re: Why is there no "Near East"?

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It's weird because dumb people think that Pakistan and India are in the ME when they are Asians.

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You do realize the Middle East is in Asia also?

Near East

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The Near East is a geographical term that roughly encompasses Western Asia. Despite having varying definitions within different academic circles, the term was originally applied to the maximum extent of the Ottoman Empire.

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Until about 1855 the words near east and far east did not refer to any particular region. The far East, a phrase containing a noun, East, qualified by an adjective, far, could be at any location in the "far east" of the speaker's home territory. The Ottoman Empire, for example, was the far East as much as the East Indies. The Crimean War brought a change in vocabulary with the introduction of terms more familiar to the late 19th century. The Russian Empire had entered a more aggressive phase, becoming militarily active against the Ottoman Empire and also against China, with territorial aggrandizement explicitly in mind. Rethinking its policy the British government decided that the two polities under attack were necessary for the balance of power. It therefore undertook to oppose the Russians in both places, one result being the Crimean War. During that war the administration of the British Empire began promulgating a new vocabulary, giving specific regional meaning to "the Near East", the Ottoman Empire, and "the Far East", the East Indies. The two terms were now compound nouns often shown hyphenated.

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The Near East and Middle East pretty much are the same area. The Middle East is just the term in common usage.

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Pretty much, my dad spent time in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and some other countries as a contractor. He's got some funny stories that happened all because of language differneces between countries.

He refers to that area as the near east.

The Near East was originally used to refer to Turkey, Egypt, and the Holy Land with the Middle East being the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. The name "Middle East" sorta caught on and ended up meaning anywhere Muslim's are in power.