, and Europe has been in use since the 6th century BCE, due to Greek geographers such as Anaximander and Hecataeus. Anaximander placed the boundary between Asia and Europe along the Phasis River (now the Rioni) in Georgia of Caucasus (from its mouth by Poti on the Black Sea coast, through the Surami Pass and along the Kura River to the Caspian Sea), a convention still followed by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE.Histories 4.38. Cf. James Rennell, The Geographical System of Herodotus Examined and Explained, Volume 1, Rivington 1830, p. 244. During the Hellenistic period,according to Strabo (Geographica 11.7.4) even at the time of Alexander, "it was agreed by all that the Tanais river separated Asia from Europe" (; cf. Duane W. Roller, Eratosthenes' Geography, Princeton University Press, 2010, , ) this convention was revised, and the boundary between Europe and Asia was now considered to be the Tanais (the modern Don River). This is the convention used by Roman era authors such as Posidonius,W. Theiler, Posidonios. Die Fragmente, vol. 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1982, fragm. 47a. StraboI. G. Kidd (ed.), Posidonius: The commentary, Cambridge University Press, 2004, , and Ptolemy.Geographia 7.5.6 (ed. Nobbe 1845, , p. 178). "And [Asia] is connected to Europe by the land-strait between Lake Maiotis and the Sarmatian Ocean where the river Tanais crosses through."
The border between Asia and Europe was later redefined by European academics. In 1730, five years after the death of Peter the Great, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published in Sweden a new atlas proposing the Ural Mountains as the border of Asia. Vasily Tatishchev announced that he had proposed the idea to von Strahlenberg. The latter had suggested the Emba River as the southern part of this boundary. Over the next century various proposals were made until the Ural River prevailed in the mid-19th century. The border had been moved perforce from the Black Sea (the Romans' definition) to the Caspian Sea into which the Emba and Ural rivers project.. Between the Black Sea and the Caspian, the border is often placed along the crest of the Caucasus Mountains, although it is sometimes placed further north, on the Kuma–Manych Depression.
Asia–Africa boundary The boundary between Asia and Africa is the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, the Red Sea, and the Bab-el-Mandeb. This makes Egypt a transcontinental country, with the Sinai Peninsula in Asia and the remainder of the country in Africa.
Asia–Oceania boundary
The border between Asia and Oceania is usually placed somewhere in the Indonesian Archipelago, specifically in Eastern Indonesia. The Wallace Line separates the Asian and Wallacea biogeographical realms, a transition zone of deep water straits between the Asian and Australian continental shelves. Weber's Line split the region in two with regard to the balance of fauna between Asian origin or Australo-Papuan origin. Wallacea's eastern boundary with Sahul is represented by the Lydekker's Line. The Maluku Islands (except the Aru Islands) are often considered to lie on the border of southeast Asia, with the Aru Islands and Western New Guinea, to the east of the Lydekker's Line, being wholly part of Oceania, as both lie on the Australian continental plate. Culturally, the Wallacea region denoted the transition between Austronesian and Melanesian people, with varying degrees of intermixing between the two. In general, the further west and coastal a region is, the stronger the Austronesian influences, and the further east and inland a region is, the stronger the Melanesian influences. The terms Southeast Asia and Oceania, devised in the 19th century, have had several vastly different geographic meanings since their inception. The chief factor in determining which islands of the Indonesian Archipelago are Asian has been the location of the colonial possessions of the various empires there (not all European). Lewis and Wigen assert, "The narrowing of 'Southeast Asia' to its present boundaries was thus a gradual process.".
Asia–North America boundary
The Bering Strait and Bering Sea separate the landmasses of Asia and North America, as well as forming the international boundary between Russia and the United States. This national and continental boundary separates the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait, with Big Diomede in Russia and Little Diomede in the United States. The Aleutian Islands are an island chain extending westward from the Alaskan Peninsula toward Russia's Komandorski Islands and Kamchatka Peninsula. Most of them are always associated with North America, except for the westernmost Near Islands group, which is on Asia's continental shelf beyond the North Aleutians Basin and on rare occasions could be associated with Asia, which could then allow the United States to be considered a transcontinental state. The Aleutian Islands are sometimes associated with Oceania, owing to their status as remote Pacific islands, and their proximity to the Pacific Plate. This is extremely rare however, due to their non-tropical biogeography, as well as their inhabitants, who have historically been related to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
St. Lawrence Island in the northern Bering Sea belongs to the US state of Alaska and may be associated with either continent but is almost always considered part of North America, as with the Rat Islands in the Aleutian chain. At their nearest points, Alaska and Russia are separated by only .
Ongoing definition
Geographical Asia is a cultural artifact of European conceptions of the world, beginning with the Ancient Greeks, being imposed onto other cultures, an imprecise concept causing endemic contention about what it means. Asia does not exactly correspond to the cultural borders of its various types of constituents..
From the time of Herodotus, a minority of geographers have rejected the three-continent system (Europe, Africa, Asia) on the grounds that there is no substantial physical separation between them. For example, Sir Barry Cunliffe, the emeritus professor of European archeology at Oxford, argues that Europe has been geographically and culturally merely "the western excrescence of the continent of Asia".