Vasos - *this* is a work of beauty and thoroughness. I rarely
read start to finish but I skip around 'til things "jump out" at
me and that's when I start. These clips are perfect for that. I
skip past the past I either know or aren't interesting at the
moment, and after a little bit of scrolling, some words pop out
at me and I start reading from there. [wait - I repeated myself
tongue emoticon ] Anyway, thank you for the resource you put
together there. Brilliance. Your labor is edification. Thank you
smile emoticon -- Oh your timeline at the bottom! Oh the inner
historian in me is fangirling with glee. [yeah, I'm a history
nerd]. I'm printing your timeline out on my laser printer for
safe-keeping. there's a huge "education gap" regarding
Greece/Russian history (Byzantine is the right word for it -
I'll start using that) and I find myself sometimes in history
battles with people who have never learned anything but what the
BBC (or BBC derived - aka American) history regarding anything
before Galileo... and I find myself batting my head against the
wall. How do you explain to people just how thready their grasp
on the fullness of history is? They see islands of events dotted
through history that only matter because they serve a cause:
promotion of Science, promotion of some value or another like
Western Philosophy... ..but they miss _so much_... I'll never
get the fullness I want of historical knowledge but I can at
least take the little I know and try to fill in other people's
histories... to start to see the timeline of human history not
as little islands of this and that, but as whole movements of
information, culture and knowledge, spanning thousands of years.
That moment when you can put yourself in ancient Greece, or
wonder what's going on at the 1st Ecumenical Council that people
have been whispering about as it happens... or imagine life
under Justinian or being there as Constanople fell... or what it
must've been like to be an early Russian learning Greek and
watching language transform over time into its own unique
expression... .. it's just a marvelous feeling. One becomes an
inhabitant of all time to some degree, as if having lived for
thousands of years but with a few gaps in memory.
