Asia
_without_New_Guinea.svg) | |
| Area | 44,579,000 km2 (17,212,000 sq mi) (1st)[1] |
|---|---|
| Population |  4,694,576,167 (2021; 1st)[2][3] |
| Population density | 100/km2 (260/sq mi) |
| GDP (PPP) | $94.66 trillion (2025 est; 1st)[4] |
| GDP (nominal) | $41.02 trillion (2025 est; 1st)[5] |
| GDP per capita | $9,180 (2025 est; 5th)[6] |
| Religions |
|
| Demonym | Asian |
| Countries |
|
| Dependencies | |
| Non-UN states | |
| Languages | List of languages |
| Time zones | UTC+02:00 to UTC+12:00 |
| Internet TLD | .asia |
| Largest cities | |
| UN M49 code | 142 – Asia001 – World |
Asia (/ˈeɪʒə/ ⓘ AY-zhə, UK also /ˈeɪʃə/ AY-shə) is the largest continent[note 1][10][11] in the world by both land area and population.[11] It covers an area of more than 44 million square kilometres,[note 2] about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of Earth's total surface area. The continent, which has long been home to the majority of the human population,[12] was the site of many of the first civilisations. Its 4.7 billion people constitute roughly 60% of the world's population.
Asia shares the landmass of Eurasia with Europe, and of Afro-Eurasia with both Europe and Africa. In general terms, it is bounded on the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Indian Ocean, and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. The border of Asia with Europe is a historical and cultural construct, as there is no clear physical and geographical separation between them. A commonly accepted division places Asia to the east of the Suez Canal separating it from Africa; and to the east of the Turkish straits, the Ural Mountains and Ural River, and to the south of the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian and Black seas, separating it from Europe.[13]
Since the concept of Asia derives from the term for the eastern region from a European perspective, Asia is the remaining vast area of Eurasia minus Europe. Therefore, Asia is a region where various independent cultures coexist rather than sharing a single culture, and its boundary with Europe is somewhat arbitrary and has moved since its first conception in classical antiquity. The division of Eurasia into two continents reflects East–West cultural differences, some of which vary on a spectrum.
China and India traded places as the largest economies in the world from 1 to 1800 CE. China was a major economic power for much of recorded history, with the highest GDP per capita until 1500.[14][15][16] The Silk Road became the main east–west trading route in the Asian hinterlands while the Straits of Malacca stood as a major sea route. Asia has exhibited economic dynamism as well as robust population growth during the 20th century, but overall population growth has since fallen.[17] Asia was the birthplace of most of the world's mainstream religions including Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and many other religions.
Asia varies greatly across and within its regions with regard to ethnic groups, cultures, environments, economics, historical ties, and government systems. It also has a mix of many different climates ranging from the equatorial south via the hot deserts in parts of West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, and East Asia and tropical jungles in Southeast Asia, temperate areas in the east and the continental centre to vast subarctic and polar areas in North Asia.
Etymology
The term "Asia" is believed to originate in the Bronze Age toponym Assuwa (Hittite: 𒀸𒋗𒉿, romanized: aš-šu-wa) which originally referred only to a portion of northwestern Anatolia. The term appears in Hittite records recounting how a confederation of Assuwan states including Troy unsuccessfully rebelled against the Hittite king Tudhaliya I around 1400 BCE.[18][19][20] Roughly contemporary Linear B documents contain the term aswia (Mycenaean Greek: 𐀀𐀯𐀹𐀊, romanized: a-si-wi-ja), seemingly in reference to captives from the same area.[21][22]
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Herodotus used the term in reference to Anatolia and the territory of the Achaemenid Empire, in contrast to Greece and Egypt. He reports that Greeks assumed that Asia was named after the wife of Prometheus, but that Lydians say it was named after Asies, son of Cotys, who passed the name on to a tribe at Sardis.[23] In Greek mythology, "Asia" (Ἀσία or Ἀσίη) was the name of a "Nymph or Titan goddess of Lydia".[24] The Iliad (attributed by the ancient Greeks to Homer) mentions two Phrygians in the Trojan War named Asios (literally 'Asian');[25] and also a marsh or lowland containing a marsh in Lydia as ασιος.[26]
The term was later adopted by the Romans, who used it in reference to the province of Asia, located in western Anatolia.[27] One of the first writers to use Asia as a name of the whole continent was Pliny.[28]
Definition
Asia–Europe boundary
The threefold division of the Old World into Africa, Asia, and Europe has been in use since the 6th century BCE, due to Greek geographers such as Anaximander and Hecataeus.[29] Anaximander placed the boundary between Asia and Europe along the Phasis River (now the Rioni) in Georgia of Caucasus (from its mouth by Poti on the Black Sea coast, through the Surami Pass and along the Kura River to the Caspian Sea), a convention still followed by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE.[30] During the Hellenistic period,[31] this convention was revised, and the boundary between Europe and Asia was now considered to be the Tanais (the modern Don River). This is the convention used by Roman era authors such as Posidonius,[32] Strabo[33] and Ptolemy.[34]
The border between Asia and Europe was later redefined by European academics.[35] In 1730, five years after the death of Peter the Great, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published in Sweden a new atlas proposing the Ural Mountains as the border of Asia. Vasily Tatishchev announced that he had proposed the idea to von Strahlenberg. The latter had suggested the Emba River as the southern part of this boundary. Over the next century various proposals were made until the Ural River prevailed in the mid-19th century. The border had been moved perforce from the Black Sea (the Romans' definition) to the Caspian Sea into which the Emba and Ural rivers project.[36] Between the Black Sea and the Caspian, the border is often placed along the crest of the Caucasus Mountains, although it is sometimes placed further north,[35] on the Kuma–Manych Depression.
Asia–Africa boundary
The boundary between Asia and Africa is the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, the Red Sea, and the Bab-el-Mandeb.[37] This makes Egypt a transcontinental country, with the Sinai Peninsula in Asia and the remainder of the country in Africa.
Asia–Oceania boundary
The border between Asia and Oceania is usually placed somewhere in the Indonesian Archipelago, specifically in Eastern Indonesia. The Wallace Line separates the Asian and Wallacea biogeographical realms, a transition zone of deep water straits between the Asian and Australian continental shelves. Weber's Line split the region in two with regard to the balance of fauna between Asian origin or Australo-Papuan origin.[38] Wallacea's eastern boundary with Sahul is represented by the Lydekker's Line.[39][40] The Maluku Islands (except the Aru Islands) are often considered to lie on the border of southeast Asia, with the Aru Islands and Western New Guinea, to the east of the Lydekker's Line, being wholly part of Oceania, as both lie on the Australian continental plate.[38] Culturally, the Wallacea region denoted the transition between Austronesian and Melanesian people, with varying degrees of intermixing between the two. In general, the further west and coastal a region is, the stronger the Austronesian influences, and the further east and inland a region is, the stronger the Melanesian influences.[41] 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 Indonesian 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."[42]
Asia–North America boundary
The Bering Strait and Bering Sea separate the landmasses of Asia and North America, as well as forming the international boundary between Russia and the United States. This national and continental boundary separates the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait, with Big Diomede in Russia and Little Diomede in the United States. The Aleutian Islands are an island chain extending westward from the Alaskan Peninsula toward Russia's Komandorski Islands and Kamchatka Peninsula. Most of them are always associated with North America, except for the westernmost Near Islands group, which is on Asia's continental shelf beyond the North Aleutians Basin and on rare occasions could be associated with Asia, which could then allow the United States to be considered a transcontinental state. The Aleutian Islands are sometimes associated with Oceania, owing to their status as remote Pacific islands, and their proximity to the Pacific Plate.[43][44][45] This is extremely rare however, due to their non-tropical biogeography, as well as their inhabitants, who have historically been related to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.[46][47]
St. Lawrence Island in the northern Bering Sea belongs to the US state of Alaska and may be associated with either continent but is almost always considered part of North America, as with the Rat Islands in the Aleutian chain. At their nearest points, Alaska and Russia are separated by only 4 kilometres (2.5 miles).
Ongoing definition
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Geographical Asia is a cultural artifact of European conceptions of the world, beginning with the Ancient Greeks, 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.[48]
From the time of Herodotus, 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.[49] For example, Sir Barry Cunliffe, 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".[50]
Geographically, Asia is the major eastern constituent of the continent of Eurasia with Europe being a northwestern peninsula of the landmass. Asia, Europe and Africa make up a single continuous landmass—Afro-Eurasia—and share a common continental shelf. Almost all of Europe and a major part of Asia sit atop the Eurasian Plate, adjoined on the south by the Arabian and Indian Plate and with the easternmost part of Siberia (east of the Chersky Range) on the North American Plate.
History
Prehistory
About 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus left the African continent.[51] This species is believed to have lived in East and Southeast Asia from 1.8 million to 110,000 years ago.[52]
Researchers believe that the modern human, or Homo sapiens, migrated about 60,000 years ago to South Asia along the Indian Ocean.[53] Modern humans interbred with an archaic human species called Denisovans in Southeast Asia.[54] Before the arrival of modern humans, Flores was occupied by Homo floresiensis, a small archaic human.[55]
Ancestors of East Eurasians split from Ancient West Eurasians about 46,000 years ago, migrating out of the hub in the Iranian Plateau.[56] Evidence from full genomic studies suggests that the first people in the Americas diverged from Ancient East Asians about 36,000 years ago and expanded northwards into Siberia, where they encountered and interacted with a different Paleolithic Siberian population (known as Ancient North Eurasians), giving rise to both Paleosiberian peoples and Ancient Native Americans.[57]
Modern South Asians are descendants of a combination of Western Eurasian ancestries (notably Neolithic Iranian and Western Steppe Herder components) with a proposed indigenous East Eurasian component (termed Ancient Ancestral South Indians) closest to the non–West Eurasian part extracted from South Asian samples; distantly related to the Andamanese peoples, East Asians and Aboriginal Australians.[58]
Ancient era
The history of Asia can be seen as the distinct histories of several peripheral coastal regions: East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and West Asia. The coastal periphery was home to some of the world's earliest known civilisations, each of them developing around fertile river valleys. The civilisations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Yellow River shared many similarities. These civilisations may well have exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel. Other innovations, such as writing, seem to have been developed individually in each area. Cities, states and empires developed in these lowlands.
The central steppe region had long been inhabited by horse-mounted nomads who could reach all areas of Asia from the steppes. The earliest postulated expansion out of the steppe is that of the Indo-Europeans, who spread their languages into West Asia, South Asia, and the borders of China,[58] where the Tocharians resided. The northernmost part of Asia, including much of Siberia, was largely inaccessible to the steppe nomads, owing to the dense forests, climate and tundra. These areas remained very sparsely populated.
The center and the peripheries were mostly kept separated by mountains and deserts. The Caucasus and Himalaya mountains and the Karakum and Gobi deserts formed barriers that the steppe horsemen could cross only with difficulty. While the urban city dwellers were more advanced technologically and socially, in many cases they could do little in a military aspect to defend against the mounted hordes of the steppe. However, the lowlands did not have enough open grasslands to support a large equestrian force; for this and other reasons, the nomads who conquered states in China, India, and the Middle East often found themselves adapting to the local, more affluent societies.
Medieval era
The Islamic Caliphate's defeats of the Byzantine and Persian empires led to West Asia and southern parts of Central Asia and western parts of South Asia under its control during its conquests of the 7th century; Islam also spread over centuries to the southern regions of India and Southeast Asia through trade along the Maritime Silk Road.[60][61] The Mongol Empire conquered a large part of Asia in the 13th century, an area extending from China to Europe. Before the Mongol invasion, Song dynasty reportedly had approximately 120 million citizens; the 1300 census which followed the invasion reported roughly 60 million people.[62]
The Black Death, one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, is thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, where it then travelled along the Silk Road.[63]
Modern era
European involvement in Asia became more significant from the Age of Discovery onward, with Iberian-sponsored sailors such as Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama paving the way for new routes from Atlantic Europe to Pacific Asia and the Indian Ocean respectively in the late 15th century.[64] The Russian Empire also began to expand into northwestern Asia from the 17th century, and would eventually take control of all of Siberia and most of Central Asia by the end of the 19th century.
Among non-European empires, the Ottoman Empire controlled Anatolia, most of the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans from the mid 16th century onward, while in the 17th century, the Manchu conquered China and established the Qing dynasty. The Islamic Mughal Empire (preceded by the Delhi Sultanate of the 13th to early 16th century)[65] and the Hindu Maratha Empire controlled much of India in the 16th and 18th centuries respectively.[66]
Western imperialism in Asia from the 18th to 20th centuries coincided with the Industrial Revolution in the West and the dethroning of India and China as the world's foremost economies.[67] The British Empire first became dominant in South Asia, with most of the region being conquered by British traders in the late 18th and early 19th centuries before falling under direct British rule after a failed 1857 revolt; the 1869 completion of the Suez Canal, which increased British access to India, went on to further European influence over Africa and Asia.[68] Around this time, Western powers started to dominate China in what later became known as the century of humiliation, with the British-supported opium trade and later Opium Wars resulting in China being forced into an unprecedented situation of importing more than it exported.[69][70]
Foreign domination of China was furthered by the Japanese colonial empire, which controlled some of East Asia and briefly much of Southeast Asia (which had earlier been taken over by the British, Dutch and French in the late 19th century),[71] New Guinea and the Pacific islands; Japan's domination was enabled by its rapid rise that had taken place during the Meiji era of the late 19th century, in which it applied industrial knowledge learned from the West and thus overtook the rest of Asia.[72][73] One significant influence on Japan had been the United States, which had begun projecting influence across the Pacific after its early-to-mid-19th century westward expansion.[74] The breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century led to the Middle East also being contested and partitioned by the British and French.[75]
Contemporary era
With the end of World War II in 1945 and the wartime ruination of Europe and imperial Japan, many countries in Asia were able to rapidly free themselves of colonial rule.[76] The independence of India came along with the carving out of a separate nation for the majority of South Asian Muslims, which in 1971 further split into Pakistan and Bangladesh;[77] The Cold War in Asia strained relations between India and Pakistan and affected Asia more generally.[78] The end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union by 1991 saw the independence of the five modern Central Asian countries.[79]
Some Arab countries took economic advantage of massive oil deposits that were discovered in their territory, becoming globally influential,[80] though stability in the Middle East has been affected since 1948 by the Arab–Israeli conflict and American-led interventions.[81][82] East Asian nations (along with Singapore in Southeast Asia) became economically prosperous with high-growth "tiger economies";[83] China, having undergone the reform and opening up under Deng Xiaoping,[84] regained its place among the top two economies of the world by the 21st century.[85] India has also grown significantly because of economic liberalisation that started in the 1990s,[86] with extreme poverty now below 20%;[87] India and China's rise has coincided with growing tensions between the two, with the Indo-Pacific now an actively contested area between China and counterbalancing forces.[88][89]
The threefold division of the Old World into Europe, Asia and Africa has been in use since the 6th century BCE, due to Greek geographers such as Anaximander and Hecataeus.
1825 map of Asia by Sidney Edwards Morse
Map of western, southern, and central Asia in 1885[90]
The map of Asia in 1796, which also included the continent of Australia (then known as New Holland)
1890 map of Asia
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Geography
Asia is the largest continent on Earth. It covers 9% of the Earth's total surface area (or 30% of its land area), and has the longest coastline, at 62,800 kilometres (39,022 mi). Asia is generally defined as comprising the eastern four-fifths of Eurasia. It is located to the east of the Suez Canal and the Ural Mountains, and south of the Caucasus Mountains (or the Kuma–Manych Depression) and the Caspian and Black Seas.[13][91] It is bounded on the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Indian Ocean and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. Asia is subdivided into 49 countries, five of them (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey) are transcontinental countries lying partly in Europe.
The Yangtze in China is the longest river in the continent. The Himalayas between Nepal and China is the tallest mountain range in the world. Tropical rainforests stretch across much of southern Asia and coniferous and deciduous forests lie farther north. Between 1990 and 2000 the area of primary forest in Asia decreased by 1.06 million hectares per year, between 2000 and 2015 it decreased by 280 000 ha per year.[92]
