West Asia’s borders shift with every agency’s map key
West Asia—also Western or Southwest Asia—typically covers Anatolia, Arabia, Iran, Mesopotamia, the Armenian highlands, the Levant, and Sinai, about 5.99 million square kilometres with some 313 million people. Of twenty UN members wholly or partly inside, thirteen are Arab; Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia lead in population.
Definitions refuse to sit still. The plant-geography scheme known as WGSRPD leaves out Arabia and adds Afghanistan; the FAO drops Egypt and includes Afghanistan; UNEP draws yet another line. The UN Statistics Division, unlike UNIDO, moves Iran into South Asia while counting Turkey, Georgia and Cyprus as West Asian. Meanwhile the UN’s Eastern European Group seats Armenia and Georgia with Europe, and UNESCO lists Armenia, Georgia and Cyprus under Europe too.
The phrase overlaps with Middle East, Near East and Eastern Mediterranean without matching any of them exactly. It is also older than those political labels: William Ouseley’s Persian Miscellanies of 1795 used Western Asia for Syria, Mesopotamia, Chaldea and Persia. Classical historians meant the part of Asia known to ancient writers, as opposed to interior Scythia or distant Transoxania and India, and twentieth-century archaeologists used it as shorthand for the Fertile Crescent without Egypt. Its use in modern geopolitics and economics dates from at least the mid-1960s.
Sport follows its own map. The West Asian Games, run by the Olympic Council of Asia, bring together thirteen nations, from Iran, Iraq and Syria to the Gulf states, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen. Regional federations exist for football, basketball, tennis, and billiards and snooker.
Eight major seas frame the region: the Aegean, Black, Caspian and Mediterranean seas, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. On land, the Turkish Straits and the Caucasus watershed divide it from Europe, the Isthmus of Suez from Africa, and the Kavir and Lut deserts of eastern Iran from South Asia. Beneath it the African, Eurasian and Arabian plates meet, and the Arabian Plate pushes north against Anatolia along the East Anatolian Fault.
Source: West Asia
