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<jats:p>Perhaps, the story of Europe's views of Asia should begin with the question of when the term ‘Asia’, ‘Açu’, was introduced into what one must call the European perspective of the world. Meaning the 'sunrising’ in its original, Assyrian usage, it always seems to have denoted that part of the world which lay to the East. Once the Greek had adopted it to identify those lands which, precisely because they were threatening and near, they wanted to denote as ‘not theirs’, it became part of the dichotomy in which Europe was created as the geographical context for Greek civilisation, Hellas, while Asia -jealously viewed and, consequently, negatively judged - was the territory of the other, the enemy. From that time onwards, ‘Europe’ was part of the vocabulary the peoples of the Mediterranean used to structure the shores of their sea geographically.</jats:p>