hey, all. been a while since i made a thread here, but i've been meaning to post alot of questions that have occurred to me in recent months. to explain, in this particular case, i was reading through a book of travel legend and folklore over the summer and learned quite alot about the historical concept of Tartary. simply put, it's a fictional country used by medieval cartographers to fill the blank spaces on the map when knowledge of far-flung regions were unknown, but all the various definitions of Tartary actually, interestingly, conform to the basic borders of the Mongol Empire. it was also addressed in same book that, as probably all of you already know, that Anatolia was historically known as "Asia Minor". that last part actually brought on a question for myself: "If Anatolia is Asia Minor, then where is Asia Major?" and i eventually looked it up on my own, the basic answer being the "Asia Major" would be Asia as it was known by the Ancient Greeks, probably amounting to the eastern reaches of the Macedonian Empire, so by modern definitions it would be Asia below the former Soviet Union and east to the Indus River.
eventually, that led to another question which i haven't yet answered for myself: What if the continent of Asia was called "Tartary" instead and "Asia" was exclusively a regional term?
basically, i wanted to get some peer review on this to see what everyone thinks. i could easily see this being so in a given ATL as an example of the butterfly effect. this would essentially mean that the Middle East is referred to as "Asia" ITTL and alot of OTL regional terms for Asia would, obviously, substitute "Tartary" for "Asia", so China, Japan, and Korea would be part of "eastern Tartary", for example. thoughts?