Asia–Europe boundary
Asia–Europe boundary
Definitions used for the boundary between Europe and Asia in different period of History. The commonly accepted modern definition mostly fits with the lines “B” and “F” in this image.
The threefold division of the Old World into Europe, Asia and Africa has been in use since the 6th century BC, due to Greek geographers such as Anaximander and Hecataeus.[citation needed] Anaximander placed the boundary between Asia and Europe along the Phasis River (the modern Rioni river) 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 BC.[16] During the Hellenistic period,[17] 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,[18] Strabo[19] and Ptolemy.[20] The border between Asia and Europe was historically defined by European academics.[21] The Don River became unsatisfactory to northern Europeans when Peter the Great, king of the Tsardom of Russia, defeating rival claims of Sweden and the Ottoman
Empire to the eastern lands, and armed resistance by the tribes of Siberia, synthesized a new Russian Empire extending to the Ural Mountains and beyond, founded in 1721. The major geographical theorist of the empire was a former Swedish prisoner-of-war, taken at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 and assigned to Tobolsk, where he associated with Peter’s Siberian official, Vasily Tatishchev, and was allowed freedom to conduct geographical and anthropological studies in preparation for a future book.[citation needed]
