Asia

Asia is Earth's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the Eastern and Northern Hemispheres. It shares the continental landmass of Eurasia with the continent of Europe and the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with both Europe and Africa.
 Asia covers an area of 44,579,000 square kilometres (17,212,000 sq mi),
 about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8.7% of the Earth's total
surface area. The continent, which has long been home to the majority of
 the human population, was the site of many of the first civilizations.
 Asia is notable for not only its overall large size and population, but
 also dense and large settlements, as well as vast barely populated
regions. Its 4.5 billion people (as of June 2019 ) constitute roughly
60% of the world's population.
In general terms, Asia is bounded on
 the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Indian Ocean, and on
 the north by the Arctic Ocean. The border of Asia with Europe is a
historical and cultural construct,
 as there is no clear physical and geographical separation between them.
 It is somewhat arbitrary and has moved since its first conception in classical antiquity. The division of Eurasia into two continents reflects East–West
 cultural, linguistic, and ethnic differences, some of which vary on a
spectrum rather than with a sharp dividing line. The most commonly
accepted boundaries place Asia to the east of the Suez Canal separating it from Africa; and to the east of the Turkish Straits, the Ural Mountains and Ural River, and to the south of the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian and Black Seas, separating it from Europe.
China and the Indian subcontinent alternated in being the largest economies in the worldfrom
 1 to 1800 CE. China was a major economic power and attracted many to
the east, and for many the legendary wealth and prosperity of the
ancient culture of India personified Asia, attracting European
commerce, exploration and colonialism.

Asia–Africa boundary
The boundary between Asia and Africa is the Red Sea, the Gulf of Suez, and the Suez Canal. This makes Egypt a transcontinental country, with the Sinai peninsula in Asia and the remainder of the country in Africa.
Asia–Europe boundary
The border between Asia and Europe was historically defined by European academics. The Don River became unsatisfactory to northern Europeans when Peter the Great, king of the Tsardom of Russia, defeating rival claims of Sweden and the Ottoman Empire to the eastern lands, and armed resistance by the tribes of Siberia, synthesized a new Russian Empire extending to the Ural Mountains
 and beyond, founded in 1721. The major geographical theorist of the
empire was actually a former Swedish prisoner-of-war, taken at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 and assigned to Tobolsk, where he associated with Peter's Siberian official, Vasily Tatishchev, and was allowed freedom to conduct geographical and anthropological studies in preparation for a future book.
In Sweden, five years after Peter's death, in 1730 Philip Johan von Strahlenberg
 published a new atlas proposing the Ural Mountains as the border of
Asia. Tatishchev announced that he had proposed the idea to von
Strahlenberg. The latter had suggested the Emba River as the lower boundary. Over the next century various proposals were made until the Ural River
 prevailed in the mid-19th century. The border had been moved perforce
from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea into which the Ural River
projects. The border between the Black Sea and the Caspian is usually
placed along the crest of the Caucasus Mountains, although it is sometimes placed further north.

The idea of a place called "Asia" was originally a concept of Greek civilization,
 though this might not correspond to the entire continent currently
known by that name. The English word comes from Latin literature, where
it has the same form, "Asia". Whether "Asia" in other languages comes
from Latin of the Roman Empire
 is much less certain, and the ultimate source of the Latin word is
uncertain, though several theories have been published. One of the first
 classical writers to use Asia as a name of the whole continent was Pliny. This metonymical change in meaning is common and can be observed in some other geographical names, such as Scandinavia (from Scania).
Bronze Age
Before Greek poetry, the Aegean Sea area was in a Greek Dark Age, at the beginning of which syllabic writing was lost and alphabetic writing had not begun. Prior to then in the Bronze Age the records of the Assyrian Empire, the Hittite Empire and the various Mycenaean
 states of Greece mention a region undoubtedly Asia, certainly in
Anatolia, including if not identical to Lydia. These records are
administrative and do not include poetry.
The Mycenaean states were destroyed about 1200 BCE by unknown agents although one school of thought assigns the Dorian invasion to this time. The burning of the palaces baked clay diurnal administrative records written in a Greek syllabic script called Linear B, deciphered by a number of interested parties, most notably by a young World War II cryptographer, Michael Ventris, subsequently assisted by the scholar, John Chadwick. A major cache discovered by Carl Blegen at the site of ancient Pylos included hundreds of male and female names formed by different methods.
Some of these are of women held in servitude (as study of the society implied by the content reveals). …

The history of Asia can be seen as the distinct histories of several
peripheral coastal regions: East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and
the Middle East, linked by the interior mass of the Central Asian steppes.
The
 coastal periphery was home to some of the world's earliest known
civilizations, each of them developing around fertile river valleys. The
 civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Yellow River shared many similarities. These civilizations may well have exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel.
 Other innovations, such as writing, seem to have been developed
individually in each area. Cities, states and empires developed in these
 lowlands.
The central steppe region had long been inhabited by horse-mounted nomads who could reach all areas of Asia from the steppes. The earliest postulated expansion out of the steppe is that of the Indo-Europeans, who spread their languages into the Middle East, South Asia, and the borders of China, where the Tocharians resided. The northernmost part of Asia, including much of Siberia, was largely inaccessible to the steppe nomads, owing to the dense forests, climate and tundra. These areas remained very sparsely populated.
The center and the peripheries were mostly kept separated by mountains and deserts. The Caucasus and Himalaya mountains and the Karakum and Gobi
 deserts formed barriers that the steppe horsemen could cross only with
difficulty. While the urban city dwellers were more advanced
technologically and socially, in many cases they could do little in a
military aspect to defend against the mounted hordes of the steppe.
However, the lowlands did not have enough open grasslands to support a
large horsebound force; for this and other reasons, the nomads
 who conquered states in China, India, and the Middle East often found
themselves adapting to the local, more affluent societies.

Asia is the largest continent on Earth. It covers 9% of the Earth's
total surface area (or 30% of its land area), and has the longest
coastline, at 62,800 kilometres (39,022 mi). Asia is generally defined
as comprising the eastern four-fifths of Eurasia. It is located to the east of the Suez Canal and the Ural Mountains, and south of the Caucasus Mountains (or the Kuma–Manych Depression) and the Caspian and Black Seas.
 It is bounded on the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the
Indian Ocean and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. Asia is subdivided
into 48 countries, three of them (Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey) having part of their land in Europe.
Asia
 has extremely diverse climates and geographic features. Climates range
from arctic and subarctic in Siberia to tropical in southern India and
Southeast Asia. It is moist across southeast sections, and dry across
much of the interior. Some of the largest daily temperature ranges on
Earth occur in western sections of Asia. The monsoon circulation
dominates across southern and eastern sections, due to the presence of
the Himalayas forcing the formation of a thermal low which draws in
moisture during the summer. Southwestern sections of the continent are
hot. Siberia is one of the coldest places in the Northern Hemisphere,
and can act as a source of arctic air masses for North America. The most
 active place on Earth for tropical cyclone activity lies northeast of
the Philippines and south of Japan. The Gobi Desert is in Mongolia and the Arabian Desert stretches across much of the Middle East. The Yangtze River in China is the longest river in the continent. The Himalayas
 between Nepal and China is the tallest mountain range in the world.
Tropical rainforests stretch across much of southern Asia and coniferous
 and deciduous forests lie farther north.

Asia has the largest continental economy by both GDP Nominal and PPP
 in the world, and is the fastest growing economic region. As of 2018 ,
 the largest economies in Asia are China, Japan, India, Russia, South
Korea, Indonesia and Turkey based on GDP in both nominal and PPP. Based
 on Global Office Locations 2011, Asia dominated the office locations
with 4 of the top 5 being in Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul. Around 68 percent of international firms have office in Hong Kong.
In
 the late 1990s and early 2000s, the economies of China and India have
been growing rapidly, both with an average annual growth rate of more
than 8%. Other recent very-high-growth nations in Asia include Israel, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Mongolia, Uzbekistan and the Philippines, and mineral-rich nations such as Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Brunei, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman.
According to economic historian Angus Maddison
 in his book The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, India had the
world's largest economy during 0 BCE and 1000 BCE. China was the largest and most advanced economy on earth for much of recorded history, until the British Empire (excluding India)
 overtook it in the mid-19th century. For several decades in the late
twentieth century Japan was the largest economy in Asia and
second-largest of any single nation in the world, after surpassing the Soviet Union
 (measured in net material product) in 1986 and Germany in 1968. (NB: A
number of supernational economies are larger, such as the European Union (EU), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or APEC). This ended in 2010 when China overtook Japan to become the world's second largest economy.

With growing Regional Tourism with domination of Chinese visitors, MasterCard
 has released Global Destination Cities Index 2013 with 10 of 20 are
dominated by Asia and Pacific Region Cities and also for the first time a
 city of a country from Asia (Bangkok) set in the top-ranked with 15.98
international visitors.

East Asia had by far the strongest overall Human Development Index
 (HDI) improvement of any region in the world, nearly doubling average
HDI attainment over the past 40 years, according to the report's
analysis of health, education and income data. China, the second highest
 achiever in the world in terms of HDI improvement since 1970, is the
only country on the "Top 10 Movers" list due to income rather than
health or education achievements. Its per capita income increased a
stunning 21-fold over the last four decades, also lifting hundreds of
millions out of income poverty. Yet it was not among the region's top
performers in improving school enrollment and life expectancy. Nepal,
 a South Asian country, emerges as one of the world's fastest movers
since 1970 mainly due to health and education achievements. Its present life expectancy
 is 25 years longer than in the 1970s. More than four of every five
children of school age in Nepal now attend primary school, compared to
just one in five 40 years ago. Hong Kong ranked highest among the
countries grouped on the HDI (number 7 in the world, which is in the
"very high human development" category), followed by Singapore (9),
Japan (19) and South Korea (22). Afghanistan (155) ranked lowest amongst Asian countries out of the 169 countries assessed.
Languages
Asia is home to several language families and many language isolates. Most Asian countries have more than one language that is natively spoken. For instance, according to Ethnologue,
 more than 600 languages are spoken in Indonesia, more than 800
languages spoken in India, and more than 100 are spoken in the
Philippines. China has many languages and dialects in different
provinces.
Religions
Many of the world's major religionshave their origins in Asia, including the five most practiced in the world…