A Parthian noblewoman This is a story from the Parthian Empire, but the earliest written version that we still have is by the Islamic poet Gorgani, about 1050 AD: King Mobad of Marv saw the beautiful [...]
Sohrab and Rustem: The death of Sohrab (Iranian painting) Where did this story come from? This story is probably an old Indo-European story that Persian people told even before they moved south into Iran [...]
Jupiter, a Roman god (fresco from the House of the Dioscuri, Pompeii, ca. 79 AD) Who was Jupiter? Jupiter was the chief of the gods for the Romans, the way Zeus was for the [...]
European boys at school in the 1800s More schools and more scientists In the first half of the 1800s AD, countries in northern Europe like France and Britain forced other countries to give them [...]
Tristan and Isolde, in a German woodcut (1400s AD) In the story, Isolde was a princess in Ireland, and a great healer. She was the best doctor in the land. One day this guy [...]
Early Slavic history: Where did the Slavs come from? A Slavic furnace from Novae, in Bulgaria (300s AD) - maybe a pottery kiln? The Slavs were Indo-Europeans The Slavs, who [...]
Ural mountains In the Early Middle Ages, Turkic and Mongol people in Central Asia were moving westward, pushing out Indo-European people - and other people - who had been living there. The Magyars, who [...]
The Lombards: a Lombard Christian altar (700s AD) (University of Alabama) Where did the Lombards come from? In 568 AD, a Turkic people, the Avars, pushed the Indo-European Lombards out of their home in Central [...]
Yamnaya get around: Map of the spread of Indo-European languages Who were the Yamnaya? People we call the Yamnaya (Ukrainian for "People who lived in pits") seem to have been [...]
Cuneiform tablet from West Asia Most people in the ancient Mediterranean and West Asian areas spoke languages that divided into two groups. One language group is Indo-European and the other group is Semitic. In southern [...]
