I want to talk to you about a border. A border that crosses other borders. One that you don’t
need a passport to cross. One of the most influential borders in the world, which much
of the world says doesn’t even exist. If, like me, you were taught the 7 continent
view of the world, you will know that this is Europe and this is Asia. With Belgium and
Vietnam being so incomprehensibly different from one another that we assign them to different
continents, where do we put the dividing line? The Eurasian border is unique because it’s
the one continental boundary defined, not by any waterway, but by mountains. We have
collectively decided that the boundaries of Europe and Asia end at the Caucasus and Ural
Mountains. But the idea of Europe and Asia being divided has been around for thousands
of years, and the precise division isn’t something we’ve all always agreed on.
So how did we get to this point? How did we use to divide the supercontinent? In fact,
why do we even divide this one landmass in this way anyway?
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The reason we define Europe as its own continent, and not a giant peninsula in Western Asia,
is because… history. Perhaps it is appropriate I talk about the Aegean islands, as it was
Ancient Greek cartographers who first made this distinction. In the 6th century BC, when
all the lands people in this area knew about looked like this, there was this one guy from
Miletus, named Anaximander. According to several Greek cartographers and philosophers that
came after him, Anaximander was the first to ever publish a true map of the world, and
this world map had one huge distinction. To the Ancient Greeks, the center of the world
was the Aegean Sea and its hundreds and hundreds of islands. Anywhere to the east of the sea
was Asia, anywhere to the west was Europe, and anywhere to the south was Libya.
This concept gave a lot of people a lot of different ideas on what role the Greeks themselves
played amongst the different continents. While some historians argue that perhaps European
Greeks used it against those who had fallen to Persian domination, others at the time
excluded the Aegean islands and the Peloponnese (and therefore the Hellenic peoples themselves)
from this continental model altogether, with the concept of Europe being more associated
with the non-Greek Thracians to the north. But even back in this time, people knew that
Europe and Asia were in fact connected by land north of the Black Sea, and had begun
to question why two conjoined regions would be their own separate continents (talk about
the original euroskeptics). Writing in the 1st century BC, Strabo made the observation,
“in giving names to the three continents, the Greeks did not take into consideration
the whole habitable Earth, but merely their own country and the land exactly opposite".
Anaximander defined the border between Europe and Asia as following the Phasis (now Rioni)
River in Georgia until it reached the Caspian Sea (eh, somewhere), and the border between
Asia and Africa as the Nile. Throughout the Roman era and the Middle Ages, European cartographers
largely followed Ptolemy’s version– through the Turkish Straits into the Black Sea, then
through the Kerch Strait into the Sea of Azov, and then following the Don River to… wherever
it ended up. However by the 16th-18th centuries, this definition was starting to get a bit
problematic, as Russia was expanding into the very lands that the smart dead people
in Greece didn’t know about. As European cartographers came to know about more of the
world, including– get this– a fourth continent, it became obvious that the Nile and the Don
might not have been the best geographic features to separate Asia from Africa and Europe. With
Asia and Africa it was pretty easy; you see that huge sea that almost connects to the
Mediterranean here? Yeah, put the border there, dummy.
In 1725, German-Swedish geographer Philip Johan von Strahlenberg (who is also dead)
redefined the border to follow the Volga River from the Caspian Sea until where it bends
near the city of Samara, also known as the Samara Bend. It then followed the division
between the drainage basins of the Volga and Ural Rivers, known as Obshchy Syrt, before
following the Ural Mountains into the Arctic Ocean. As the Russian Tsar Peter the Great
was on his whole ‘Russia is actually western’ shtick, Russian intellectuals associated with
him basically went, “Sweet! This puts so much more of our country in Europe! Look we’re
totally western, check out our tricolor flag!” However scholars across Russia and the rest
of Europe would fiercely debate this point, with some wanting to use the Don, and others
wanting to go as far east as the Ob or the Yenisei, but the Urals were the one thing
just about everyone could agree on (and to a lesser extent the Caspian). However, as
the universe inherently doesn’t care about the whims of some hairless apes who argue
over which way toilet paper should be hung, the Urals don’t actually extend all the
way to the Caspian. Increasingly, cartographers started to put the boundary along the Ural
River until it reached the Caspian, going down the sea about ⅔ the way before turning
to the northwest, going along the Caucasus Mountains instead of any river. But even then
the division wasn‘t completely set in stone, with Soviet geographers proposing the divide
follow the Kuma-Manych Depression in the Caucasus.
Nowadays the dividing line follows the eastern foothills of the Urals, then the Ural River
into the Caspian, and then along the watershed of the Caucasus Mountains before emptying
into the Black Sea and making both Turkey and Greece transcontinental countries.
But if this division is all about culture, what about Georgia, Armenia, and Cyprus? Culturally,
historically, and geopolitically, these regions have all had much more to do with Europe,
and yet they all find themselves mostly or entirely on the Asian side of the border.
What I think this sort of tells us about humanity is how even human things evade the human desire
to sort everything into neat little categories. The most empirical way to define a continent
(at least without including islands) might be to count Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, Antarctica,
and Australia, but that’s not what most of us use continents for. The way we actually
use continents, as a way to categorize the peoples and cultures of this mud ball floating
through space, doesn’t really fit with this definition if we count landmasses with populations
of a few hundred, 25 million, 1 billion, and 6.7 billion. God imagine what it’d be like
if Europe and Asia had random little enclaves and exclaves within each-other!
[AD]
Okay but you can’t just write off the Mariner Valley like that!
Um, have you seen what’s going on in Arcadia? It’s a war zone over there!
I don’t care about what’s happening on Luna or Mars, I want incriminating pictures
of Spider-Man! Okay well let’s tune into our reporter on
the scene in Shackleton right now. [3-second pause]
Thanks, Darrell, the situation in the Crater Region is actually totally normal but we still
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