The first deals with the Western portions of what we colloquially call the "Middle East"--you can look at schools which have departments of "Near East Studies" for more, but basically Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia as the primary focus.
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Africa is NOT "the biggest continent"; it is about 2/3 the area of Asia. See
[i]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent[/i]
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Maps ARE generally not correct, but not because of conspiracy, but because of the difficulties of mapping the curved nearly-spherical surface onto a flat plane. The standard projection used for some time, the Mercator projection, is most accurate near the equator and moderate latitudes, and gets increasingly off as you get closer to the poles (you can see this from the spacing of the parallels themselves; also, Antarctica is not the vast landmass you see).
Though some have said that this overemphasizes certain areas, the places with the greatest populations tend to be reasonably accurate...
There are various ways people have tried to adjust maps to try to fix this issues, with various outcomes.
