Europe As A Cultural Region Essay

806 Words4 Pages

Europe as a Continent and as a Cultural Region.

A continent, in basic geographic terms, is a landmass and Europe is part of a big continent called Eurasia, containing both Europe and Asia. Europe, as a cultural region, is the home of the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome with Slavic peoples in the East, Latin people in the South and Germanic people in the North.

The geographic boundaries of Europe are the Arctic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Ural and Caucasus Mountains which has a six hundred mile gap between these mountain ranges and the Ural Mountains are located in Russia. As the historian, Arnold Toynbee said, in reference to the classification of Europe as its own continent, “the geographer’s error here lay in attempting to translate a serviceable piece of …show more content…

This brings up an important concept of metageography, which states that mapping the world is subjective, not objective. For example, long ago Greeks defined a boundary line between Europe and Asia to belittle their Persian neighbors. However, others saw Greece in an undefined position between Europe and Asia. Another example is the rise of the ‘nation-state’, or the modern autonomous nation, which is considered a unit of political organization, produced a war against Germans and French. Now in Europe, the transition began in the Middle Ages. The havoc of the bubonic plague left much of the region in political, economic, and social disarray. It also weakened the power of nobles and the church. Power, of course, existed in little pockets where feudal lords ruled over small territories. But eventually, powerful kings incorporated these feudal regions into their own kingdoms. And so, often out of a need for protection, the lords slowly turned their power over and became part of large kingdoms or principalities, where there are some

Open Document