Thank you very much for the kind remarks to all of you. It's a pleasure to be here. I was a young person in Washington, D.C. I had internships at various think tanks and spent some time on the Hill and did other things. And so for me it's always a special pleasure to come back to Washington, D.C. and to speak to the very special collection of folks that one can meet here. I'm grateful for the Moynihan Prize. I'm going to take it as recognition of unpredictability, which is one of the things I associate with Senator Moynihan, and a word which for me has an entirely positive valence.
So I should caution that despite the kind words at the end of Professor Stent's introduction, and despite the emphasis that Ambassador Markarova has placed on my current work, I was invited to give an academic lecture. So if you are not interested in hearing that, now is the time to go. You've already sat through the introductions. You can summarize them to your friends. But what I'm going to be doing here is I'm going to be making an academic argument. I've given 17 consecutive political appearances over the course of the last seven days in about five cities. They're all online. And if you want to ask political questions afterwards, I will be happy to take them.
But I want to give you actually the opportunity to do something different with me, which is to listen to an argument about the way history in fact was. Or to put it in a slightly more sophisticated way, what the history of Ukraine can tell us about the legends, the stories, the tropes, the myths about the world that many of us already share.
So, I'm not apologizing for this. We're in a public policy school and public policy schools do not have enough history. So, another 30 minutes or so isn't going to hurt anybody. And I'm also not apologizing for it for a different reason, which is that I think when you leave the public policy school world and you go out and become a diplomat and you have to deal with what, for example, Mr. Putin thinks about history, it doesn't hurt to have a clue. It really doesn't.
No. I mean, I've taught for 20 years. I've sent a lot of students out into the public policy world and into foreign affairs. And very often they come back to me and they say, you know, the thing which mattered to me was that you taught me, Professor Snyder, about the 13th century, right? Like that's not the only thing, but it does matter. Despite what Americans think, like the world does not actually start anew every day. Okay.
So what I'm going to try to do is speak about two or three or four examples of where the facts of Ukrainian history, often facts which have been recently understood thanks to high technology, might radically alter the way we think about the history of the whole world. And when I say high technology, I'm going to emphasize this because, as you might have noticed, the things which are called high technology are quickly destroying the future. There's this misunderstanding that high technology is useful in creating the future. I think we can more or less say that in general that's not true. Unless you've been investing in Nvidia, which perhaps is fine, but ironically, there weren't that many laughs for that. So I'm going to try it again. Like social media hasn't actually generated the bright future. Okay, it's not happening. People, maybe this hasn't dawned yet.
But what high tech actually turns out to be useful for is understanding the distant past. That's from my point of view, from where I sit, that's actually its main... Thank you for those nods in the third row. It's actually the main purpose of advanced technology. So, I'm going to give you an example. I'm going to start with number one, which is the story of the biblical fall, which will be familiar to those of you who come from the monotheistic traditions.
The idea that history began with great human error, with sins, and those sins led us to be banished to these terrible places called cities, of course, which is always a tension. I know in Genesis that there were already cities and so on, but the story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel is they do bad things and then they have to go off and be in cities, and cities are corrupt and they're terrible. And the reason why it seems this way is because the Bible is an essentially Mesopotamian text. And its notion of what cities are like comes from ancient Babylon. And that, by the way, my friends, is where our notion of cities comes from.
And our notion of cities, our whole history of urbanity and civilization says that there were terrible cities. They were oppressive in Babylon. They had high walls. They tortured human beings. They sacrificed them. There were concentrations of power, religious and political, and since then things have gotten better because we went from cities with higher walls to cities with lower walls. We stopped sacrificing human beings at a certain point, mostly. And so on that congratulatory scale of history we look around and we say, well, there's been this thing called progress. Things are generally getting better and so on.
But those Mesopotamian cities were not the first cities. Nor are cities with high walls and human sacrifice and concentrations of power the only possible model of cities. A daring thing to say in Washington, I know. Okay. I'm waiting for that to land. Thank you. There's a generous group out there. They're the ones you can see when I hold up the laugh card.
The earliest cities in the world, as far as we know now, were actually in south-central Ukraine around Ochakiv. They are older than the Babylonian cities. They are bigger in size than the Babylonian cities. And what's most interesting is that they're designed on a completely different pattern, in semicircular rows of dwellings with a big gathering space in the middle and a broad avenue. Now, we can't say exactly what this meant. But the general view among the archaeologists is that this suggests a different mode of life, a more egalitarian one in which there were no obvious concentrations of either power or wealth.
Now, if that is the way that humans initially gathered in large numbers, it suggests first of all that that's possible. But it also suggests that second of all, our self-congratulatory story of progress might not be the right story. And that things just getting slightly less bad over the course of the last 6,000 years is not something to be so self-congratulatory about.
Okay, second point. So that's the origins of cities, which did I mention are in Ukraine? Because the ambassador made a point, like there are things you can say as a non-Ukrainian that if you say as a Ukrainian, you get laughed off the stage. So for example, the first human cities were on the territory of today's Ukraine. That's one of them. It just happens to be true. But okay, second thing is language. Biblical fall. Babel, right? The idea that we tried to build a city up into the sky. There was a moment where suddenly all of our languages became incomprehensible.
Counterpoint. Roughly half the people in the world speak an Indo-European language. And those Indo-European languages are in fact all related to one another. They all go back to a single root which is Proto-Indo-European. Proto-Indo-European, we now are fairly confident on the basis of the archaeological, linguistic, but now also ancient DNA evidence, we are fairly confident that the origins of Proto-Indo-European are the steppe of south Ukraine. Right?
So not only the first cities, but also the language which is the base of the culture of roughly half the people who are now alive on earth across every continent. Languages that include the major Indian languages, Iranian languages, as well as Romance, Slavic, the Germanic language I'm speaking right now. All of them go back in their history to pastoral people in southern Ukraine roughly 5,000 years ago. So that is, I would dare say, a major missing point in the history of the culture of half the world. Cities plus language takes you a long way.
And if the two things that I've said, by the way, are uncontroversial in their fields, what's new is putting them in their territory and thinking, aha, if it weren't for this territory, then the history of the world would look different. Okay, let me give you a second example. Second example, those are biblical falls. Second example is classical myths. So, who doesn't like Amazons? And that was a rhetorical question because everybody likes Amazons, right? Everyone likes the... I mean, not Amazon. They're not required, but you're not required. I love it how like, oh, I just spotted nine lobbyists. All right. Ten.
So Amazons, right? Amazon. Thank you. I got the kid to smile. All right. Like, I won. I won. I won. All right. And thank you for being here. That is so amazing that you're here. So, who doesn't like Amazons, right? The Greeks loved the Amazons. It was the major topic of their art, number one. And then in all of their myths, the Amazons are the major ones. Achilles fights Amazons. Heracles, Bellerophon fights Amazons. Theseus marries one. The Amazons are everywhere in their myth.
But the Amazons are just a myth, right? Like there couldn't possibly have been, you know, women fighting wars. That's absurd. You can't have that, you know, not in reality, not in your stories. That can't ever have been the case. But here's the thing. We are the ones who took those Greek stories and said, oh, those have to be myths. That wasn't the Greeks. The Greeks were perfectly aware that there were Amazons because the Greeks for hundreds of years encountered Scythian female archers who they described as Amazons.
The Scythians, who were the major power from roughly 700 BC to roughly 100 BC in what's now Ukraine, roughly one-fifth of their armed forces were female, and that was possible because of the state of technology of the day, which involved the domestication of the horse plus the recurve bow. As a result of those two technological developments, women were able to fight and did for hundreds of years. Now you might be wondering why am I so confident about this? It's because of the high technology.
We have been discovering what archaeologists used to charmingly call small warriors with unusual pelvic development in the Ukrainian steppe for well over a hundred years. But thanks to ancient DNA technology, which as you're gathering doesn't always tell people what they expect, thanks to ancient DNA technology, we are now able to say that roughly 20% of the warriors buried in Scythian burial mounds were biologically female.
And by the way, that figure, 20%, recurs over and over again with respect to women in the armed forces. It happens to be the same percentage roughly of women in the Ukrainian armed forces today, fighting, by the way, the most impressive armed defense in recent history. So that's an example of a thing we think is a story, but if you know the facts on the ground from Ukraine, then you realize, aha, a story turns out to be true. Okay.
And it points to a more fundamental reality, which is this: Greek civilization. So, not for all of us, but for many of us, we live in a version of a Western civilization narrative which begins with the Greeks. You might have wondered how could the Greeks, given that they live on a rocky island and just grow olive trees, how is it that they could have survived economically? And of course, the answer is yes, they lived on a rocky island and they grew those olive trees for export because all of their wheat came from... Right. This is an excellent class. This is amazing. That's right.
So the thing that we know as Greek civilization from the fifth and fourth centuries was not only economically but deeply culturally dependent upon the lands of what are now southern Ukraine. And that includes the whole series of cities which Greek colonists founded on the North Black Sea coast, many of which became hybrid Scythian-Greek cities or city-states.
So for example, the most interesting in my view of the Greek dramas, Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, is set in what is in fact Crimea. It is interestingly the only Greek drama that we know of in which there is a female protagonist who rationally takes the stage, dominates the plot, and organizes an escape. I won't tell you the whole plot, although it's incredible. But the escape drama involving the woman who has her act together, two guys who are sort of friends who come to rescue her but are kind of bumbling, and some kind of mysterious totem that you have to rescue became the template for all of the major stories in the West since then, right down to and including the first Star Wars movie.
So yeah, so all of that in some sense comes from Ukraine. And before I finish the Greeks, I have to add this. Iphigenia, if you don't know her, you may not know her story because it was popular for 2,400 years, but for the last hundred years it's kind of fallen out of fashion. But at the beginning and the end of her story was the Greek hero Achilles. Her story is set around the time of the end of the Trojan War. Achilles, when he dies, is rescued from death and is brought to an island which the Greeks knew as White Island.
And he was worshipped on White Island, which is just south of, let's say, Mykolaiv. He was worshipped on White Island for about 900 years by the citizens of Olbia, which is now in South Ukraine on the Black Sea. That island, White Island, where Achilles was worshipped for 900 years, is now known as Snake Island. And you may remember it as the island which the Ukrainians famously took back at the beginning of this invasion.
So in a way what I'm talking about here is it's Greece in the beginning, but it's also the entirety of our Renaissance narrative about how things work. And let me just give you an example of this from which caught my eye. There's a painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, in the Art History Museum in Vienna, by a Dutch painter called Otto van Veen, who was Rubens' teacher. It's from the 1620s, and it's a picture. It's in Vienna on a wall painted by a Dutch painter in the 17th century. It has a classical subject, and the classical subject is a whole group.
I sometimes forget that I'm in America and I have to be approved. Just imagine that I've forgotten that. It's a whole group of... I'm sorry. It's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay. Okay. Like, bury your head in your mom's shoulder or whatever. There is a whole group of naked women. And then next to them is a pile of armor. Okay. And so you think, like, so what do you... how do you put those... like what could the naked women possibly have to do with a pile of armor? And for hundreds of years, this puzzled people, right? No, really, because what could they have?
And then eventually it was figured out that this painting represents a scene from Herodotus. And is the scene of the Amazons supposedly waiting for the men who they met once a year, which, like, you know, as far as ways to deal with men, I can think of worse. That's what Herodotus thought the Amazons did. And so eventually it was figured out that this was a scene of Amazons, right? And that's why there was armor, because these women were warriors.
So what is this thing? Right? It's a Renaissance painting. It's from the Netherlands. It's hanging in Austria. It's in these... if you're in a Eurocentric or Western civilization mode, this is all very comfortable. And then you say, oh, well, okay, we've identified this scene. It's from Herodotus. Therefore, it has to do with Greece, right? It's from Greece. Our Renaissance is going back to Greece. But you've already... you see where I'm going to go with this.
The scene, the actual scene of actual female warriors, like insofar as that happened, the once-a-year thing probably didn't happen, but the female warriors did happen, and where they happened was precisely Ukraine. So, an image which seems like comfortably West European Renaissance of Greece actually has to do with the true history of what happened in Scythia, which is to say in what's now southern Ukraine.
Museums. Let me give you a historical absence which bothers me a lot. This has to do with the historical Goths. I told you this was going to be an academic lecture. The Goths were real people. I was talking about the Goths in my seminar the other day and I asked my students what their association with the word Goth was, and one of them said, well, before I did the reading, Professor Snyder, I thought about the emo people.
And of course there's Gothic literature and Gothic architecture, but all of that comes, you know, 1,700 years after the fact. So the Goths were historical people with their basis in what is now Ukraine. And the museum thing which bothers me and where I'll start is that there are these famous, I don't know if you've seen them or pictures of them, votive crowns, very beautiful votive crowns from the Visigoths, the seventh and eighth centuries. And they hang in two museums. They hang in the medieval museum in Paris, Cluny, and they hang in the archaeological museum in Madrid.
And they're relics of a Visigothic kingdom in Spain. But what no one ever says, and this is the part that troubles me, is that the Goths as a people, the people who founded this medieval kingdom in Spain, originally came from Ukraine. That knowledge has gone completely missing. Like I feel with Ukrainian history, it's not just that no one knows Ukrainian history. It's that anything that has any contact with Ukraine somehow short-circuits and is forgotten and is lost.
So I'm just going to say a word about the Goths because they're incredibly interesting and necessary. The Goths were a people who lived in the territory of what is now Ukraine for about 300 years. And their encounter with the Huns and then with the Romans has an awful lot to do with the way that Europe actually emerges. By the way, the conversion of Ukraine to Christianity did not take place in the 10th century, as they keep trying to tell you. It took place in the 4th century. The Goths were the first people who converted to Christianity on the territory of Ukraine. Not the Rus', much as I love them, six centuries and more later on.
And unlike the Rus', with apologies, who never actually got the Bible until six centuries later, by which time it was too late, and learned their Christianity as an unpredictable amalgamation of things that happened to be translated by Bulgarian priests for reasons best known to themselves, the Goths actually had most of the Bible in their own language in the 4th century. So if we're going to talk about a conversion, it would have been in the 4th century.
The Goths encounter the Huns, that's putting it lightly. Some of the Goths flee across the Danube, kill a Roman emperor, sack Rome in 410, which leads to the writing of City of God by St. Augustine. It also leads to the career of Hannah Arendt, who wrote her dissertation about St. Augustine. Other Goths stayed, were dominated by the Huns, moved from Ukraine into what's now Hungary, and then pestered and along with the Huns, pestered and blackmailed the Roman emperor for the next 150 years or so.
And by the way, the Huns were a small charismatic organization. The Goths were much more numerous. It was the merger of the Huns with the Goths and the Germanic peoples which troubled the Romans so much. But there was a merger, and that merger involved Rome too. There was a fellow called Theodoric who grew up in the Roman capital, which at the time of course was Constantinople, and learned Latin and Greek, and he became the last notable leader of the Western Roman Empire.
This fellow Theodoric, he ruled from 493 to 526. He was a Germanic person whose people were from what is now Ukraine, who ruled a Latin realm. And it was in this time that the Latin-Germanic synthesis at the heart of what is European culture was actually created.
The Visigoths, who were another group of Goths, the ones who initially fled, they were the ones who ended up founding the state of Spain, which is the first and the model feudal European state, the model European kingdom with all the things we associate with European kingdoms, including the famous lays or sagas or tales. Brunhilda, who you might have heard of if you're an opera person. Brunhilda, I'm looking at you, Professor Stent. Brunhilda was a Visigothic princess. She married a Frankish king whose name was Sigebert, who is remembered as Sigurd or as Siegfried.
Theodoric, who I mentioned, in German stories becomes Dietrich of Bern. Attila the Hun, you might have heard of. These are the chief characters in the early medieval German European stories about themselves. These are the basic characters of what then become the Scandinavian stories. These are the basic characters of what then become the Ring Cycle. And so all of this, that whole history which is at the foundation of what Europeans or Germanic peoples think of as themselves in its origins, come from Ukraine.
But there's a broader point I want to make here. If you're coming from the English-speaking world or if you're educated in schools that have something to do with England, you probably have this notion of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, right? Okay, nod. It's reassuring when you nod. Thank you. And that's one way of looking at it, but there's another way of looking at it, which is that the Goths fought the Romans for 150 years from the periphery and made their way to the capital and then ran the place themselves for quite a long time and then went on to found other European kingdoms. That's another way of looking at it, right? And if you're taking the history of Ukraine seriously, you can see it in that other way.
Or another way to put this is that our whole story, and again, forgive my hour, I realize it's not everybody's story, but a big story about the fall of civilization might not look so correct if you include the people who were actually present at the time instead of just speaking of a dark ages where everything disappears.
My final example, which I've already hinted at, is going to be Nordic myth. The myths, the Viking myths, the Viking stories. So, you've probably heard of the Vikings. You might associate them with a trip to North America, which did happen, or the Icelandic sagas, which of course are amazing, or Greenland. But the truth of the matter, as our Ukrainian friends will know, is that the main line of Viking exploration was actually to the south and the east into what is now the Baltics, what is now Finland, what is now northern Russia, what is now Belarus, what is now Ukraine.
There was an extraordinary Viking globalization in which they reached all the continents except Latin America, Antarctica, and Australia, in which they dominated the technology of shipping, and in which they had a long encounter, almost 400 years, with Arab speakers. The reason why the Vikings did what they did was Arab silver, first of all, Arab speakers, Khazars, some of whom converted to Judaism probably, Bulgars in what's now Russia who had converted to Islam, and finally Kyiv.
Now, why am I stressing all of this? Why am I mentioning all this? Because we have a notion, again, this is sort of a European, I'm afraid, or North European wish, but many of us have a notion, or people from beyond also have a notion, that the Vikings were these like fair-haired conquerors from the north and everything about them is pure and northern and so on. And that's just not even remotely true. The Viking stories that we like are all a consequence of their long encounter with Eastern Europe and with Asia.
An encounter which ends with them founding a city in Kyiv which is known as Rus'. So I'll just give you a few examples. Odin being one-eyed or Odin having a special access to wisdom that comes from Finnish and Baltic stories. Valhalla, the idea that you and your special group of selected warriors are going to go to a place after death and fight again, that is a Turkic notion. Ragnarok, and this is something I'm going to have a lot of fun writing about when I finally write this book, is an essentially Jewish idea, which is preserved in apocryphal texts in Kyiv.
Because when the Ukrainians converted to Christianity, as I said before, it's actually hilarious how little sorting out of the texts was done. So the first monks and Christians in Kyiv were reading Jewish texts from Egypt from the first and second centuries BC, because nobody really knew what else they should be reading. And I don't have time for it, but the stuff in there is wild. And it includes notions of a final confrontation between light and darkness. It includes the notions of dark fire, which is so important for Wagner in the Ring Cycle, but also for Tolkien in Lord of the Rings.
So what the Vikings did was they managed to experience several multiple cultures and bring them all together into their fascinating, I think it's the most fascinating pagan religion before they converted and when they did convert.
Okay, so the story of how Rus' converted, and this is the last thing I'm going to talk about before I conclude, because I don't want to get that close to the present before I conclude, the story of how Rus' converted. So these Vikings, they didn't found Kyiv probably, it was the Khazars probably who did, but the Vikings controlled Kyiv and they get their Christianity from Byzantium. How do they get it? The way that they get it is one of their warlords, Volodymyr, goes to Chersonesus, which is a Greek city, and storms it and runs off with what he claims and they claim to be the relics of St. Clement. That's how it happens.
So who was St. Clement? St. Clement was an early Roman churchman of whom we have one letter. He was later promoted to pope because, and I say this with love to all the Jesuits out here who know it's true, he became a pope because later they had to make a list of popes.
No, that's how it actually works, people. Like if you need a list, you always need a genealogy, and so you have to go back and kind of fill in the gaps. So Clement was retroactively promoted to pope because they needed to have a pope. He's not the only one, by the way. And then he became the subject, and some of you scholars of Christianity might know this, of fascinating stories involving, for example, that he went to Chersonesus in what's now Crimea and he was martyred there.
Okay, it didn't happen. He never went there. He wasn't martyred there. So his bones can't be there. But nevertheless, we then had, I say this with respect for miracles. Miracles are very important in history. But I have to just say why this is interesting. So Clement's bones were then recovered by Cyril and Methodius, or Cyril of Cyril and Methodius fame. They were then recovered and brought back. Okay. None of that, of course, actually happened. Cyril and Methodius didn't actually also go there.
But those non-existent relics of a person who never went to Chersonesus became the basis of the conversion of Rus'. Now I'm not saying this just to dispel the whole myth. I love myths. Myths are very important in history. I'm saying it for an important reason. The story of going to Chersonesus and recovering, it was actually the skull, not to get too graphic about it, of St. Clement, that legend was modeled practically paragraph for paragraph on the older Greek play Iphigenia in Tauris, the adventure story of going to Chersonesus and finding a religious relic. It's the same story in both cases.
Which is an example of how the story that we take to be primary when it comes to the history of Rus' is itself modeled on a much older story, which is just one way of saying that all of the things that have to do with the history of Rus', all of them go back to much older histories. And that's where I want to close.
So of course bits of this ancient history are known to various people and have been put to various uses at various times. When the Nazis wanted to invade Ukraine, they invoked the history of the Goths. When Putin wanted to invade Ukraine, he invoked his own version of the history of Rus'. In both cases, the invaders blocked out all of the other context and all of the other interesting things that happened before and after.
But here's what I find interesting. When we put these stories and these histories together, I hope, and you can tell me if I didn't do it right, but I hope it's the case that the history of the world makes more sense. It's also the case that big parts of our contemporary culture start to fall into place. So, I'm not going to look right at you when I say this, but probably some of you are familiar with the heroes of DC Comics and of Marvel Comics, right?
Wonder Woman does not exist without really existing female warriors in Scythia, just as Thor and Odin, the whole batch over at Marvel, do not exist without the cultural encounter of Vikings and Asians in and around Rus'. Things that we take for granted as American mass culture simply could not exist without the actual history of the lands of Ukraine.
But I want to push this one step further. When we talk about the Ukrainian national movement, okay, people, there's this obsession with like how Ukraine is new and so on. I talked to a gentleman after a lecture the other day and he said, well, Ukraine is only 35 years...
old or whatever, or 25, and I said, 'Well, you know, Russia is two, you know, like this is like like but but there's this like there's there's this like we've all been kind of train like we just heard of Ukraine, therefore it must be new, you know, something like that.' And um and as as Professor Stent said, and it's very true, most of us were educated in some kind if we were educated in this stuff at all, we were educated in some kind of Russian imperial framework. And so then at some deep level we're uncomfortable with being told that there was something else. And then we were told that well in so far as Ukraine exists it's like an artificial creation of Ukrainian nationalists and they must have some dumb story. And that's where I want to land. The people who actually generated the Ukrainian national story were totally uninterested in there being some kind of Ukrainian ethnos that had existed forever. None of them actually said anything like that. That is our dumb imposition on on history. If you take Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the first historian um of Ukraine, the first major one, or Ivan Franko, the most important writer, or Lesia Ukrainka, probably the most beautiful of Ukrainian writers, figures from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, arguably three, the three or certainly three of the most important creators of Ukrainian national ideas ideas. All of them talked more like I just talked than they talked like ethnic nationalists. Hrushevsky obsesses in volume one of his long history with the question of the origins of Indo-European. Ivan Franko spent the second half of his adult life collecting apocryphal documents about the colorful history of Ukrainian Christianity. Um and uh and Lesia Ukrainka, who was an extremely interesting writer who died very young, um spent her writing career talking about the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Iliad, um the Scythians, uh as elements of how might one understand a modern Ukraine. In other words, they didn't know all the things we know. They didn't have the ancient DNA, but they were able to do something which is very interesting, which is to imagine Ukraine not as some kind of boring continuity of something which was always the same, but rather to imagine Ukraine as involving bits and pieces of a whole lot of things which touched on world history, which actually turns out to be the case. Thank you very much.
