Asia - Largest

NASA/JPL/NIMA. “WorldSRTM-noPoles-giant” Online Image. Earth Observatory. 16 May 2005 <http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/PIA03395_lrg.jpg>

Asia - Largest

This image was created from a larger Public Domain world map produced from data obtained by NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). The world map was cropped to Asia and resized to twice normal size using a trial version of Adobe Photoshop. Using Google's free Picasa2 program, the color and lighting were then enhanced and finally sharpened to obtain the image above. The original image can be viewed at the NASA link above.

Asia is a study in contrasts. In all respects the biggest continent. It’s massive land area and vast distances have separated the civilizations on opposite ends more effectively than walls or armies. The collision between the Indian subcontinent and the Eurasian tectonic plate has thrust up the Himalayas, the world’s highest mountains including Mt. Everest. The world’s deepest sea trench lies off its Eastern shore, the Challenger Deep where the Pacific tectonic plate dives under Eurasia. Its place in history is as rich and varied as its three distinct cultural zones, China, India, and the Middle East.

Three of the first four civilizations flourished here (excepting only Egypt in Africa): the Sumerian city states of the Middle East emerged c. 4000BC, the Indus Valley civilization of India emerged c. 2600BC, and the Shang dynasty emerged in China in 1766BC. The Middle East's quick start made it the unquestioned superpower of the Formative Era. It was also during this period that one of the great unsung changes occurred that would reshape the world. From 900-700BC, the Central Asian tribes rejected their semi-agricultural existence to become the world’s first full fledged pastoral nomads. (nomadic tribes who herd livestock for their sustenance) Their new lifestyle gave them undreamt of mobility and made them masters of cavalry who would wreak havoc on the settled peoples for more than 2000 years.

Then in 328BC, Alexander the Great brought the Ancient Era crashing into the heartland of world civilization with his breathtaking conquest of the Persian Empire. Alexander’s conquests made Greek culture a significant influence throughout Asia excepting only China and SE Asia. While Alexander’s empire rapidly fragmented nowhere in Asia was there a major successor state until the rise of the Gupta dynasty in 320AD. The Gupta dynasty is correctly hailed as the “Classical” Age of India, creating a burst of art, literature, and learning similar to the Greeks who launched Europe into the Ancient Era. Its poetry and plays are cherished around the world to this day including the Mahabharata and Ramayana which were completed under the Gupta. Astronomy and mathematics flourished, and around 575AD, Indian mathematicians developed the decimal system, including the number 0. It was so sophisticated that Muslim scholars scrapped their own notation to use “Indian numerals”, and through them Europeans adopted “Arabic numerals” which the world continues to use to this day.

In 627AD the Arabian Muslim tribes conquered the Sassanian Empire, permanently transforming Asia, as Islam would sweep the continent. The Arabs reaped the benefits of their rapid expansion, which brought massive resources under their control, and their relatively gentle conquest and tolerance, which brought them relatively contented conquests which a rich cultural heritages that they encouraged and developed. By 732AD, the Arabs were at war in Central Asia and France, held relatively peaceful sway over the lands in between, and were lords of the largest empire ever built. (And aside from the Tang dynasty in China, the most learned and artistic.) The Tang dynasty ruled China from 618-907AD. The Tang conquered their way to the Middle East and are remembered as the cultural and artistic high point. It was only a short time afterwards that the Song dynasty emerged to reunify China in 960AD becoming the most advanced state on the planet.

However, barbarian invasions would decimate Asia and hand the initiative to the Europeans who escaped largely unscathed. From 1037-1071AD, the Seljuk Turks swept through the Middle East conquering from Iran to Anatolia. They were not gentle conquerors and permanently crippled the region’s previous emphasis on learning and toleration, keeping the subject populations under the feet of their lethal armies of mounted cavalry. Eventually even the Song succumbed to the conquest of northern China in 1127AD by Central Asian barbarians. The Song dynasty survived in southern China until it was destroyed and devastated by the Mongol hordes 1236-1279AD. The Song dynasty was the only major state to resist the Mongols for more than a year or two. In 1206, the Mongols, a minor Central Asian tribe, emerged under their leader Temujin to unify the Central Asian barbarians. Without each other to fight, they turned their fury on the outside world, and rechristened their leader, Genghis Khan. By the fall of the Song dynasty in 1279AD, the Abbasid Caliph of Islam had been slaughtered in 1258 and every state from Poland to China had been crushed and culturally decimated in ways from which it would never recover.

Alone among the Asian regions, India escaped the full force of the Mongol fury although one of his successors, Timur the Lame, broke the major states of northern India before his death in 1405AD. Then in 1556AD, the nearly defunct Mughal dynasty was resurrected by Akbar at the 2^nd Battle of Panipat, and catapulted the Mughal to the forefront of the superpowers of the Renaissance. Akbar pushed Mughal power across all of northern and into central India and erected the professional bureaucracy necessary to effectively control such a large empire. He encouraged education, fostered religious toleration, built an unparalleled military that would swell to a million soldiers, and established credit and banking houses which drove the Indian economy's leadership across the Indian Ocean. However, his successors' religious intolerance sparked civil wars that crippled the dynasty which died at the hands of Nadir Shah in 1739AD.

This set the pattern for Asia into the Information Age, Nadir Shah’s Persia emerged to spar with the Ottoman’s for control of the Middle East, mighty but rigidly isolationist dynasties ruled China, and Britain inherited an India with no major power to check it’s seizure of the subcontinent. While each region emerged fully independent in the 1900s, the legacy of European colonialism and rapidly exploding population continues to haunt an Asia strained between forces reaching forward into the future and clinging tightly to the past.