Esperanto belongs typologically to a group of languages typical of the western extreme of the Eurasian continental axis. Along that longitudinal axis, which extends from the Pacific to the Atlantic, people have enjoyed for millennia the same quantity of seasonal sunlight. Thus, more easily than the people of other continents, Eurasians exchanged their knowledge of the natural flora and fauna that they had in common and on a linguistic level, too, they developed cultural traits in common. One of these is the spread of a language typology which puts the predicate at the end of a proposition; another is the lack of grammatical gender. Both traits are present in languages from Japanese to Basque. In contrast to this, from the southern shore of the Mediterranean a new language typology gradually spread, one that is most clearly illustrated, in the middle of the second millennium BC, by the “Late Egyptian” language. In this model the verb is located at the start of a proposition or immediately after the subject or after a lexical element that is the focus. At the same time masculine and feminine genders were introduced, but several languages also preserve a remnant of the earlier system, namely the neuter gender. Waves of systemic reform flowed northwards from the south of Europe, among them the most remarkable being the introduction of prepositions, coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, and relative clauses following the noun they relate to in the main proposition. All of these novelties were already present in the Egyptian language of the second millennium BC. So Esperanto fully inherited the new typology that had spread through the languages of Europe and grafted it into onto an unprecedented structure in which all word classes are clearly recognisable from their distinct endings and the roots of words are not modified inflectionally.