Today's Asian culture is a hybrid of native as well as European; maintaining a balanced ratio, although, at some locations, this ratio weighs heavily on the European side. For example, the language English is still considered as a language of class and elitism in South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines have retained the colloquial versions of their names as given by post-medieval European explorers. Asia is probably the only continent that bores home to all the known human religions - Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Jainism etc. It all started from some of the other locations in Asia. Medieval maps or the series of mappa mundii have variously been centred at Jerusalem, with landmasses and water bodies encircling it, making the Jewish homeland an epicentre of culture and religion. Despite having such greatness of cultures and languages, the European mapping of Asia has always been quite ill-informed. On one hand, when boundaries and coastlines of European countries were well-shaped since the Antiquity Era, with even the most obscure maps having a clear demarcation of Iberia, Italia, Francia, Brittania and Scandinavia, it fails to even recognise flourishing civilisations in Asia properly. This lack of knowledge about Asian frontiers have lead to innumerable wrong and incorrect interpretations of certain civilisation, that remains unchanged even to date.
The best example would be India and the Indians. The local name for the country is Bharat, but the misinterpretation of the River Indus (which itself is a misinterpretation of Sindhu) lead to the labelling of this land as 'India', something that Christopher Columbus labelled inappropriately to the natives of Caribbean islands. The whitewashing of Caribbean islands by various European names christened to them is another topic of discussion. The various regional kingdoms on the islands far east of the Chinese mainland were grouped together as a single unit and renamed by Spanish explorers as Archipelago de San Lazaro in 1521. This, in 1542 was renamed as Islas Filipinas, something over the period that came to be known as the Philippines. A similar explanation is given to Indonesia which was colloquially referred to as 'Indian Islands' or 'Indies'. The suffix -asia got attached with 'India', thus giving the name Indonesia to another set of local Buddhist / Hindu / Muslim kingdoms on these islands.
The language Farsi is what is still known to even South Asians as what is spoken in the land between Arabia and India. Still, the corrupted terminology 'Persia' got stuck by Europeans even though the natives constantly termed themselves as 'Iranians' and their country as 'Iran'. The term 'Indochina' is another wrong interpretation of the various Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms to the east of India, misinterpreted by the Europeans as a further stretch of India and south of China. There were multiple Buddhist / Hindu kingdoms, traces of which can still be found. The Central Asian cultures have always been referred to as 'Tartary', a colloquial phrase to club the various Central Asian tribes - Uzbeks (or Uzbegs), Kazakhs, Tajiks (or Tadzhiks), Turkmens and Kyrgyz. In fact, the Uzbeks held extremely important empires or Khanates even when the Russian Empire was at its peak in the 19th century. But the European mapmakers started distinguishing the individual cultures only as late as in the late 19th century.
Turkey has always been considered as a stretch of land from the Balkans to Asia Minor. All the territories under the Ottoman (again, a misspelt term for Usmans) were clubbed as 'Turkey' being divided into Europe and Asia. The knowledge of Levant to the Europeans have existed since time immemorial, explaining the solid reasons that gave birth to two critically important religions - Christianity and Judaism. And it was the Middle East again that was home to Islam in the 8th century AD. To see it from an interesting perspective, Islam was the only religion that countered the olden era's Roman Empire that sprung out of Rome and spread along the three continents. The Islamic empire started from the Arabian coast on the Red Sea and spread across the Levant, Turkey, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula. This also proves a philosophical theory that time is the most powerful of all elements and ones those held authorities once, were now mere puppets and dependent on other territories.
The knowledge of China, Korea and Japan to the Europeans has always been hilariously incorrect. Japan's medieval maps as per the European cartographers were mostly a bunch of disfigured islands with names that bore little or no relevance to the native Japanese names. The term Iopania is a synonym for Japan on several older maps. Similarly, Korea has been wrongly mentioned as 'Correa' and a rather bulging structure from the tip of Manchuria is referred to as the Korean peninsula by early Europeans. Another important reason for the lack of information on Japanese history is that the country had shut itself down from the outside world, thus giving little knowledge about its coastline and internal conflicts to the western world. Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkim (now part of India), Tibet and other Himalayan kingdoms have similar stories to narrate wherein the Europeans have misjudged their political prowess and deliberately scratched improper frontiers, something that affects South Asia even today.
Russia is another interesting case that although is majorly in Asia (areawise), but since the Muscovite Empire started from mainland Europe, the Russians identify themselves more as Europeans than Asians. Asia can also be credited for having empires and political identities that shook the entire world with its monarchial tactics and God-like supremacy that made a bunch of Asian territories as Asian colonies. The Japanese Empire during the Second World War is an excellent example where Japan held colonies majorly in Asia itself.
The nomenclature of water bodies in Asian territories has also changed through map history. The Indian Ocean has been variously referred to as the Indian Sea, while the Arabian Sea has been mentioned as the Sea of Oman. This pattern of naming a water-body after a major civilisation's name was also observed in Europe, such as the German Ocean, a colloquial term for today's North Sea. The Europeans fiddled with this concept and applied it in African waters as well when they mentioned the entire Atlantic Ocean as the Ethiopian Sea.
The Europeans also had this tendency of renaming places starting with 'K' to 'C'; Kolkata became Calcutta, Kabul was Cabul, Kampuchea was Cambodia, Korea was Correa, Kozhikode was Calicut, Kamboja was Cambodge etc. Another practice of Europeans was to simply name provinces and administrative units as per their geographical placements. The United Provinces were to denote the northern provinces of British India, that got renamed in 1950 to Uttar Pradesh (literally, northern province). Similar nomenclature is observed in Sri Lanka such as Central Province, Northern Province Eastern Province, Southern Province etc.
Perhaps due to colonisation and heavy administrative reforms, the concepts of boundaries and frontiers were also laid in Asia since the beginning of the. 15th century - an era of some of the earliest collected proofs of maps dating back to those eras. The concept of drawing straight lines as boundaries between multiple countries was although less used in Asia, but were a major source of bifurcation in Africa as well as the American states.
Here's a hand-sketched recreation of a 1795-dated map of Asia, originally sketched by Mathew Carey (1760-1839).
 |
@mapsbysagar
@mapsbysagar
0 Comments