I'm more familiar with the term Ancient Near East, and that includes ancient Sumer / Babylon, now modern Iraq. The A-H dictionary gives: "Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the other countries of the Arabian Peninsula. Egypt and Sudan in northeast Africa are sometimes considered part of the region." I think it's more a toponym of the mind ... I mean to me the Far East is west of me. Also, how did Europe break off from Asia? Isn't this just Eurasia? I can see North and South America because of the narrowness of the Panama isthmus, but the old, so-called Iron Curtain is a pretty wide connector. In Greek, the Anatolian peninsula was simply called the East (place where the Sun rises).