How did Asia become a continent, who were the key players that determined the continent’s creation, and the naming of the area of such?
There are two origins that possibly the word Asia is derived from. In an Ancient Greek perspective, it originated from the word “Ἀσία” which was first used in 440 BC by a Greek geographer, Herodotus in Histories (a book of recordings of Herodotus that talks about the ancient traditions, politics, and geography and various cultures found in Western Asia, Northern Africa, and Greece at that time). Though the word Asia was used even before, it was not used to describe a whole continent like what people are describing Asia as of now, but it was used to refer to a name of a land on the east bank of the Aegean Sea and Anatolia which is known as the Asia Minor or in present day, a part of Turkey. While, in …show more content…
During that time, the division of Asia was along the Rioni River in the Caucasus Mountains, presently known as Georgia. When the Hellenistic Period of the Greeks came, the boundary moved to the Don River west of the Urals, presently known now as Ukraine (Lineback, 2013).
Then by 1972, a German geographer, Philip Johan von Strahlenburg, extended the boundary beyond the Don River which was further moved along the east of the Volga River and the north of the Ural Mountains. The watershed divide of the Ural Mountains acts as the physical boundary between Europe and Asia. While, the line that separates Africa from Asia is the Isthmus of the Suez, which is the gap between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of the Suez Canal (Hamilton, 2011).
With the effort of the European scholars, the main reason why they created boundaries between these three continents because they want to distinguish their region of the world (Hamilton,
There are two origins that possibly the word Asia is derived from. In an Ancient Greek perspective, it originated from the word “Ἀσία” which was first used in 440 BC by a Greek geographer, Herodotus in Histories (a book of recordings of Herodotus that talks about the ancient traditions, politics, and geography and various cultures found in Western Asia, Northern Africa, and Greece at that time). Though the word Asia was used even before, it was not used to describe a whole continent like what people are describing Asia as of now, but it was used to refer to a name of a land on the east bank of the Aegean Sea and Anatolia which is known as the Asia Minor or in present day, a part of Turkey. While, in …show more content…
During that time, the division of Asia was along the Rioni River in the Caucasus Mountains, presently known as Georgia. When the Hellenistic Period of the Greeks came, the boundary moved to the Don River west of the Urals, presently known now as Ukraine (Lineback, 2013).
Then by 1972, a German geographer, Philip Johan von Strahlenburg, extended the boundary beyond the Don River which was further moved along the east of the Volga River and the north of the Ural Mountains. The watershed divide of the Ural Mountains acts as the physical boundary between Europe and Asia. While, the line that separates Africa from Asia is the Isthmus of the Suez, which is the gap between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of the Suez Canal (Hamilton, 2011).
With the effort of the European scholars, the main reason why they created boundaries between these three continents because they want to distinguish their region of the world (Hamilton,