The Roman province of Asia was the administrative unit added to the late Republic, a Senatorial province governed by a proconsul who was an ex-consul, an honor granted only to Asia and the other rich province of Africa. The arrangement was unchanged in the reorganization of the Roman Empire of 211 CE.
"Asia" in the books of the Maccabees refers to Asia Minor, which Antiochus III (the Great) had to give up when the Romans, under Manius Glabrio crushed his army in 191 BCE at the historic battle site of Thermopylae. After the battle of Magnesia, 188 BC, the entire territory would be surrendered to Rome and placed under the control of a clkient king at Pergamum.
In 133 BC, Attalus III, king of of Pergamon, having no heirs to succeed him, bequeathed his kingdom to Rome, and after some hesitation the Roman province of Asia Proconsularis was formed, embracing the regions of Mysia, Lydia, Caria, and Phrygia.
After 326 AD, when the Emperor Constantine I moved the capital to Byzantium, which he refounded, the province of Asia was more centrally situated than ever, and remained a center of Roman and Hellenistic culture in the east for centuries, and the territory remained part of the Byzantine Empire until the 15th century.
The Republic of India, Asia's second-largest country after China, fills the major part of the South Asian subcontinent (which it shares with Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh) and includes the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal and Lakshadweep (formerly the Laccadive, Minicoy, and Amindivi Islands) in the Arabian Sea.
The smallest country in Asia, the Republic of Maldives consists of an archipelago of nearly 1,200 coral islands and sand banks in the Indian Ocean, some 200 of which are inhabited.
The Republic of the Philippines consists of an archipelago of 7,107 islands situated SE of mainland Asia and separated from it by the South China Sea.
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