An Introduction to Big Geography
Afroeurasia
The land mass made up of Africa and Eurasia together. This geographical expression serves as a helpful tool in discussing large-scale historical developments that cut across the traditionally defined continental boundaries. Even though Africa and Eurasia are separated by the Mediterranean and Red seas (except at the Isthmus of Sinai where modern Egypt meets Israel), these bodies of water have historically been channels of human intercommunication, not barriers to it. Therefore, we may think of both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea as “lakes” inside Afroeurasia.
Eur-asia
The land mass made up of Asia and Europe. Today, this term is widely used in history and geography education. The idea that Europe and Asia are separate continents goes back many centuries, but scholars who accept the definition of a continent as “a large land mass surrounded, or nearly surrounded, by water” know that the definition applies to neither Europe nor Asia because these two land masses are conjoined. Moreover, the Ural Mountains, which eighteenth-century European geographers designated as the proper boundary between the European and Asian continents, have never been a serious obstacle to the flow of migrants, armies, trade goods, or ideas. In this book we define Europe as a subcontinent of Eurasia (or of Afroeurasia), parallel to South Asia or to the Indochinese peninsula.
Great Arid Zone
A climatic map of Afroeurasia shows that a good part of the land mass is a belt of dry or semi-dry country that extends all the way from the Atlantic coast of Africa in a generally northeasterly direction to the northern interior of China. This enormous tract comprises a chain of interconnected deserts, mountains, and semi-arid steppes. A steppe may be defined as flat or rolling grassland, equivalent to, what Americans call "prairie" and Argentineans call "pampas." The main climatic characteristic of the Great Arid Zone is low annual rainfall, which may range from an average of less than 5 inches in the bleakest of deserts to 20 inches or so in better watered steppes. The Great Arid Zone has traditionally been home to pastoral nomadic peoples and, where water has been available from rivers, springs, or wells, to farming societies and even large cities.
Indo-Mediterranea
The region of lands and seas extending from the Atlantic coasts of Europe and North Africa to North India. This expression includes the Mediterranean basin as a whole and extends eastward across Southwest Asia to northern India as far as the Bay of Bengal. In the long term of human history from at least the third millennium BCE to modern times this region has been characterized by a proliferation of clusters of dense population (notably in river valleys) and by intense commercial and cultural interchange.
Inner Eurasia
The huge interior land mass of Eurasia, whose dominant feature is flat, semi-arid steppeland. Forested highlands and bone-dry deserts relieve the grassland landscape in some parts of the region. The historian David Christian defines Inner Eurasia as the territories ruled by the Soviet Union before its collapse, together with Mongolia and parts of western China. Poland and Hungary on the west and Manchuria (northeastern China) on the east may be thought of as Inner Eurasia’s borderlands. The northern margins are boreal forest and Arctic tundra. The southern boundaries are the Himalayas and other mountain chains.
History of Eurasia
The history of Eurasia is the collective history of several distinct peripheral coastal regions: the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Europe, linked by the interior mass of the Eurasian steppe of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. While geographically on a separate continent, North Africa has historically been integrated into Eurasian history. Perhaps beginning with early Silk Road trade, the Eurasian view of history seeks establishing genetic, cultural, and linguistic links between European, African, Middle-Eastern, and Asian cultures of antiquity.
The three eastern regions of the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia developed in a similar manner with each of the three regions developing early civilizations around fertile river valleys. The civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China (along the Yellow River and the Yangtze) shared many similarities and likely exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel. Ancient Egypt also shared this model. Europe was different, however. It was somewhat further north and contained no river systems to support agriculture. Thus Europe remained comparatively undeveloped, with only the southern tips of the region (Greece and Italy) being able to fully borrow crops, technologies, and ideas from the Middle East and North Africa. Similarly, civilization didn't arise in Southeast Asia until contact was made with ancient India, which gave rise to Indianized kingdoms in Indochina and the Malay archipelago.
The steppe region had long been inhabited by mounted nomads, and from the central steppes they could reach all areas of the Asian continent. The earliest known such central expansion out of the steppe is that of the Proto-Indo-Europeans which spread their languages into the Middle East, India, Europe, and to the borders of China (with the Tocharians). Throughout their history, up to the development of gunpowder, all the areas of Eurasia would be repeatedly menaced by the Indo-Iranian, Turkic and Mongol nomads from the steppe.
A difference between Europe and most of the regions of Eurasia is that each of the latter regions has few obstructions internally even though it is ringed by mountains and deserts. This meant that it was easier to establish unified control over the entire region, and this did occur with massive empires consistently dominating the Middle East, China, and at times, much of India. Europe, however, is riddled with internal mountain ranges: The Carpathians, the Alps, the Pyrenees and many others. Throughout its history, Europe has thus usually been divided into many small states, much like the Middle East and Indian subcontinent for much of their history.The Iron Age made large stands of timber essential to a nation's success because smelting iron required so much fuel, and the pinnacles of human civilizations gradually moved as forests were destroyed. In Europe the Mediterranean region was supplanted by the German and Frankish lands. In the Middle East the main power center became Anatolia with the once dominant Mesopotamia its vassal. In China, the economical, agricultural, and industrial center moved from the northern Yellow River to the southern Yangtze, though the political center remained in the north. In part this is linked to technological developments, such as the mouldboard plough, that made life in once undeveloped areas more bearable.History of West Eurasia
West Eurasia is an area bounded by the Sahara and the Indian Ocean to the south, the Atlantic to the west, and the Arctic Ocean to the north. West Eurasia thus covers West Asia and Europe, though North Africa is also sometimes included as part of West Eurasia. Significant movements of people have entered the region from the East across the steppes. Nonetheless, the steppes have, for much of history, been lowly populated and so the interaction of West Eurasia with East Eurasia had been mostly indirect, except for West Asia which did have more direct contacts with India and China. The Southern barrier, the Sahara, is cut thru by the Nile but such Movements of people as has occured had been southward, out of the region. There have however been long periods in prehistoric times when the Sahara formed no barrier at all. For most of the period from 13,000 years ago to around 5,500 years ago the Sahara was fed by monsoon rains. However once it began to dry up, feedbacks caused it to change into the desert we know today in around a century.
See Also: Ancient History | Prominent Civilisations| Big ERA I | Big ERA II | Time in History | Eurasia| Industrial Revolution II| Scientific Revolution
Salauddine Mohammed Faruque on July 25,2007, last updated on 12.10.2007