Tagged “history”
Inherited Property
The people whose language became English, Greek and Hindi left no writing, no buildings and no graves anybody can identify. So how does anyone know they kept bees?
The Other Face
The Franks claimed they came from Troy. Why would a people only two generations old need ancestors from a famous war fifteen centuries earlier?
The Break
Around 1200 BC a connected world came apart in about fifty years. What happens to a civilisation's memory of itself when everybody who could read is gone?
The Older Layer
Sacred texts were copied by hand for centuries, and each generation quietly adjusted what it disagreed with. So why is the older version still sitting in there?
One Sentence, Four Englishes
One sentence, traced back through four written stages of English and three reconstructed proto-languages, eight thousand years in one line.