| The Myth of Continents (4252 words) |
 | Whereas the best Greek geographers had recognized the conventional nature of the continents--and insisted that the Red Sea made a more appropriate boundary between Asia and Africa than the Nile River--such niceties were often lost on their counterparts in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. |
| The continents accordingly formed the core of Guyot's geographical exposition--one aimed at revealing "the existence of a general law, and disclos[ing] an arrangement which cannot be without a purpose." Not surprisingly, the purpose Guyot discerned in the arrangement of the world's landmasses entailed the progressive revelation of a foreordained superiority for Europe and the Europeans. |
| Geographers in the Islamic realm, for their part, had adopted the ancient threefold global division from the Greeks at a much earlier date, although the continents generally played an insignificant role in their conceptions of the terrestrial order before the twentieth century. |
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