Why are Europe and Asia considered discrete landmasses instead of a single continent which could be called Eurasia?
Apparently geographers do prefer to define things this way (it’s sometimes called six-continent combined-Eurasia model), as far as I can tell it’s a hangover from 19th century European cartographers who may have been working off a model which dates back to the pre-Christian era (ancient Greeks, who coined the terms Europe and Asia, saw the waters off their shores separating them from areas like current-day Turkey and the Middle East as representing a civilizational as well as geographic divide). Interestingly, when I was in Russia I sometimes saw the phrase “European peninsula” used in English-language papers published there. Maybe we should start calling it “Northwest Asia” from now on.
Related Questions
- Why are Europe and Asia considered discrete landmasses instead of a single continent which could be called Eurasia?
- Why are Europe and Asia considered separate rather than a single continent which could be called Eurasia?
- How did human history in North America differ from the events of Asia, Eurasia, and Europe?
