Europe: A History
I decided to go back and explore Europe to understand its impact on my current areas of interest, namely the Middle East, Central Asia and India.
The one thing that I love about history is that it brings perspective – and perspective is always humbling. I'm attempting to tackle European history right now, and the 1,350 page volume by Norman Davies, while dense, is written well enough to achieve the near impossible – condensing more than two thousand years of history and million years of prehistory into a single volume. I decided to go back and explore Europe to understand its impact on my current areas of interest, namely the Middle East, Central Asia and India.
A couple of cool trivia I've learned so far?
- Ole in Spanish is derived from its Moorish and Arabic roots (i.e. "Allah")
- Ashkenazi Jews may have come from the Khazar Khanate, when in the early 300s AD, a significant portion of Khazak tribes were converted to Judaism by merchants and remnants of the Roman diaspora. The Khazars influenced the Bulgars and Huns and Magyars, who all migrated pass the Dnieper and towards the central plains of Europe. Which is ironic on a lot of levels.
- The history of the early church is really amazing for its political intrigue, theological flexibility and heretical pragmatism as exemplified by: establishment of the canonical works, ascendancy of the Carolignian relationship vs the legitimacy of the papal states, the wooing of 'barbarians' through the assimilation of ancient pre-Christian rituals and the wholesale slaughter of the opposition. In effect, the Christian religion, like many others, was and is a business.
- Greeks today are actually more Slavic than ancient Greeks. English today are more Slavic (Normans) than Germanic. And the Irish, Welsh and Highland Scots (Celtics) are some of the most ancient Europeans present, coming and settling in northern Europe before the founding of the Hellenistic states.
Why do any of these things matter? Well, for one, it makes an interesting read. And two, the theme across history is that we're all connected, that we more often share a common history than not and that forgetting our very human roots leads to inevitable tragedy.