Eurasia

From Free net encyclopedia

See also Asian, Eurasian, Afrasian and Australasian.

Image:LocationEurasia.png Image:Eurasia.jpg Eurasia is the landmass composed of Europe and Asia. Mostly in the eastern and northern hemispheres, Eurasia can be considered a supercontinent, comprising European and Asian continents, part of a supercontinent of Africa-Eurasia, or simply a continent. In plate tectonics, the Eurasian Plate includes Europe and most of Asia, but not the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian subcontinent, and the area east of the Cherskiy Range in Sakha. Eurasia is also used in international politics as a neutral way to refer to organizations of or affairs concerning the post-Soviet states.

Europeans, unaware of the extent of Eurasia, traditionally considered Europe and Asia to be separate continents, with the dividing line placed along the Aegean Sea, Dardanelles, Bosphorus, Black Sea, Caucasus Mountains, Caspian Sea, Ural River, and Ural Mountains, and this terminology has spread to the rest of the world, even though Asia contains multiple regions and cultures as large and populous as Europe, and as different and geographically separated from each other as they are from Europe.

Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, credits Eurasia's dominance in world history to the east-west extent of Eurasia and its climate zones, and the availability of Eurasian animals and plants suitable for domestication.

The Silk Road symbolizes trade and cultural exchange linking Eurasian cultures through history and has been an increasingly popular topic. Recent decades have brought forth a view toward a greater Eurasian history, establishing genetic, cultural, and linguistic relationships between European and Asian cultures of antiquity, which had long been thought of as distinct.

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Other uses

Eurasia was also a fictional country comprising approximately the same land area in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, excluding the British Isles (controlled by Oceania) and Eastasia, the latter of which was formed, as the novel says, by an alliance of the states of the region, being the most important couple China and Japan after a 'decade of confused fighting'. India was a contested border zone between Eurasia and Oceania.
In the game universe of the Earth series (Earth 2140,2150,2160), one of the major factions was the Eurasian Dynasty.

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