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.