Thursday, January 31, 2019

Contemplating the shapes of the world

We have hung a new shower curtain. The top 4/5s of it is a quite detailed map of the boundaries and cities of the contemporary world. Looking at it daily is improving my grasp of national geographies. At the bottom are outlines of seven continents without interior markings. I find myself staring long and hard at this blob:
Yes, that's Asia. But what is "Asia" anyway? It almost looks to consist of everywhere Europeans either don't include in "Europe" or perhaps didn't "discover" when they left "Europe." What else does Kamchatka have to do with Ceylon?

The ancestors of those Europeans who invented these continental naming conventions would likely have centered their map around the Mediterranean Sea and might well have included modern Turkey, Palestine, and perhaps even Egypt and Libya in their sense of the land masses that mattered and were all one known civilization.

On the other hand, would they really have thought the Nordic lands and the wild expanses of Russia, even the portion west of the Ural Mountains, were part of the same whole? I doubt it.

Will we always think of "continents" as we do today? Perhaps some day people will categorize land masses yet some other way. It is interesting to contemplate the arbitrariness of conventional divisions.

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