When you look at a map, Europe appears like a sizable peninsula stretching westward from the massive body of Asia. While geological reality tells us there is a single landmass and tectonic system often summarized as “Eurasia,” why do we still insist—from school textbooks to diplomatic tables—on treating Europe as a separate continent?

The answer isn’t in mountains or seas. The answer lies in the deep layers of cultural prejudice, the reflections of ancient arrogance, and the biological illusions of the human brain.

This isn’t just a map issue; it’s the thousands-of-years-long story of how humans define what is “not us.”

1) Biological Roots: Why Do We Hear Foreigners as “Noisy” and “Savage”?

The history of “othering” begins not with Ancient Greece, as many assume, but with Sumer—where civilization itself begins.

In the earliest written records, the Sumerians’ view of nomadic groups coming from outside Mesopotamia (especially the Martu/Amurru peoples) contains not only hostility, but an anthropological disgust. In Sumerian tablets from the 2000s BCE, the descriptions used for these nomads are striking:

“They know no house or home, they do not bury their dead, they do not eat cooked meat, and… their language is like the barking of a dog, like the bellowing of an animal.”

For a Sumerian scribe, every sound outside his complex, rhythmic language wasn’t “human speech,” but a wild noise from nature. Why?

Modern psychoacoustics and neurology explain this through Cognitive Load: when our brain hears its native language, it runs on “autopilot,” parsing words and filtering out irrelevant frequencies. But when it hears a foreign language it doesn’t know at all, the brain burns huge energy trying to crack that “cipher.”

That triggers three effects:

• Perceiving it as noise: The brain categorizes sound signals it can’t interpret not as “information,” but as a kind of “threat” or “background noise.”

• The block-sound effect: In a familiar language, we detect the gaps between words (pauses). In an unfamiliar language, sound can hit the ear as a continuous, coarse, heavy “block.”

• A virtual decibel increase: Because of intense focus, even if the physical loudness is the same, the brain can perceive foreign speech as louder, more dominant, and more irritating. Remember this the next time you’re on the metro thinking tourists are “talking so loudly.”

So what the Sumerian called “animal bellowing” was, in reality, his brain’s biological strain—trying to silence, label, or compress a signal it couldn’t decode.

"Inscribed with the text of the poem Inanna and Ebih by the priestess Enheduanna, the first author whose name is known. In an era when Western civilization was not even a whisper in history, the first signature on the dusty pages of time was carved not by a male monarch or a warrior, but by a woman. By engraving her name beneath her works, Enheduanna became the first human being to declare an individual identity to the world."

And I want to say this bluntly, because it’s the core of the mechanism:

“Actually, the Sumerians weren’t doing all this through conscious racism; our primitive ancestors evolved exactly this way. This is an inevitable outcome of the tribal survival instinct. When our primitive ancestors saw a different group whose language, culture, appearance—even haircut—fell outside their familiar perception, they coded it directly as a survival threat. Because of this genetic legacy, the brain pairs everything foreign with fear; it perceives it as a threat and, to protect itself, wants to destroy it through hatred. So racism is actually far beyond consciousness: it’s our most primitive defense mechanism shaped by evolution, where the survival instinct turns us into a killer to protect the tribe.”

Even today, in conservative societies, a young person choosing a different haircut can become a problem. Even if the world has been touched by individualization, in the Turkey I live in, this is still the case. If you look different from the norm, it’s absolutely possible to be met with furrowed brows.

So even the “continent” debate, at its deepest layer, leads to this question: How does the brain code the foreign?

2) “Bar-Bar-Bar”: Greek Arrogance and the Division of the World

Centuries after Sumer, the same biological illusion turned into a cultural weapon in Ancient Greece.

When Greeks heard Persians, Egyptians, or Scythians speaking—languages they didn’t understand—they perceived only meaningless syllables: “Bar-bar-bar…”

From this sound imitation came the word barbaros: “one who doesn’t speak Greek, whose speech is unintelligible, whose sound is crude.” For them, the world split in two: “Us” (those who possess Logos/Reason) and “The Others” (those who make noise).

Those who put this mental map onto paper were Anaximander, Hecataeus, and the historian Herodotus. They divided the world (even though it was essentially one landmass) into three artificial continents:

• Europe: the Greek peninsula and the lands to its north (close to them)

• Asia: Anatolia, the Persian Empire, and the “others” to the east

• Libya (Africa): the mysterious lands to the south

This is crucial: before geology, “continent” becomes the stamping of “us/other” onto geography.

Europe Libya and Asia

3) From Language to State: The Etymological Journey of a “Noise”

The Greeks’ imitation of “unintelligible sound” stopped being a mere joke in Roman hands—and became a massive legal status.

When Romans transferred the Greek bárbaros into Latin as barbarus, they lifted it from “not knowing the language” into “not belonging to the state.” A barbarian was no longer just someone making noise; a barbarian stood outside Roman law, discipline, and borders (Limes)—and therefore had to be “tamed.”

The spread of this concept was like a global software update: Rome exported this “othering” terminology through Medieval Latin (barbarinus) into European languages as a civilizational standard.

The most striking part is that this contempt wasn’t only a Western reflex; the kinship with Sanskrit barbara (stammering, foolish) shows how ancient and universal the tendency is: equating what is “not us” with “noise.”

Thus, a simple ancient “blah blah” mockery became—across thousands of years and continents—one of the core ideological weapons building the modern “civilized vs. savage” split.

4) The Roman Paradox: Winning with Weapons, Losing with Culture

The map Greeks drew, and the “Barbarian/Civilized” split, was institutionalized through one of history’s most interesting ironies: Rome.

Romans crushed Greece militarily, looted its cities, and enslaved Greeks. In theory, the one with weapons should impose his culture. But the opposite happened. As the Roman poet Horace confessed in his famous line:

“Conquered Greece captured her savage conqueror (Rome) and brought her arts into rustic Latium.”

Bronze medallion depicting Horace, 4th–5th century

Rome took Greek philosophy, Greek gods, and—most importantly—the East–West split, and fused it with Roman law and statecraft. Greece produced the “software”; Rome built the massive “operating system” to run it. That’s how “Europe” stopped being merely a geographic region and became an identity formed from Roman law and Greek thought.

“As the Roman Empire collapsed politically, the immense cultural and geographic legacy it left behind became the highest status to be reached for the northern peoples who destroyed it. Germanic, Frankish, and northern tribal chiefs, even if they defeated Rome militarily, admired its law, its urban structure, and that sharp cartography dividing the world as ‘Europe–Asia’… To become Romanized was the only passport to be seen as a legitimate ruler and a civilized society…”

5) History’s Biggest Slap: Who Was Carrying the “Barbarian” Stamp?

“The greatest irony in history is that the Germanic, Frankish, and northern peoples who today define themselves as the ‘truly civilized Europeans’—and stamp the rest of the world with the label ‘barbarian’—were, at that time, seen by Romans as the lowest barbarians.”

The examples of Sidonius Apollinaris and Tacitus work like a mirror here:

Sidonius Apollinaris whining in disgust at the smell and noise of the Goths—“How can I write civilized poetry among seven-foot-tall stinking giants?”… Tacitus describing these peoples as “undisciplined savages who know only war and plunder”…

And the punchline:

“The most absurd part is that yesterday’s ‘barbarian’ peoples—who have no genetic or direct historical link to Rome—today take on the role of Rome’s heir and keep calling everyone unlike themselves ‘barbarian.’”

Barbarian Kingdoms: Rome’s Killers, the New Owners of the Legacy

The period known in historical literature as the Barbarian Kingdoms (Regna Barbarorum) (5th–8th centuries CE) is exactly where this irony becomes institutional.

The Frankish, Visigothic, Ostrogothic, and Vandal kingdoms rising over Rome’s ruins couldn’t resist imitating Rome’s grandeur even as they looted it.

The sharpest example: Charlemagne. Coming from a Germanic tribe Rome once called “savage,” he was crowned in 800 CE by the Pope as “Emperor of the Romans.” Yesterday’s “stinking giant” now wore the title of Rome’s legal heir and the “Father of Europe” (Pater Europae).

These kingdoms copied Rome’s legal system, Latin, and religion (Christianity) to forge an “armor of legitimacy.” But in the process, they also inherited Rome’s famous “superior tone” intact.

In short: the voices giving civilization lessons today are, in large part, the product of history’s most successful act of imitation.

Thomas Cole – "The Course of Empire: Destruction

Same Map, Different Actors: A Thousand-Year “Psychological Border”

What began in the Greek mind as a concept—Europe and Asia—turned in Roman hands into an impassable physical and legal wall, concretized by the Rhine and Danube and by the logic of Limes.

Today’s “central” European states are, in a sense, the heirs of yesterday’s “barbarian tenants” who took shelter inside that ancient wall. Ownership changed hands; but the “Us vs. Others” line on the mental map barely moved.

The East–West projection used today from Brussels or Berlin is, in many ways, an updated version of the same ancient stubbornness sketched in a Greek city-state 2,500 years ago, sealed by Rome, and carried into the present by the Barbarian Kingdoms.

6) The Dance of Borders: From the Don River to the Urals (And Peter Enters the Stage)

Now we come to the concrete, “scientific” part I love: the border itself.

If we return to geographic reality, there is no natural boundary (like an ocean) separating Europe and Asia. These borders are drawn entirely by political decisions.

From antiquity to the 18th century: Starting with Ptolemy, for more than a thousand years, cartographers accepted the eastern boundary of Europe as the Don River in Russia.

Then something happened: Russia didn’t want to remain “Asian.”

Russia’s move: In the 18th century, Tsar Peter I (Peter the Great) and his successors wanted to pull Russia out of an “Eastern/Asian” identity and have it recognized as “European.”

Boundary between Europe and Asia near Urzhumki Station in the Ural Mountains, Russia (1910). This modest obelisk turns a negotiated convention into a roadside “fact.” In the wake of Russia’s drive to be recognized as a European power, especially after Peter the Great’s Westernizing reforms, the Urals were embraced as the Europe–Asia dividing line, and border monuments like this helped make that claim feel natural to every traveler who passed.

Here, the issue wasn’t “rock layers,” it was status. In Peter’s eyes, “Europe” wasn’t a continent; it was a club, a rank, a table. The moment you say “I will sit at that table,” even the line on the map can bend.

And it did bend:

After work with geographers, the boundary was pushed roughly 2000–2500 km eastward from the Don to the line of the Ural Mountains and the Ural River.

Then this line standardized itself “as if it had always been there.” Because when a powerful empire says “I am European,” maps often don’t object—maps get updated.

And the Urals aren’t even a dramatic “continental rift” wall:

The Ural Mountains are old, relatively low hills with an average elevation of 600–1000 meters, far from creating a true geological continental split. But because political will wanted it so, the thick line separating Europe from Asia on today’s maps is essentially the cartographic trace of Russia’s “Westernization” project.

This is the best “proof” in the whole essay:

If Europe is a continent, then Peter enlarged it with a ruler.

(1730) Philip Johan von Strahlenberg’s Map — Before 1730, from antiquity onward, Europe’s eastern boundary was commonly taken to be the Don River (Tanais). This map is one of the earliest documents to push Europe’s border roughly 2,000 kilometers eastward, toward the Ural line. The shift was not a “natural discovery,” but part of Peter the Great’s broader project to have Russia recognized as a European power.

I live in a city where you can literally “change continents” in the middle of an ordinary day: Istanbul. On a map, continents look like massive, absolute realities—but if I want, I can take a ferry and go from Asia to Europe before my tea gets cold. Or I can step into Marmaray and cross under the Bosphorus in what feels like a single metro stop, and suddenly I’ve “switched continents.” It sounds dramatic, but in my daily life it’s just a commute.

And that’s exactly why the whole idea of a “continent” can feel so psychological and so constructed: in the same city, on the same day, along the same after-work route, I can “change continents.” But if I use the bridge… the story flips. Because Istanbul bridge traffic can be so insane that switching continents starts to feel like a mass migration—slow, exhausting, and endless. The line on the map stays fixed; but in real life, that line can be either a sip of tea… or hours of waiting. 

Bosporus ( Asia and Europe )

Side Note: The “Highest Mountain in Europe” Fight (A Small Detail That Exposes Everything)

Here’s a ridiculously concrete example of how arbitrary this border is—so concrete that even climbers end up arguing about it.

There’s a famous challenge called the “Seven Summits”: climbing the highest peak on each continent. Sounds straightforward—until you try to define Europe.

Because depending on where you draw the Europe–Asia boundary, Europe’s highest mountain changes:

• If you use the Kuma–Manych Depression as the dividing line (an older approach often associated with a Russian framing), then the Caucasus stays in Asia, and Europe’s highest peak becomes Mont Blanc in the Alps (4,807 m).

• If you use the Greater Caucasus watershed / main ridge as the boundary (the more common modern tendency), then the Caucasus becomes the border zone, and Mount Elbrus (5,642 m) is counted as inside Europe—making it Europe’s highest mountain.

That’s the kind of detail that makes a reader pause and think:
“Wait… even the highest mountain of a ‘continent’ isn’t settled? What exactly are we calling a continent here?”

7) The Mythology of Names and the Colonial Seal

Even Herodotus questioned why one landmass carried three different names, especially women’s names: “I cannot understand why three names, especially women’s names, were given to what is actually a single land.”

• Europe (Europa): the Phoenician princess Zeus abducted in the form of a bull

• Asia (Asia): a figure tied to Anatolia, the mother of Titans

• Libya (Africa): a mythic queen tied to Egyptian and Phoenician traditions

The reason these names endured—and Europe preserved its “continent” status—is modern colonialism: “Those with weapons set the rules.”

From the 15th century onward, European powers exploring and colonizing the world imposed their map on everyone else. Seeing themselves as the sole heirs of Roman and Greek civilization, they had to preserve the split between “Us (Europe)” and “The Others (Asia/Africa/Americas).”

If they had accepted the geological truth and said, “We’re actually just the western edge of Asia,” the Europe-centric history and superiority narrative they built would have collapsed.

Conclusion: Not a Geography, but a Construct

Modern geology says Europe and Asia are unified on the Eurasian plate, while India can still be classified as Asia despite being on a distinct plate. Culturally, you could argue for 14 continents; by plate tectonics, you could argue for 9.

World Tectonic Plate Map

But we still look at the old map: the one where the Sumerian heard “animal sounds,” the Greek said “Barbar,” the Roman systematized it, and Russia stretched the border.

Europe was separated from Asia not by geology, but by ink, mythology, and the psychology of othering—by a continent of identity.

But all these artificial border debates are meaningless against geological time. If we wait 250 million years, we will all be from the same continent anyway.

Epilogue: 250 Million Years Later (Pangaea Ultima)

The supercontinent that all continents will form by merging 250 million years from now: Pangaea Ultima

Pangea Ultima

As you know, Earth’s continents are constantly moving, even if we don’t notice it. That’s why, roughly 250 million years from now, the world will look very different from today.

And I’m keeping the timeline below as a “bonus” section inside the blog—without removing a single line:

50 Million Years Later: The Atlantic Ocean will widen and push New York even farther from North Africa (once, New York and Morocco were side by side). Meanwhile, in the Southern Hemisphere, Australia will collide with Southeast Asia. In Europe, Africa will move north and close the Mediterranean. Where Italy and Greece are today, a mountain chain known as the “Mediterranean Mountains” will form, as high as the Himalayas (Istanbul will be erased from the face of the Earth). This range will stretch from Spain to South Africa, the Middle East, and into Asia.

100 Million Years Later: The power of continental movement will make Earth unrecognizable. The Atlantic will keep expanding, but a sedimentation zone will form along the western coastline. The first sign of this can be seen in the Puerto Rico Trench in the Caribbean. This massive sedimentation zone will consume the Atlantic Ocean, pushing Europe and Africa toward the Americas.

250 Million Years Later: When intergalactic explorers return to their homeland, they will find a planet different from the one in their records. We who live today will be nothing more than fossils. There will no longer be 7 continents; instead, most of Earth’s land will have gathered into a single giant landmass: Pangaea Ultima. The explorers may find a deserted, frozen world and examine what remains of our cities; but as Europe and America collide, all the countries along the coasts—and today’s “discriminatory” borders—will slowly disappear.