Sublime

For these empire-builders, the vast grassy steppe that stretched across Eurasia from Manchuria to Hungary was an open road to commercial wealth and almost limitless power. The trading cities of the Near and Middle East were a natural target.

Similarities between the rituals excavated at Sintashta and Arkaim and those described later in the RV have solved, for many, the problem of Indo-Iranian origins.46 The parallels include a reference in RV 10.18 to a kurgan (“let them … bury death in this hill”), a roofed burial chamber supported with posts (“let the fathers hold up this pillar for

In 1877, another high-status female grave was discovered at Arras. This time it was found during chalk quarrying, and it became known as the Lady’s Barrow. The woman buried in it was probably around her late thirties when she died. She was around 5ft tall, and her bones were robust – suggesting she was likely to have been fit and well-muscled. She

Naropa transmitted his lineage to Marpa (1012–1096), a Tibetan householder who had come to India in search of the dharma. Naropa

Avestan Iranian was the language of the Avesta, the holiest text of Zorastrianism. The oldest parts of the Avesta, the Gathas, probably were composed by Zoroaster (the Greek form of the name) or by Zarathustra (the original Iranian form) himself. Zarathustra was a religious reformer who lived in eastern Iran, judging from the places he named,

When the tea market collapsed, the distributing system that had been put in place and capitalized by the British East India Company turned to the production and selling of opium and the exploitation of the Chinese population that was outside of the colonial system proper. The invention of morphine (1803) and then heroin (1873) carries us to the

An interesting aspect of the spread of animal keeping in the steppes was the concurrent rapid rise of chiefs who wore multiple belts and strings of polished shell beads, bone beads, beaver-tooth and horse-tooth beads, boars tusk pendants, boars-tusk caps, boars-tusk plates sewed to their clothing, pendants of crystal and porphyry, polished stone