Old World

The Old World is a historical and cultural term for Afro-Eurasia, the combined landmass of Africa, Europe and Asia. Europeans coined it after 1493, once they had become aware that the Americas, Oceania and Antarctica existed, and they set it against the New World, the newly encountered lands of the Western Hemisphere and above all the Americas. The phrase also carries a Latin form, Mundus vetustus. Before that awareness, Europeans had thought of these three continents of the Eastern Hemisphere as the entire world, so the name records a change in how the world was understood rather than a boundary drawn on the ground. In this atlas it is held as a transregional grouping that spans more than one continent, and its neighbouring term, the New World, marks the other side of the same contrast.