Asia

The border between Asia and the region of is usually placed somewhere in the . The in Indonesia are often considered to lie on the border of southeast Asia, with , to the east of the islands, being wholly part of Oceania. The terms Southeast Asia and Oceania, devised in the 19th century, have had several vastly different geographic meanings since their inception. The chief factor in determining which islands of the Malay Archipelago are Asian has been the location of the colonial possessions of the various empires there (not all European). Lewis and Wigen assert, "The narrowing of 'Southeast Asia' to its present boundaries was thus a gradual process."[21]

Ongoing definition

Geographical Asia is a cultural artifact of European conceptions of the world, beginning with the , being imposed onto other cultures, an imprecise concept causing endemic contention about what it means. Asia does not exactly correspond to the cultural borders of its various types of constituents.[22]

From the time of a minority of geographers have rejected the three-continent system (Europe, Africa, Asia) on the grounds that there is no substantial physical separation between them., the emeritus professor of European archeology at Oxford, argues that Europe has been geographically and culturally merely "the western excrescence of the continent of Asia".[24]

Geographically, Asia is the major eastern constituent of the continent of with Europe being a northwestern of the landmass. Asia, Europe and Africa make up a single continuous landmass— (except for the Suez Canal)—and share a common . Almost all of Europe and the better part of Asia sit atop the , adjoined on the south by the and and with the easternmost part of Siberia (east of the ) on the .

The idea of a place called "Asia" was originally a concept of , is much less certain, and the ultimate source of the Latin word is uncertain, though several theories have been published. One of the first classical writers to use Asia as a name of the whole continent was . change in meaning is common and can be observed in some other geographical names, such as (from ).

Bronze Age

Before Greek poetry, the area was in a , at the beginning of which syllabic writing was lost and alphabetic writing had not begun. Prior to then in the the records of the , the and the various states of Greece mention a region undoubtedly Asia, certainly in Anatolia, including if not identical to Lydia. These records are administrative and do not include poetry.

The Mycenaean states were destroyed about 1200 BCE by unknown agents although one school of thought assigns the to this time. The burning of the palaces baked clay diurnal administrative records written in a Greek syllabic script called , deciphered by a number of interested parties, most notably by a young World War II cryptographer, , subsequently assisted by the scholar, . A major cache discovered by at the site of ancient included hundreds of male and female names formed by different methods.

Some of these are of women held in servitude (as study of the society implied by the content reveals). They were used in trades, such as cloth-making, and usually came with children. The epithet lawiaiai, "captives", associated with some of them identifies their origin. Some are ethnic names. One in particular, aswiai, identifies "women of Asia"., a Greek colony, which would not have been raided for slaves by Greeks. Chadwick suggests that the names record the locations where these foreign women were purchased. The was a confederation of states in western Anatolia, defeated by the under around 1400 BCE.