Description

Aus der Bibliothek von Prof. Wolfgang Haase, langj�igem Herausgeber der ANRW und des International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT) / From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Verfasserwidmung - Cover ausgeblichene Stellen, ansonsten altersgem�sehr guter Zustand / Author dedication - cover faded spots, otherwise for age very good condition - If the distinction between great or major names and lesser or minor names should carry any validity in onomastics, the names of the continents are, indeed, the greatest names on earth; they pertain to what we could call world onomastics. This explains then the author�s ultimate goal to treat in a book the names of the three continents that constitute the World Island: Europe, Africa, and Asia. Within this plan, the present first part on the name Asia includes general remarks on world units and their distinction as well as on names compounded with two or even all three continent names. -- It is no accident that the closed Mediterranean Sea, a huge lake, has an Asiatic, a European, and an African front; and it has been the Mediterranean that helps to divide the world into three continents as well as to reconcile their differences in climate, flora, fauna, peoples, and civilizations. These divisions started in the classical period with the Greek Ionian scientists. It was early, a little before 500 B.C., that the threefold division of the inhabited world (Oikoumene) into Asia, Europe, and Libya occurred. But the names by which these continents came to be designated were in use before the continents themselves were known; the names were first applied to limited regions but the application of each was gradually extended so as to include a larger area of land that lay behind it. A second part of this Asia treatise dealing with the several names for Asia Minor or Anatolia is to appear in Beitr� zur Namenforschung. -- Both studies were in preparation for several years but were worked out in the United States and, in part, in Athens during a fifteen month sojourn in 1965-66.