English is full of mysteries hiding in ordinary words. The verb to be is one of the strangest.

Its forms is, was, be, look nothing alike, as if the word had been assembled from spare parts.

It was.

The explanation reaches back six thousand years, to a dead language spoken on the grasslands north of the Black Sea by people who left no writing.

They founded no cities, built no pyramids. The immortality they hoped for came from the words of poets, who would spread the glory of their great deeds.

So it’s fitting that it’s through words we remember them too.