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? [This video was brought to you by MorningBrew] 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 have another 23 hours and 59 minutes of program
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Interesting, do tell us more about this Morning Brew thing.
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NFTs [laughs] Sorry, that’s totally gonna go well, isn’t it?
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