The first recorded usage of Eurṓpē as a geographic term is in the Homeric Hymn to Delian

Apollo, in reference to the western shore of the Aegean Sea. As a name for a part of the known
world, it is first used in the 6th century BCE by Anaximander and Hecataeus. Anaximander
placed the boundary between Asia and Europe along the Phasis River (the modern Rioni River on
the territory of Georgia) in the Caucasus, a convention still followed by Herodotus in the 5th
century BCE.[31] Herodotus mentioned that the world had been divided by unknown persons into
three parts—Europe, Asia, and Libya (Africa)—with the Nile and the Phasis forming their
boundaries—though he also states that some considered the River Don, rather than the Phasis,
as the boundary between Europe and Asia.[32] Europe's eastern frontier was defined in the 1st
century by geographer Strabo at the River Don.[33] The Book of Jubilees described the
continents as the lands given by Noah to his three sons; Europe was defined as stretching from
the Pillars of Herculesat the Strait of Gibraltar, separating it from Northwest Africa, to the Don,
separating it from Asia.[34]
The convention received by the Middle Ages and surviving into modern usage is that of the
Roman era used by Roman-era authors such as Posidonius,[35] Strabo[36] and Ptolemy,[37]
who took the Tanais (the modern Don River) as the boundary.
The Roman Empire did not attach a strong identity to the concept of continental divisions.
However, following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the culture that developed in its place,
linked to Latin and the Catholic church, began to associate itself with the concept of "Europe".
[38] The term "Europe" is first used for a cultural sphere in the Carolingian Renaissance of the
9th century. From that time, the term designated the sphere of influence of the Western Church,
as opposed to both the Eastern Orthodox churches and to the Islamic world.
A cultural definition of Europe as the lands of Latin Christendom coalesced in the 8th century,
signifying the new cultural condominium created through the confluence of Germanic traditions
and Christian-Latin culture, defined partly in contrast with Byzantium and Islam, and limited to
northern Iberia, the British Isles, France, Christianised western Germany, the Alpine regions and
northern and central Italy.[39][40] The concept is one of the lasting legacies of the Carolingian
Renaissance: Europa