Iroquois longhouse - where Iroquois people lived What is an Iroquois longhouse? Most people who lived in the Iroquois nation lived in longhouses. An Iroquois longhouse is just what it sounds like, a long house, built of thin bendable wood, with branches woven in and out of the joists. Who were the Iroquois? Other [...]
Medieval Book (Cluny Museum, Paris) In the Early Middle Ages, as the Roman Empire was collapsing, the new power of Christianity inspired Augustine, in North Africa, and Pope Gregory the Great in Italy. They both wrote new books in Latin about Christian philosophy. In Constantinople, Procopius wrote in Greek about Justinian's conquests. And about the same time, Cassiodorus in Italy [...]
The only surviving manuscript of Beowulf Date of Beowulf Beowulf is a long poem that somebody wrote down around 1000 AD. The poem is in Old English, so whoever wrote it probably lived in England. It's one of the oldest poems written in English (but not the oldest). Only one copy of the poem [...]
Monk writing a book, seated on a wyvern (North Germany, ca. 1150 AD now in Metropolitan Museum, NYC) The earliest stories of German and Scandinavian literature probably come from even earlier Indo-European stories. Some of these stories seem to be related to stories told by other Indo-European people like the Persians or the [...]
Women swimming in the Seljuk kingdom (1494 AD) The fall of the Roman Empire and the Sassanian Empire in the 500s AD doesn't seem to have made much difference to swimming. People in the medieval Islamic Empire kept right on swimming. Women and men still swam, naked as always. Men and women [...]
