Videos

The Aztecs didn't call him Montezuma. Nor Moctezuma. They didn't call chocolate "chocolate". Heck, they didn't even call themselves Aztec! Though they were an oral culture, we have an idea of what their language really sounded like. Here's...

Ancient Mexico was a hotbed of language mixing. Aztecs and Maya spoke completely unrelated languages, but a Mesoamerican linguistic mindmeld tied them together in surprising ways. Here's the grammar. I'll start with the things that stood...

Your vowels were invented in Greece, giving birth to the first "true" alphabet. Watch as your new toga-clad friend turns your consonant abjad into a consonant-vowel alphabet. It's such a useful mapping of letters to sounds that neighbor...

The story of a Greek town that I'm told still preserves the Spartan tongue. I explore why they don't speak like the rest of Greece and dig into their connection to ancient Sparta. Will their Tsakonian language survive? Ancient Greece was...

This first episode in this BBC series examines the religious, political, economic and social lives of the Celts.

Introductory video for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic and World Heritage Site. The site preserves the largest prehistoric Native American city north of Mexico and the largest prehistoric earthen mound in the Americas. http://www.cahokiamounds.org...

Drawing on historical and archaeological evidence, this documentary, by Dr. Farzin Rezaeian, reconstructs 7,000 years of Iranian (Persian) history.

This brief video discusses the key concepts of the ancient Persian religion Zoroastrianism: Zarathustra, Ahura Mazda and the Avesta.

This brief video explains the origin of the terms "Persia" and Zoroastrianism. It also puts the Median, Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian and Sassanian Empires in context.

This video delves deeper into the reign of Cyrus the Great as he overthrows the Medians to establish the Achaemenid Empire, the first official Persian Empire.