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| Definition and boundaries | |
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For more details on Asian borders, see Geography of Asia, Boundaries between continents, List of transcontinental countries and Copenhagen criteria.
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| Greek three-continent system | |
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Two-point equidistant projection of Asia and surrounding landmasses.
The original distinction between Europe and Asia was made by the ancient Greeks. They used the Aegean Sea, the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus, the Black Sea, the Kerch Strait, and the Sea of Azov as the border between Asia and Europe. The Nile was often used as the border between Asia and Africa (then called Libya), although some Greek geographers suggested the Red Sea would form a better boundary.[7] Darius' canal between the Nile and the Red Sea introduced considerable variation in opinion. Under the Roman Empire, the Don River emptying into the Black Sea was the western border of Asia. It was the northernmost navigable point of the European shore.[citation needed] In the 15th century the Red Sea became established as the boundary between Africa and Asia, replacing the Nile. As exploration developed, the border between Asia and Europe had to be redefined, as the borders of the time did not extend to the arctic.[7]
Tags:Landmass,Ancient Greeks,Aegean Sea,Dardanelles,Sea Of Marmara,Bosporus,Black Sea,Kerch Strait,Red Sea,Darius,Roman Empire,Ancient Greek,Europe,Africa,Oman, | |
| Asia-Europe boundary | |
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The Don River became unsatisfactory to northern Europeans when Peter the Great, king of the Tsardom of Russia, defeating rival claims of Sweden and the Ottoman Empire to the eastern lands, and armed resistance by the tribes of Siberia, synthesized a new Russian Empire extending to the Ural Mountains and beyond, founded in 1721. The major geographical theorist of the empire was actually a former Swedish prisoner-of-war, taken at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 and assigned to Tobolsk, where he associated with Peter's Siberian official, Vasily Tatishchev, and was allowed freedom to conduct geographical and anthropological studies in preparation for a future book.[citation needed]
At home in Sweden again, five years after Peter's death, in 1730 von Strahlenberg published a new atlas proposing the Urals as the border of Asia. The Russians were enthusiastic about the concept, which allowed them to keep their European identity in geography as well as other cultural heritage. Tatishchev announced that he had proposed the idea to von Strahlenberg. The latter had suggested the Emba River as the lower 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 to the Caspian Sea into which the Ural River projects.[8] In the maps of the period, Transcaucasia was counted as Asian. The incorporation of most of that region into the Soviet Union tended to push views of the border to the south.
Tags:Eastern,Ural Mountains,Caspian,Peter The Great,Tsardom Of Russia,Sweden,Ottoman Empire,Siberia,Russian Empire,Battle Of Poltava,Tobolsk,Vasily Tatishchev,Emba River,Ural River,Russia, | |
| Asia-Oceania boundary | |
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The border between Asia and Oceania is placed somewhere in the Malay archipelago. The terms Southeast Asia and Oceania, devised in the 19th century, have had vastly different geographic meanings since their inception. Oceania has never been Asia, whatever it may have been defined to be. The chief factor in determining what islands of the Malay 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."[7]
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| Ongoing definition | |
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Afro-Eurasia shown in red
Geographical Asia is a cultural artifact, an imprecise concept causing endemic contention about what it means. In contrast to Europe, Asia is the largest and most culturally diverse of the continents in the seven-continent system.[9] It does not exactly correspond to the cultural borders of its various types of constituents.[10]
In addition to its general inherited geographical meaning, to which the entire literate world subscribes, Asia has any number of agency-specific meanings organizationally and operationally of use in more restricted fields of interest. For example, the World University Service of Canada is a volunteer organization dedicated to bringing educational, health and other services to nations that need them the most. The regional divisions most convenient to its operations include, among others, the Middle East and Europe, and South and Southeast Asia, termed just "Asia."[11] Its administrative Asia is substantially different from the overall geographic and the same may be said of many hundreds more agencies across the globe that operate in Asia from headquarters elsewhere. Some of the most innovative and perhaps the most transitory uses of "Asia" have been promulgated by the news media reporting on current events. Their classifications must be the most suitable for the news and the sources of it. For example, the BBC News has an Asia-Pacific section, which acquires news from anywhere in Australasia, Oceania or the Pacific side of the Americas.[12]
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 or is no substantial physical separation between them.[6] 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."[13] Geographically, Asia is the major eastern constituent of the continent of Eurasia with Europe being a northwestern peninsula of the landmass – or of Afro-Eurasia; geologically, Asia, Europe and Africa make up a single continuous landmass (except for the Suez Canal) and share a common continental shelf. Almost all of Europe and most of Asia sit atop the Eurasian Plate, adjoined on the south by the Arabian and Indian Plate and with the easternmost part of Siberia (east of the Cherskiy Range) on the North American Plate.
Tags:Suez Canal,Peninsula,Arabian,Indian Plate,Cherskiy Range,North American Plate,Herodotus, | |
| Etymology | |
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Ptolemy's Asia
Asia was originally a concept of Western civilization.[14] The place name, "Asia", in various forms in a large number of modern languages is of unknown ultimate provenience. Its etymology and language of origin are uncertain. It appears to be one of the most ancient of recorded names. A number of theories have been published. English Asia can be traced through the formation of English literature to Latin literature, where it has the same form, Asia. Whether all uses and all forms of the name derive also from the Latin of the Roman Empire is much less certain.
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| Classical antiquity | |
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Latin Asia and Greek Ἀσία appear to be the same word. Roman authors translated Ἀσία as Asia. The Romans named a province Asia, which was in the location of the then Asia. There was an Asia Minor and an Asia Major (Iraq), of which the name of Minor survived. As the earliest evidence of the name is Greek, it is likely circumstantially that Asia came from Ἀσία, but ancient transitions, due to the lack of literary contexts, are difficult to catch in the act. The most likely vehicles were the ancient geographers and historians, such as Herodotus, who were all Greek. Roman civilization Hellenized extensively. Ancient Greek certainly evidences early and rich uses of the name.[15]
The first continental use of Asia is attributed to Herodotus (about 440 BC), not because he innovated it, but because his Histories are the earliest surviving prose to describe it in any detail. He defines it carefully,[16] mentioning the previous geographers whom he had read, but whose works are now missing. By it he means Anatolia and the Persian Empire, in contrast to Greece and Egypt. Herodotus comments that he is puzzled as to why three women's names were "given to a tract which is in reality one" (Europa, Asia, and Libya, referring to Africa), stating that most Greeks assumed that Asia was named after the wife of Prometheus (i.e. Hesione), but that the Lydians say it was named after Asies, son of Cotys, who passed the name on to a tribe at Sardis.[17] In Greek mythology, "Asia" (Ἀσία) or "Asie" (Ἀσίη) was the name of a "Nymph or Titan goddess of Lydia."[18]
Herodotus' geographical puzzlement was perhaps only a form of disagreement, as, having read the earlier Greek poetry along with everyone else literate, he would have known perfectly well why places received female names. Athens, Mycenae, Thebes and many other locations in fact had them. In ancient Greek religion, places were under the care of female divinities, parallel to guardian angels. The poets detailed their doings and generations in allegoric language salted with entertaining stories, which subsequently playwrights transformed into classical Greek drama and became "Greek mythology."
For example, Hesiod mentions the daughters of Tethys and Ocean, among whom are a "holy company", "who with the Lord Apollo and the Rivers have youths in their keeping."[19] Many of these are geographic: Doris, Rhodea, Europa, Asia. Hesiod explains:[20]
"For there are three-thousand neat-ankled daughters of Ocean who are dispersed far and wide, and in every place alike serve the earth and the deep waters."
The Iliad (attributed by the ancient Greeks to Homer) mentions two Phrygians (the tribe that replaced the Luvians in Lydia) in the Trojan War named Asios (an adjective meaning "Asian");[21] and also a marsh or lowland containing a marsh in Lydia as ασιος.[22]
Tags:Anatolia,Persian Empire,Greece,Egypt,Europa,Prometheus,Hesione,Lydians,Sardis,Nymph,Titan,Lydia,Hesiod,Tethys,Apollo,Iliad,Homer,Luvians,Trojan War, | |
| Bronze Age | |
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Before Greek poetry, the Aegean Sea area was in a Greek Dark Age, at the beginning of which syllabic writing was lost and alphabetic writing had not begun. Prior to then in the Bronze Age the records of the Assyrian Empire, the Hittite Empire and the various Mycenaean states of Greece mention a region undoubtedly Asia, certainly in Anatolia, including if not identical to Lydia. These records are administrative and do not include poetry.
The Mycenaean states were destroyed about 1200 BC by unknown agents although one school of thought assigns the Dorian invasion to this time. The burning of the palaces baked clay diurnal administrative records written in a Greek syllabic script called Linear B, deciphered by a number of interested parties, most notably by a young World War II cryptographer, Michael Ventris, subsequently assisted by the scholar, John Chadwick. A major cache discovered by Carl Blegen at the site of ancient Pylos included hundreds of male and female names formed by different methods.
Some of these are of women held in servitude (as study of the society implied by the content reveals). They were used in trades, such as cloth-making, and usually came with children. The epithet, lawiaiai, "captives," associated with some of them identifies their origin. Some are ethnic names. One in particular, aswiai, identifies "women of Asia."[23] Perhaps they were captured in Asia, but some others, Milatiai, appear to have been of Miletus, a Greek colony, which would not have been raided for slaves by Greeks. Chadwick suggests that the names record the locations where these foreign women were purchased.[24] The name is also in the singular, Aswia, which refers both to the name of a country and to a female of it. There is a masculine form, aswios. This Aswia appears to have been a remnant of a region known to the Hittites as Assuwa, centered on Lydia, or "Roman Asia."
Alternatively, the etymology of the term may be from the Akkadian word (w)aṣû(m), which means 'to go outside' or 'to ascend', referring to the direction of the sun at sunrise in the Middle East and also likely connected with the Phoenician word asa meaning east. This may be contrasted to a similar etymology proposed for Europe, as being from Akkadian erēbu(m) 'to enter' or 'set' (of the sun).
T.R. Reid supports this alternative etymology, noting that the ancient Greek name must have derived from asu, meaning 'east' in Assyrian (ereb for Europe meaning 'west').[14] The ideas of Occidental (form Latin Occidens 'setting') and Oriental (from Latin Oriens for 'rising') are also European invention, synonymous with Western and Eastern.[14] Reid further emphasizes that it explains the Western point of view of placing all the peoples and cultures of Asia into a single classification, almost as if there were a need for setting the distinction between Western and Eastern civilizations on the Eurasian continent.[14] Ogura Kazuo and Tenshin Okakura are two outspoken Japanese figures on the subject.[14]
Also, Assuwa has been suggested as the origin for the name of the continent "Asia".[25] The Assuwa league was a confederation of states in western Anatolia, defeated by the Hittites under Tudhaliya I around 1400 BC.
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| History | |
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Main article: History of Asia
1890 map of Asia
The history of Asia can be seen as the distinct histories of several peripheral coastal regions: East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, linked by the interior mass of the Central Asian steppes.
The coastal periphery was home to some of the world's earliest known civilizations, each of them developing around fertile river valleys. The civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Huanghe shared many similarities. These civilizations may well have exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel. Other innovations, such as writing, seem to have been developed individually in each area. Cities, states and empires developed in these lowlands.
The central steppe region had long been inhabited by horse-mounted nomads who could reach all areas of Asia from the steppes. The earliest postulated expansion out of the steppe is that of the Indo-Europeans, who spread their languages into the Middle East, South Asia, and the borders of China, where the Tocharians resided. The northernmost part of Asia, including much of Siberia, was largely inaccessible to the steppe nomads, owing to the dense forests, climate and tundra. These areas remained very sparsely populated.
The Silk Road connected many civilizations across Asia[26]
The center and the peripheries were mostly kept separated by mountains and deserts. The Caucasus and Himalaya mountains and the Karakum and Gobi deserts formed barriers that the steppe horsemen could cross only with difficulty. While the urban city dwellers were more advanced technologically and socially, in many cases they could do little in a military aspect to defend against the mounted hordes of the steppe. However, the lowlands did not have enough open grasslands to support a large horsebound force; for this and other reasons, the nomads who conquered states in China, India, and the Middle East often found themselves adapting to the local, more affluent societies.
The Islamic Caliphate took over the Middle East and Central Asia during the Muslim conquests of the 7th century. The Mongol Empire conquered a large part of Asia in the 13th century, an area extending from China to Europe.
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| Geography | |
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This section requires expansion.
Main article: Geography of Asia
Geography in Asia is rather complicated, while Asia is the largest continent on Earth, and Asia is neighboring with Europe, Africa and Oceania. While neighboring with Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean. It contains 48 countries[27] in its region, with 2 of them (Russia and Turkey) having part of their land in Europe, and also see Geography of Asia for further information.
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| Economy | |
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Main article: Economy of Asia
Singapore has one of the busiest ports in the world and is the world's fourth largest foreign exchange trading centre.
Asia has the second largest nominal GDP of all continents, after Europe, but the largest when measured in purchasing power parity. As of 2010, the largest economies in Asia are China, Japan, India, South Korea and Indonesia. Based on Global Office Locations 2011, Asia dominated the office locations with 4 of top 5 were in Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, London and Shanghai. Around 68 percent of international firms have office in Hong Kong.[28]
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the economies of the PRC[29] and India have been growing rapidly, both with an average annual growth rate of more than 8%. Other recent very high growth nations in Asia include Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Cyprus and the Philippines, and mineral-rich nations such as Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Brunei, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman.
According to economic historian Angus Maddison in his book The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, India had the world's largest economy during 0 BCE and 1000 BCE.[30][31] China was the largest and most advanced economy on earth for much of recorded history,[32][33][34][35] until the British Empire (excluding India) overtook it in the mid 19th century. For several decades in the late twentieth century Japan was the largest economy in Asia and second-largest of any single nation in the world, after surpassing the Soviet Union (measured in net material product) in 1986 and Germany in 1968. (NB: A number of supernational economies are larger, such as the European Union (EU), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or APEC). This ended in 2010 when China overtook Japan to become the world's second largest economy.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Japan's GDP was almost as large (current exchange rate method) as that of the rest of Asia combined.[citation needed] In 1995, Japan's economy nearly equaled that of the USA as the largest economy in the world for a day, after the Japanese currency reached a record high of 79 yen/US$. Economic growth in Asia since World War II to the 1990s had been concentrated in Japan as well as the four regions of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore located in the Pacific Rim, known as the Asian tigers, which have now all received developed country status, having the highest GDP per capita in Asia.[36]
Mumbai is one of the most populous cities on the continent, is a hub for infrastructure & tourism and plays a crucial role in the Economy of India
It is forecasted that India will overtake Japan in terms of nominal GDP by 2020.[37] In terms of GDP per capita, both nominal and PPP-adjusted, South Korea will become the second wealthiest country in Asia by 2025, overtaking Germany, the United Kingdom and France. According to IMF statistics for the year 2010, Taiwan PPP-adjusted GDP per capita, at USD 34,743, is already higher than that of Finland, France, or Japan.[citation needed] By 2027, according to Goldman Sachs, China will have the largest economy in the world. Several trade blocs exist, with the most developed being the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Asia is the largest continent in the world by a considerable margin, and it is rich in natural resources, such as petroleum, forests, fish, water, rice, copper and silver. Manufacturing in Asia has traditionally been strongest in East and Southeast Asia, particularly in the People's Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, India, Philippines and Singapore. Japan and South Korea continue to dominate in the area of multinational corporations, but increasingly the PRC and India are making significant inroads. Many companies from Europe, North America, South Korea and Japan have operations in Asia's developing countries to take advantage of its abundant supply of cheap labour and relatively developed infrastructure.
According to Citigroup 9 of 11 Global Growth Generators countries came from Asia driven by population and income growth. They are Bangladesh, the People's Republic of China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Mongolia, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.[38] Asia has four main financial centres: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai. Call centres and business process outsourcing (BPOs) are becoming major employers in India and the Philippines due to the availability of a large pool of highly skilled, English-speaking workers. The increased use of outsourcing has assisted the rise of India and the China as financial centres. Due to its large and extremely competitive information technology industry, India has become a major hub for outsourcing.
In 2010, Asia had 3.3 million millionaires (people with net worth over US$1 million excluding their homes), slightly below North America with 3.4 million millionaires. Last year Asia had toppled Europe.[39]
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