Asia's name began with a small corner of Bronze Age Turkey
The world's biggest continent, home to about 4.7 billion people, takes its name from Assuwa, a Bronze Age term for part of northwestern Anatolia. Its border with Europe has no natural basis and has shifted repeatedly, from a Georgian river in ancient Greek maps to the Urals in an 18th-century atlas.
Asia covers more than 44 million square kilometres, some 30% of Earth's land and 8% of its whole surface, and holds roughly 60% of humanity. Oceans bound it on three sides, the Pacific to the east, the Indian to the south and the Arctic to the north. It shares one landmass with Europe and a larger one with Africa too, so its edges are drawn by convention. A widely used scheme starts Asia beyond the Suez Canal and the straits of Turkey, follows the Ural range and its river, and places the continent below the Caucasus, the Caspian and the Black Sea.
Hittite records describe a league of Assuwan states, Troy among them, revolting unsuccessfully against King Tudhaliya I around 1400 BCE, and Mycenaean Linear B tablets mention aswia, apparently captives from the same area. Herodotus used Asia for Anatolia and the Persian Achaemenid lands, noting Greeks thought it honoured Prometheus's wife while Lydians credited a man named Asies. Rome gave the name to a province in western Anatolia, and Pliny was among the first to stretch it over the entire continent.
Greek geographers such as Anaximander and Hecataeus divided the Old World into three parts from the 6th century BCE, and Anaximander ran the Europe–Asia line along the Phasis, today's Rioni in Georgia. Hellenistic and Roman writers like Strabo and Ptolemy moved it to the Don. In 1730 Philip Johan von Strahlenberg's atlas proposed the Urals, and the Ural River won out by the mid-19th century. To the southwest, the Suez Canal and Red Sea make Egypt transcontinental, with Sinai in Asia. In the east, the Bering Strait separates Russia's Big Diomede from America's Little Diomede, and the edge with Oceania dissolves among Indonesia's islands, where the Wallace, Weber and Lydekker lines mark shifts in wildlife.
China and India alternated as the largest economies on Earth from 1 to 1800 CE, linked to the west by the Silk Road overland and the Straits of Malacca by sea. Asia gave rise to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, and its climates range from equatorial jungle and hot desert to subarctic and polar Siberia.
Source: Asia
