At a time when international law has effectively ceased to exist, when the laws of war have disappeared, when the United Nations has been rendered practically defunct, and when immoral bandits can start major wars with the most shameless rhetoric—openly targeting and killing civilians and children—it is precisely the moment to republish an old article. So that we may better understand what the human being is, and what “civilization” is.

Until the early 20th century, global scholarship largely accepted that the roots of European languages lay in the Turkic or Turanian language family, in short, in Turkish. At the very least, the vast majority of scholars recognized and wrote about the deep Turkic influence in European languages going back thousands of years.