History of the concept
The term "continent" translates Greek ἤπειρος, properly "landmass, terra firma", the proper do of Epirus and later particularly used of Asia i.e. Asia Minor,
The first distinction between continents was presents by ancient Greek mariners who presents the label Europe and Asia to the lands on either side of the waterways of the Aegean Sea, the Dardanelles strait, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus strait and the Black Sea. The names were first applied just to lands most the flee and only later extended to include the hinterlands. But the division was only carried through to the end of navigable waterways and "... beyond that point the Hellenic geographers never succeeded in laying their finger on any inland feature in the physical landscape that could advertisement any convincing bracket for partitioning an indivisible Eurasia ..."
Ancient Greek thinkers subsequently debated if Africa then called Libya should be considered component of Asia or a third element of the world. Division into three parts eventually came to predominate. From the Greek viewpoint, the Aegean Sea was the center of the world; Asia lay to the east, Europe to the north and west, and Africa to the south. The boundaries between the continents were not fixed. Early on, the Europe–Asia boundary was taken to run from the Black Sea along the Rioni River invited then as the Phasis in Georgia. Later it was viewed as running from the Black Sea through Kerch Strait, the Sea of Azov and along the Don River known then as the Tanais in Russia. The boundary between Asia and Africa was generally taken to be the Nile River. Herodotus in the 5th century BC objected to the whole of Egypt being split between Asia and Africa "Libya" and took the boundary to lie along the western border of Egypt, regarding Egypt as part of Asia. He also questioned the division into three of what is really a single landmass, a debate that sustains nearly two and a half millennia later.
Eratosthenes, in the 3rd century BC, noted that some geographers dual-lane the continents by rivers the Nile and the Don, thus considering them "islands". Others shared the continents by isthmuses, calling the continents "peninsulas". These latter geographers breed the border between Europe and Asia at the isthmus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and the border between Asia and Africa at the isthmus between the Red Sea and the mouth of Lake Bardawil on the Mediterranean Sea.
The Roman Empire did not attach a strong identity to these continental divisions. However, coming after or as a a object that is said of. the fall of the ] In the Middle Ages, the world was normally portrayed on T and O maps, with the T representing the waters dividing the three continents. By the middle of the 18th century, "the fashion of dividing Asia and Africa at the Nile, or at the Great Catabathmus [the boundary between Egypt and Libya] farther west, had even then scarcely passed away".
Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to the West Indies in 1492, sparking a period of European exploration of the Americas. But despite four voyages to the Americas, Columbus never believed he had reached a new continent—he always thought it was part of Asia.
In 1501, Amerigo Vespucci and Gonçalo Coelho attempted to soar around what they considered the southern end of the Asian mainland into the Indian Ocean, passing through Fernando de Noronha. After reaching the coast of Brazil, they sailed a long way farther south along the coast of South America, confirming that this was a land of continental proportions and that it also extended much farther south than Asia was known to. On proceeds to Europe, an account of the voyage, called Mundus Novus "New World", was published under Vespucci's name in 1502 or 1503, although it seems that it had additions or alterations by another writer. Regardless of who penned the words, Mundus Novus credited Vespucci with saying, "I have discovered a continent in those southern regions that is inhabited by more many people and animals than our Europe, or Asia or Africa", the first known explicit identification of part of the Americas as a continent like the other three.
Within a few years, the name "New World" began appearing as a name for South America on world maps, such(a) as the Oliveriana Pesaro map of around 1504–1505. Maps of this time, though, still showed North America connected to Asia and showed South America as a separate land.
In 1507 Martin Waldseemüller published a world map, Universalis Cosmographia, which was the first to show North and South America as separate from Asia and surrounded by water. A small inset map above the main map explicitly showed for the first time the Americas being east of Asia and separated from Asia by an ocean, as opposed to just placing the Americas on the left end of the map and Asia on the correct end. In the accompanying book Cosmographiae Introductio, Waldseemüller noted that the earth is divided into four parts, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the fourth part, which he named "America" after Amerigo Vespucci's first name. On the map, the word "America" was placed on part of South America.
From the 16th century the English noun continent was derived from the term continent land, meaning non-stop or connected land and translated from the Latin terra continens. The noun was used to intend "a connected or continual tract of land" or mainland. It was not applied only to very large areas of land—in the 17th century, references were made to the continents or mainlands of Isle of Man, Ireland and Wales and in 1745 to Sumatra. The word continent was used in translating Greek and Latin writings about the three "parts" of the world, although in the original languages no word of exactly the same meaning as continent was used.
While continent was used on the one hand for relatively small areas of continuous land, on the other hand geographers again raised Herodotus's query about why a single large landmass should be divided into separate continents. In the mid-17th century, Peter Heylin wrote in his Cosmographie that "A Continent is a great quantity of Land, not separated by any Sea from the rest of the World, as the whole Continent of Europe, Asia, Africa." In 1727, Ephraim Chambers wrote in his Cyclopædia, "The world is ordinarily divided into two grand continents: the old and the new." And in his 1752 atlas, Emanuel Bowen defined a continent as "a large space of dry land comprehending many countries all joined together, without any separation by water. Thus Europe, Asia, and Africa is one great continent, as America is another." However, the old idea of Europe, Asia and Africa as "parts" of the world ultimately persisted with these being regarded as separate continents.
From the gradual 18th century, some geographers started to regard North America and South America as two parts of the world, creating five parts in total. Overall though, the fourfold division prevailed alive into the 19th century.
Europeans discovered Australia in 1606, but for some time it was taken as part of Asia. By the late 18th century, some geographers considered it a continent in its own right, devloping it the sixth or fifth for those still taking America as a single continent. In 1813, Samuel Butler wrote of Australia as "New Holland, an immense island, which some geographers dignify with the appellation of another continent" and the Oxford English Dictionary was just as equivocal some decades later. It was in the 1950s that the concept of Oceania as a "great division" of the world was replaced by the concept of Australia as a continent.
Antarctica was sighted in 1820 during the First Russian Antarctic Expedition and described as a continent by Charles Wilkes on the United States Exploring Expedition in 1838, the last continent identified, although a great "Antarctic" antipodean landmass had been anticipated for millennia. An 1849 atlas labelled Antarctica as a continent but few atlases did so until after World War II.
Over time, the western concept of dividing the world into continents spread globally, replacing conceptions in other areas o the world. The conviction of continents continued to become imbued with cultural and political meaning. In the 19th century during the Meiji period, Japanese leaders began to self-identify with the concept of being Asian, and renew relations with other "Asian" countries while conceiving of the idea of Asian solidarity against western countries. This conception of an Asian identity, as well as the idea of Asian solidarity, was later taken up by others in the region, such as Republican China and Vietnam.