Uninhabited or swarming with giant bees is what I've always assumed about any place I've never been to. Now I know who started that trend.

Pour one out for the giant bees of northern Europe 🐝

I googled it: The Ancient Greek word for snow is νίφα (accusative singular). Apparently it’s such a rare word that the expected nominative single form *νίψ is unattested. However we know it is an inherited word rather than a borrowed word because it follows the expected sound changes from the proto indo European word for snow: *sníghws. The initial /s/ in consonant clusters often drops in older Indo-European languages due to it being confused for a final /s/ from a preceding word, because like 60% of words end in /s/. The /ghw/ sound predictably would have become /khw/ in Mycenaean Greek, and the /khw/ sound later turned into /ph/ in in most conditions in Ionic and Attic Greek. English “Snow” comes from a thematic declension version of the same root: *snoyghwos->*snaiwaz-snāw->snow.

Already great to be early for a Thersites drop

Even Christopher Marlowe, a writer contemporary to Shakespeare, in his play "Tamburlaine" describes that 14th century Turco-Mongol conqueror as "Son of a Scythian shepherd."

“[…] the Romans, whose high culture consisted mostly of translating Greek thought into Latin.”

I’m stealing this.

Gotta love Pytheas

Sumerian swords had British metal in them? That's freaking cool

Greece is mountainous. It snows there regularly every winter, even on Crete they get snow and ice.
I cannot imagine they would be missing a word for "ice"...
Whatever that magical, mystical substance of  Pytheas was, it sounds like a bit of an exaggeration.

Yeah, Britain content!

I find it fascinating that thousands of years ago, a paramount alloy was dependent on really long distance trade and the bronze age collapse kinda forced iron into use (and research).

I ‘ d like to thank you for sharing your knowledge !!!!!!!

Thank you for making this content! Great as always! Also no ice in greek seas.

I'm really excited for more of this kind of history!

i am jazzed for this

the ptolemaeus map is fascinating, i cant stop looking at it. there has to be a major miscommunication somewhere. Caesar landed in Kent, not sure where Claudius landed but they would have known the distance between Kent and Cornwall, its mindboggling they would have made such a big error.

Fascinating series. Thersities, I'm sorry I, essentially, passivley doubted you by sleeping on this until 2 months after the start of it's release. I got no excuse for ya boss. My fuck up.😂 although, one thing, can you fix up the order of the episodes in the playlist? I mean I just easily enough, created my own playlist, with them in order, from I onwards. But others may appreciate it.

God blesses us with more content from this wonderful historian

Excellent

Greece, Anatolia, and the broader Mediterranean has many mountainous areas where snow regularly falls. The Greeks certainly knew of and had words for snow & ice.

Maybe what he saw was indeed sea ice and he still had trouble describing it. But it wouldn’t be because he didn’t have the words for ice.

I suspect he saw some kind of slush/pack ice that he didn’t immediately recognise as ice due to its unusual consistency.