Why is Europe considered a a seperate continent when it's on the continent of Asia?

Why do they separate Egypt and North Africa from Sub Saharan Africa and call it the middle east and not Africa?

 

Hey, how exactly is a rainbow made? How exactly does the sun set? How exactly does the posi-trac on a plymouth work? It just does.

 

It hasn't always been that way. But somewhere, some time ago, someone said that it should be that way... and so it is.

 

Europe and Asia make up the super continent of Eurasia.

Still working on this one

 

The first distinction between continents was made by ancient Greek mariners who gave the names Europe and Asia to the lands on either side of the waterways of the Aegean Sea, the Dardanelles strait, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus strait and the Black Sea.[29] The names were first applied just to lands near the coast and only later extended to include the hinterlands.[30] But the division was only carried through to the end of navigable waterways and "... beyond that point the Hellenic geographers never succeeded in laying their finger on any inland feature in the physical landscape that could offer any convincing line for partitioning an indivisible Eurasia ..."[29]

Ancient Greek thinkers subsequently debated whether Africa (then called Libya) should be considered part of Asia or a third part of the world. Division into three parts eventually came to predominate.[31] From the Greek viewpoint, the Aegean Sea was the center of the world; Asia lay to the east, Europe to the west and north and Africa to the south.[32] The boundaries between the continents were not fixed. Early on, the Europe-Asia boundary was taken to run from the Black Sea along the Rioni River (known then as the Phasis) in Georgia. Later it was viewed as running from the Black Sea through Kerch Strait, the Sea of Azov and along the Don River (known then as the Tanais) in Russia.[33] The boundary between Asia and Africa was generally taken to be the Nile River. Herodotus[34] in the fifth century BC, however, objected to the unity of Egypt being split into Asia and Africa ("Libya") and took the boundary to lie along the western border of Egypt, regarding Egypt as part of Asia. He also questioned the division into three of what is really a single landmass,[35] a debate that continues nearly two and a half millennia later.

Eratosthenes, in the third century BC, noted that some geographers divided the continents by rivers (the Nile and the Don), thus considering them "islands". Others divided the continents by isthmuses, calling the continents "peninsulas". These latter geographers set the border between Europe and Asia at the isthmus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and the border between Asia and Africa at the isthmus between the Red Sea and the mouth of Lake Bardawil on the Mediterranean Sea.[36]

Through the Roman period and the Middle Ages, a few writers took the Isthmus of Suez as the boundary between Asia and Africa, but most writers continued to take it to be the Nile or the western border of Egypt (Gibbon). In the Middle Ages the world was portrayed on T and O maps, with the T representing the waters dividing the three continents. By the middle of the eighteenth century, "the fashion of dividing Asia and Africa at the Nile, or at the Great Catabathmus [the boundary between Egypt and Libya] farther west, had even then scarcely passed away".[37]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contine...rld_continents

 

My understanding of what was taught in Middle School was Europe and Asia were divided by the mountain ranges that were treacherous to pass. So they developed different cultures, dividing them culturaly.


On a side note, one of my favorite teachers passed away today , 8th grade History. He was a prime example of how much difference some teachers make than others. He was tough on some people , but he seemed to like me

 

Thoes sound like the kind of questions to ask if you're baked. Then someone else who was baked would give an answer like momalle1 did, that would take like an hour to explain. Then the origional questions would have been forgotten.

That's what I've been told anyhow.

 

Likely story!

 

why does my tv remote have braile on it?

 

Rofl! Why's a rainbow good? Why are ***** good? They just are.

 

It is my understanding that they were seperated, then the movement of the tectonic plates brought them together, so they weren't always the same continent. Maybe I just got hammered one night and thought that, though, I can't find any semblance of fact that I may have based that on.

On the second part, I don't know. Maybe because of the civilization that was in Egypt, it may have been like totally seperate from the rest of Africa, alienating the north, yet still not completely connected to the middle east, and the geographic location of the middle east was so far off from India that they didn't claim it. Yet, it was before you got to Egypt, which they considered the east, so they just called it the middle east. Sounds good enough to BS someone with, anyway.