Excellent article. The phrase "Mother Ukraine" comes to mind, not only as a counter to Mother Russia but also as a statement of Ukraine's own identity, history and destiny.
Ukraine was the birthplace of the Proto-Indo-European language, wasn't it?
More or less. The
Proto-Indo-European homeland was likely the territory of the
Yamnaya culture of 5000 years ago, in a long thick strip running roughly Moldova - Ukraine - southern European Russia - western Kazakhstan - southern Ural Mountains. It was bordered to the south by the Black Sea, the Caucasus Mountains, and the Caspian Sea.
The PIE speakers were likely the first people to have domestic horses and wheeled vehicles, and they were the first of the nomads that would overrun settled people every now and then until recent centuries.
Their homeland was part of the
Eurasian Steppe - a long strip of grassland that extends from Hungary to Manchuria (NE China).
North of it is mostly flatland, except for the Ural Mountains. This flatland includes the
North European Plain of Belgium - Holland - N Germany - Poland.
Among their offshoots was the
Corded Ware culture of northern Europe, which stretched from Belgium to Moscow. I read somewhere (one of JP Mallory's books?) that this was the most culturally unified Northern Europe has been, more culturally unified than at any time before -- or since.
Advancing forward in time to around 2000 BCE, we find the people of the
Sintashta culture of the Asian side of the southern Urals. They invented the chariot, a stripped-down two-wheeled horse-drawn vehicle designed for speed. These people then spread southward into India and Iran, and westward into the ancestral IE homeland, becoming the Scythians and Sarmatians there.
The Scythians were difficult to conquer, because they could easily retreat from some would-be conquerors -- and return when those conquerors decided to quit.
Around 1000 - 500 BCE, Greek colonists spread all over the Mediterranean and Black Seas, but never went very far inland. Odessa got its name centuries later because someone thought that it was at the location of a Greek colony named Odessos. It was more likely at what's now Varna, Bulgaria.
Around 500 BCE, Celtic people spread out from central Europe, overrunning much of it, and making much of Western Europe Celtic. But they were not as successful in Eastern Europe, though Galicia in southern Poland got its name from them, as did the Galatians in the New Testament.
A few centuries later, Germanic people started spreading out from their homeland in N Germany - Denmark - S Sweden, and around 300 - 500 CE, they spread over much of Europe, deposing the last Western Roman Emperor. In some places, they stuck, and that's why English is a Germanic language and not a Celtic or pre-Celtic one. Also why Germany extends as far south as it does and why Austria is German and part of Switzerland is also. These Germanic invaders got assimilated into western and southwestern Europe, but not before leaving such evidence as their words for "north", "east", "south", and "west". They also reached the Black Sea and even settled in the Crimea:
Crimean Goths We have evidence of them in a word list collected by Flemish ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq in the late 16th century.
Over the centuries, they also went eastward, into what's now eastern Germany, western Poland, and northeastern Poland / the Kaliningrad District of Russia. That latter territory was East Prussia, and it was German since the late Middle Ages, with its capital city originally being called Königsberg. Adolf Hitler wanted to go further, to turn Poland and the Baltic States and the eastern Slavic lands into Lebensraum for the German people: habitat / living space for them. But his attempt to build a Greater Germany was crushed. The easternmost parts of Germany were annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union and their ethnic Germans driven out. The ethnic Germans of Czechoslovakia were also driven out, those ethnic Germans that Neville Chamberlain infamously appeared Hitler about. The remaining parts of Germany were split in two by that nation's conquerors.
Backing up, Huns from central Asia invaded Europe at about 400 CE, noted for their leader Attila. But they ended up assimilated.
Then over 500 - 1000 CE, Slavic people started spreading out of their homeland in SW Belarus, W Ukraine, and SE Poland. They went in all directions, and their languages have three main groupings, West (Polish, Czech, Slovak), South (Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian), and East (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian).
Also over that time, Turkic people started spreading out from their homeland, likely just west of Mongolia. As with the previous waves of nomads, some of them become dominant, some assimilated. Turkic people became dominant in places like Turkey and Kazakhstan, but assimilated elsewhere. Around 1000 CE, there was a Turkic people called the Pechenegs that live in what's now southern Ukraine.
Some more invaders were some people from the southern Ural Mountains who settled down in Hungary around 900 - 1000 CE. Their language is a Uralic one, related to languages of people living near the Ural Mountains.
Around 1200 CE, Temüjin of Mongolia organized a coalition and he started conquering territory around him, and he became known as Genghis Khan, "Universal Ruler". His successors continued their conquests, making the Mongol Empire one of the largest in history, comparable to the Russian Empire and only behind the British Empire:
List of largest empires The Mongols would murder entire populations of cities which did not submit to them, and some estimates of their death toll are as high as 11% of humanity's total population back then.
Destruction under the Mongol Empire
At its height, the Mongol Empire covered European Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the Caucasus, Iran, Pakistan, Tibet, China, Korea, Siberia, and the central Asian stans. The Mongols tried to invade Japan in 1274 and 1281, but despite having 100,000 soldiers, Japanese ones held them off at a beach, and a typhoon (hurricane) came by and smashed up the fleet. The Japanese called that hurricane "kamikaze" - "divine wind". The suicide attackers at the end of WWII got that name out of their hoped-for effect: another last-minute miracle.
But the Mongols were the last of the conquering nomads.
So it's a long way, from Proto-Indo-European speakers to Mongols.
