At dawn, a map of Asia lies open from the Suez Canal to the Pacific Ocean, and the sheer scale is the first thing that strikes you. This is the largest continent on Earth, covering more than 44 million square kilometres, about 30% of the planet’s land area and roughly 8% of its surface. Home to around 4.7 billion people, Asia holds about 60% of humanity, and it has long been the stage for some of the first civilisations.

Asia is not a single culture, but a vast eastern portion of Eurasia, bounded in broad terms by the Pacific to the east, the Indian Ocean to the south, and the Arctic to the north. Its western edge is a human invention, not a clean line in the earth, running by convention along the Suez Canal, the Turkish straits, the Ural Mountains and Ural River, and the Caucasus. The very word itself grew out of a European way of seeing the world.

Long before the modern map, the name appears in Bronze Age records as Assuwa in north-western Anatolia, around 1400 BCE, when a confederation including Troy rebelled against the Hittite king Tudhaliya I. Herodotus later used Asia for Anatolia and the lands of the Achaemenid Empire, while the Romans applied it to their province in western Anatolia. One of the first writers to use Asia for the whole continent was Pliny.

By the 6th century BCE, Greek geographers such as Anaximander and Hecataeus had already divided the Old World into Africa, Asia and Europe. Their boundary shifted over time from the Phasis River to the Tanais, now the Don, and then, in 1730, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg proposed the Ural Mountains as the border. By the mid-19th century the Ural River had prevailed, proving that continents can be drawn as much by custom as by geography.

In the ancient lowlands of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Yellow River, cities, states and empires rose around fertile river valleys. The Silk Road linked the Asian hinterlands by land, while the Straits of Malacca carried sea trade between regions. China and India traded places as the world’s largest economies from 1 to 1800 CE, and Asia also became the birthplace of Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Sikhism, Taoism and Zoroastrianism.