PIE Geography

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[...] I've looked here and there for a decent introduction to East European geography. There is none! What you get from maps is not entirely satisfactory; for Germany or the United Kingdom, it's easy to find very large scale maps; for Eastern Europe, you often have to make do with continental-scale maps. I have never seen a really detailed set of maps for the former Soviet Union. It's like trying to make sense of the hydrology of the Mississippi basin by looking at a map of North America.

Decent maps can be found e.g. in the Britannica Atlas, which often accompanies the Encyclopaedia Britannica in public reading-rooms and college libraries. Good atlases exist (and bibliographies of them can be found on the nets), but are horribly expensive. Still, it might be worth trying to contact map publishers (also in eastern Europe) for individual maps of selected areas; such things have fortunately become possible nowadays. I could help you to get hold of some Polish maps if you tell me precisely what you're after, and I'm sure the other CyBaList members would also be happy to help.

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[...] Agriculturalists build their roads along the river valleys. Pastoralists have trails that connect adjacent river valleys. It's the latter I'm primarily interested in. It's the Ural to the Samara-Volga, then the Volga to the Don-Donets, then to Dneiper, then across to the Dneister, etc. These are rivers whose names I know, and who's length's I can trace on a map, but as to how you get from east to west or west to east, I don't know. Could there possibly be something we could call 'the Indo-European Road' (i.e., the western extension of the Silk Road, leading towards Hungary or the Vistula.< html>

There certainly were such roads, though 'the Indo-European Road' is perhaps too grand a name for any of them. At the time when Iranian peoples were the most influential ethnic element in the Pontic steppes (and later also in Pannonia), they occasionally raided Poland. Arrowheads of a characteristic Scythian type, as well as specimens of Scythian art and weaponry, have been found even in Western Poland. At a later date, the Goths and the Huns moved to and fro between Northern Europe and the Black Sea; the last spectacular raid by nomadic warriors took place as late as 1241, when a formidable Tatar expedition (the Golden Horde) under Batu Khan, grandson of Temujin, invaded Poland from the southeast (having burnt Moscow and Kiev). They laid waste Lublin and Cracow, then reached Silesia, annihilating an army of Polish knights in the battle of Legnica. The Tatars retreated to their Volga headquarters after an unsuccessful siege of Neustadt, but some of them crossed the Elbe gap to plunder Hungary as well on their return route, maybe just to show what nomads could do.

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