she became the mother of Minos, Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon. She was worshipped under the name of Hellotis in Crete, where the festival Hellotia, at which her bones, wreathed in myrtle, were carried round, was held in her honour (Athenaeus xv. p. 678). Some consider Europa to be a moon-goddess; others explain the story by saying that she was carried off by a king of Crete in a ship decorated with the figure-head of a bull. O. Gruppe (De Cadmi Fabula, 1891) endeavours to show that the myth of Europa is only another version of the myth of Persephone.
See Apollodorus iii. 1; Ovid, Metam. ii. 833; articles by Helbig in Roscher’s Lexikon der Mythologie, and by Hild in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dictionnaire des antiquités. Fig. 26 in the article Greek Art (archaic metope from Palermo) represents the journey of Europa over the sea on the back of the bull.
EUROPE, the smallest of those principal divisions of the land-surface of the globe which are usually distinguished by the conventional name of continents.
1. Geography and Statistics
It has justly become a commonplace of geography to describe
Europe as a mere peninsula of Asia, but while it is necessary
to bear this in mind in some aspects of the geography
of the continent, more particularly in relation to the
climate, the individuality of the continent is established
Individuality of
the continent.
in the clearest manner by the course of history and the
resultant distribution of population. The earliest mention of
Europe is in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, but there Europe
is not the name of a continent, but is opposed to the Peloponnesus
and the islands of the Aegean. The distinction between Europe
and Asia is found, however, in Aeschylus in the 5th century B.C.,
but there seems to be little doubt that this opposition was learnt
by the Greeks from some Asiatic people. On Assyrian monuments
the contrast between asu, “(the land of) the rising sun,”
and ereb or irib, “(the land of) darkness” or “the setting sun,”
is frequent, and these names were probably passed on by the
Phoenicians to the Greeks, and gave rise to the names of Asia and
Europe. Where the names originated the geographical distinction
was clearly marked by the intervention of the sea, and
this intervention marked equally clearly the distinction between
Europe and Libya (Africa). As the knowledge of the world
extended, the difficulty, which still exists, of fixing the boundary
between Europe and Asia where there is land connexion, caused
uncertainty in the application of the two names, but never
obscured the necessity for recognizing the distinction. Even in
the 3rd century B.C. Europe was regarded by Eratosthenes as
including all that was then known of northern Asia. But the
character of the physical features and climate finally determined
the fact that what we know as Europe came to be occupied by
more or less populous countries in intimate relation with one
another, but separated on the east by unpeopled or very sparsely
peopled areas from the countries of Asia, and the boundary between
the two continents has long been recognized as running
somewhere through this area. Within the limits thus marked
out on the east and on other sides by the sea “the climatic
conditions are such that inhabitants are capable of and require
a civilization of essentially the same type, based upon the cultivation
of our European grains.”[1] Those inhabitants have had a
common history in a greater measure than those of any other
continent, and hence are more thoroughly conscious of their
dissimilarities from, than of their consanguinity with, the peoples
of the east and the south.
On the subject of the boundaries of Europe there is still divergence of opinion. While some authorities take the line of the Caucasus as the boundary in the south-east, others take the line of the Manych depression, between the upper end of the Sea of Azov and the Caspian Sea, Boundaries. nearly parallel to the Caucasus. Various limits are assigned to the continent on the east. Officially the crest of the Caucasus and that of the Urals are regarded in Russia as the boundaries between Europe and Asia on the south-east and east respectively,[2] although in neither case does the boundary correspond with the great administrative divisions, and in the Urals it is impossible to mark out any continuous crest. Reclus, without attempting to assign any precise position to the boundary line between the two continents, makes it run through the relatively low and partly depressed area north of the Caucasus and east of the Urals. The Manych depression, marking the lowest line of this area to the north of the Caucasus, has been taken as the boundary of Europe on the south-east by Wagner in his edition of Guthe’s Lehrbuch der Geographie,[3] and the same limit is adopted in Kirchhoff’s Länderkunde des Erdteils Europa[4] and Stanford’s Compendium of Geography and Travel. In favour of this limit it appears that much weight ought to be given to the consideration put forward by Wagner, that from time immemorial the valleys on both sides of the Caucasus have formed a refuge for Asiatic peoples, especially when it is borne in mind that this contention is reinforced by the circumstance that the steppes to the north of the Caucasus must interpose a belt of almost unpeopled territory between the more condensed populations belonging undoubtedly to Asia and Europe respectively. Continuity of population would be an argument in favour of assigning the whole of the Urals to Europe, but here the absence of any break in such continuity on the east side makes it more difficult to fix any boundary line outside of that system. Hence on this side it is perhaps reasonable to attach greater importance to the fact that the Urals form a boundary not only orographically, but to some extent also in respect of climate and vegetation,[5] and on that account to take a line following the crest of the different sections of that system as the eastern limit between the two continents.[6] Obviously, however, any eventual agreement among geographers on this head must be more or less arbitrary and conventional. In any case it must be borne in mind that, whatever conventional boundary be adopted, the use of the name Europe as so limited must be confined to statements of extent or implying extent. The facts as to climate, fauna and flora have no relation to any such arbitrary boundary, and all statistical statements referring to the countries of Europe must include the part of Russia beyond the Urals up to the frontier of Siberia. In such statements, however, in the present article the whole of the lieutenancy of the Caucasus will be left out of account. As to extent it is provisionally advisable to give the area of the continent within different limits.
The following calculations in English square miles (round numbers) of the area of Europe, within different limits, are given in Behm and Wagner’s Bevölkerung der Erde, No. viii. (Gotha, Justus Perthes, 1891), p. 53:—Europe, within the narrowest physical limits (to the crest of the Urals and the Extent. Manych depression, and including the Sea of Azov, but excluding the Caspian Steppe, Iceland, Novaya Zemlya, Spitsbergen and Bear Island) 3,570,000 sq. m. The same, with the addition of the Caspian Steppe up to the Ural river and the Caspian Sea, 3,687,750 sq. m. The same, with the addition of the area between the Manych depression and the Caucasus, 3,790,500 sq. m. The same, with the addition of territories east of the Ural Mountains, the portion of the Caspian Steppe east of the Ural river as far as the Emba, and the southern slopes of the Caucasus,
- ↑ H. Wagner’s edition of Guthe’s Lehrbuch der Geographie (5th ed., Hanover 1882).
- ↑ At the summit of each of the Trans-Ural railways (Perm-Tyumen and Ufa-Chelyabinsk) and that of the road across the Caucasus from Vladikavkaz to Tiflis, sign-posts, with the name Europe on one side, Asia on the other, mark this boundary.
- ↑ Fifth edition, vol. ii. pp. 24-25.
- ↑ Pt. i. pp. 11-12.
- ↑ Griesbach, on the strength of Middendorff’s observations, remarks that, in addition to European fruit trees, oak, maples, elms, ashes and the black alder do not cross the Urals, while the lime tree is reduced to the size of a shrub (La Végétation du globe, translated by Tchihatchef, i. p. 181).
- ↑ On the history of the boundary between Asia and Europe see F. G. Hahn in the Mitteilungen des Vereins für Erdkunde zu Leipzig (1881), pp. 83-104. Hahn, on the ground that true mountain systems must be regarded as forming geographical units, pronounces against the practice of making “natural boundaries” run along mountain crests, and assigns the whole of the Caucasus region to Europe as all belonging to such a system, but orographically quite different from the Armenian plateau (p. 103). But surely it is no less different from the European plain.
