Asia

• 1. Introduction

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  Asia covers more than 44 million square kilometres, about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of its total surface area. Its 4.7 billion people make up roughly 60% of everyone alive. This is the largest continent in the world by both land area and population, and it has long held the majority of the human population. Yet the name itself was once borrowed from a small corner of northwestern Anatolia, and the line that supposedly separates Asia from Europe has never been a real wall of rock or water. So where does Asia actually begin, and who decided? Why did China and India trade places as the world's largest economies across eighteen centuries? And how did a single landmass come to hold equatorial jungles, polar tundra, the tallest mountains on Earth, and the birthplaces of most of the world's mainstream religions? The answers run from a Bronze Age toponym to a desert pandemic, from horse-mounted nomads to the modern tiger economies.

• 2. The Borrowed Name

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  Assuwa, written 𒀸𒋗𒉿, is the Bronze Age toponym from which the word Asia is believed to come, and it first referred only to a portion of northwestern Anatolia. Hittite records describe a confederation of Assuwan states, including Troy, that unsuccessfully rebelled against the Hittite king Tudhaliya I around 1400 BCE. Roughly contemporary Linear B documents contain the term aswia, 𐀀𐀯𐀹𐀊, seemingly referring to captives from the same area.

  Herodotus used the term for Anatolia and the territory of the Achaemenid Empire, setting it against Greece and Egypt. He reports that Greeks assumed Asia was named after the wife of Prometheus, while Lydians said it came from Asies, son of Cotys, who passed the name to a tribe at Sardis. In Greek mythology, Asia was a nymph or Titan goddess of Lydia. The Iliad names two Phrygians in the Trojan War called Asios, literally meaning Asian.

  The Romans later adopted the term for the province of Asia in western Anatolia. One of the first writers to use Asia as a name for the whole continent was Pliny, stretching a regional label across a quarter of the planet.

• 3. An Arbitrary Border

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  Anaximander and Hecataeus, Greek geographers, helped establish the threefold division of the Old World into Africa, Asia, and Europe, in use since the 6th century BCE. Anaximander placed the boundary between Asia and Europe along the Phasis River, now the Rioni, in Georgia of the Caucasus, running from Poti on the Black Sea coast through the Surami Pass and along the Kura River to the Caspian Sea. Herodotus still followed this in the 5th century BCE. During the Hellenistic period the boundary shifted to the Tanais, the modern Don River, a convention used by Posidonius, Strabo, and Ptolemy.

  Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, in Sweden in 1730, published a new atlas proposing the Ural Mountains as the border of Asia. Tatishchev announced that he had proposed the idea to von Strahlenberg, who had suggested the Emba River as the lower boundary. Over the next century the Ural River prevailed in the mid-19th century, pushing the border from the Black Sea to the Caspian, into which the Ural River projects. Between the Black Sea and the Caspian, the line often follows the crest of the Caucasus Mountains, sometimes placed further north on the Kuma-Manych Depression.

  Not everyone accepted the three-continent system. Sir Barry Cunliffe, emeritus professor of European archeology at Oxford, argues that Europe has been merely the western excrescence of the continent of Asia. Asia, Europe, and Africa form one continuous landmass, Afro-Eurasia, sharing a common continental shelf, which is why the easternmost part of Siberia, east of the Chersky Range, actually sits on the North American Plate.

• 4. Edges Of A Continent

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  The Bering Strait separates the Diomede Islands by just a sliver: Big Diomede belongs to Russia, Little Diomede to the United States. At their nearest points, Alaska and Russia are separated by only 2.5 miles. The Bering Strait and Bering Sea form the international boundary between the two countries and divide the landmasses of Asia and North America. The Aleutian Islands extend westward from the Alaskan Peninsula toward Russia's Komandorski Islands and the Kamchatka Peninsula, and most are tied to North America, except the westernmost Near Islands, which sit on Asia's continental shelf.

  The Wallace Line marks where Asia frays into the Pacific, separating the Asian and Wallacea biogeographical realms across deep water straits between the Asian and Australian continental shelves. Weber's Line splits the region by the balance of fauna between Asian and Australo-Papuan origin, while Lydekker's Line marks Wallacea's eastern edge with Sahul. The Maluku Islands, except the Aru Islands, are often counted on the border of southeast Asia. Lewis and Wigen note that the narrowing of Southeast Asia to its present boundaries was a gradual process, shaped largely by which colonial empire held which islands.

  The Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, the Red Sea, and the Bab-el-Mandeb form the boundary between Asia and Africa. That line cuts Egypt in two, leaving the Sinai Peninsula in Asia and the rest of the country in Africa, and making Egypt a transcontinental country. Several others share that status, including Georgia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey, each lying partly in Europe.

• 5. Steppe And River Valley

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  Homo erectus left the African continent about 1.8 million years ago, and is believed to have lived in East and Southeast Asia from 1.8 million to 110,000 years ago. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, migrated about 60,000 years ago to South Asia along the Indian Ocean, interbreeding with an archaic species called Denisovans in Southeast Asia. Before they arrived, Flores was occupied by Homo floresiensis, a small archaic human. Ancestors of East Eurasians split from Ancient West Eurasians about 46,000 years ago, migrating out of a hub in the Iranian Plateau.

  Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Yellow River each cradled some of the world's earliest known civilisations, every one developing around a fertile river valley. These cultures shared many similarities and may have exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel, while writing seems to have been developed individually in each area. Cities, states, and empires grew in these lowlands.

  The central steppe was home to horse-mounted nomads who could reach all areas of Asia. The earliest postulated expansion out of the steppe was that of the Indo-Europeans, who carried their languages into West Asia, South Asia, and the borders of China, where the Tocharians resided. The Caucasus and Himalaya mountains and the Karakum and Gobi deserts formed barriers the steppe horsemen could cross only with difficulty. Yet the lowlands lacked the open grasslands to raise a large equestrian force, so nomads who conquered states in China, India, and the Middle East often found themselves adapting to the richer societies they had overrun.

• 6. Conquest And Humiliation

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  The Islamic Caliphate's defeats of the Byzantine and Persian empires brought West Asia, southern Central Asia, and western South Asia under its control during the conquests of the 7th century, and Islam spread further to southern India and Southeast Asia along the Maritime Silk Road. The Mongol Empire seized a large part of Asia in the 13th century, stretching from China to Europe. The Song dynasty reportedly had around 120 million citizens before the Mongol invasion; the 1300 census that followed reported roughly 60 million. The Black Death, one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, is thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, then travelled along the Silk Road.

  Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, sailing under Iberian sponsorship, opened new routes from Atlantic Europe to Pacific Asia and the Indian Ocean in the late 15th century. The Russian Empire pushed into northwestern Asia from the 17th century and took control of all Siberia and most of Central Asia by the end of the 19th. The Ottoman Empire held Anatolia, most of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans from the mid 16th century, while the Manchu conquered China and established the Qing dynasty in the 17th century.

  The British Empire became dominant in South Asia, with British traders conquering most of the region before direct British rule followed a failed 1857 revolt. The 1869 completion of the Suez Canal increased British access to India and deepened European influence over Africa and Asia. Western powers came to dominate China in what became known as the century of humiliation, where the British-supported opium trade and the Opium Wars forced China into importing more than it exported. Japan, by contrast, rose rapidly during the Meiji era of the late 19th century, applying industrial knowledge learned from the West and building a colonial empire across East Asia, Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and the Pacific islands.

• 7. The Center Of Gravity

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  China and India traded places as the largest economies in the world from 1 to 1800 CE, with China holding the highest GDP per capita until 1500. According to economic historian Angus Maddison, India had the world's largest economy for much of the past three millennia before the 19th century, accounting for 25% of the world's industrial output. Japan was for several decades the largest economy in Asia and second-largest in the world, surpassing Germany in 1968 and the Soviet Union by net material product in 1990. In 1995, Japan's economy nearly equaled that of the US as the largest in the world for a day, after the yen reached a record high of 79 yen per US dollar.

  World War II ended in 1945, and the wartime ruination of Europe and imperial Japan let many Asian countries rapidly free themselves of colonial rule. The independence of India came with the carving out of a separate nation for the majority of South Asian Muslims, which in 1971 split further into Pakistan and Bangladesh. The end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union by 1991 brought independence to the five modern Central Asian countries. China, after the reform and opening up under Deng Xiaoping, overtook Japan in 2010 to become the world's second largest economy.

  Japan and South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore became known as the Four Asian Tigers, now all developed economies with among the highest GDP per capita in Asia. Citigroup found in 2011 that 9 of 11 Global Growth Generator countries came from Asia, naming Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Mongolia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. The same year, Asia topped Europe in the number of millionaires. In 2025, India overtook Japan in nominal GDP to become the world's 4th largest and Asia's 2nd largest economy.

• 8. Faiths And Laureates

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  Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Chinese folk religion, and Buddhism, the five most practiced religions in the world, all have origins in Asia. The story of the Great Flood appears earliest in Mesopotamian mythology, in the Enuma Elis and the Epic of Gilgamesh, before it reached Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Hindu mythology tells of an avatar of Vishnu in the form of a fish who warned Manu of a terrible flood. Hinduism, with around 1.1 billion adherents, is the largest religion in Asia, representing about 25% of its population, with over 80% of both India and Nepal adhering to it.

  Islam, which originated in the Hejaz in modern-day Saudi Arabia, has at least 1 billion Muslims, around 23.8% of Asia's population, and Indonesia holds the largest Muslim population in the world. Judaism, the oldest of the Abrahamic faiths, is practiced primarily in Israel, where Jews number about 6.1 million and make up 75.6% of the population. The Saint Thomas Christians in India trace their origins to the evangelistic activity of Thomas the Apostle in the 1st century. Buddhism holds the majority in Cambodia, at 96%, and Thailand, at 95%, among others.

  Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali dramatist and author from Santiniketan, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, becoming the first Asian Nobel laureate, and he authored both the Indian and Bangladeshi national anthems. C.V. Raman became the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences, in Physics, for his work on the scattering of light. Japan has won the most Nobel Prizes of any Asian nation, 24, followed by India with 13. In 2006, the Bangladeshi Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for founding Grameen Bank, a community development bank built on the concept of micro credit, lending money to poor people, especially women.