The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

https://lithub.com/the-dark-ages-werent-as-dark-as-we-thought/

by kjaleshire • 7 years ago

283 241 7 years ago

hodgesrm3• 7 years ago

The Dark Ages are something of a misnomer but there does not seem to be any question that levels of literacy, trade, and social organization were lower than the preceding Roman era and than even the latter part of the middle ages after 1200 or so. Indeed much of the 'darkness' is the result of so few written records surviving from the era, which in turn points to far fewer of them being generated in the first place.

The question for anyone trying to roll back the use of the term 'Dark Ages' is what would you call it instead?

mjw1007• 7 years ago

I think "Late Antiquity" is common.

lazyasciiart• 7 years ago

I've never heard that and wouldn't guess that it meant the Dark Ages at all.

hodgesrm3• 7 years ago

Late antiquity generally refers to the period around and after the emperor Constantine when the Roman empire started to fray around the edges. It includes writers like St. Augustine who IMHO was as good as any thinker before or after. Not to mention artistic creations like the churches of Ravenna and the laws of Justinian. It's quite different from the period that set in after the invasion of the Lombards (568 AD) and more particularly the Moslem invasions of Africa (630s AD), which severely disrupted communications in the Mediterranean.

AstralStorm• 7 years ago

Also "Middle Ages" or "Medieval period". Pretty common though a bit wide.

FabHK2• 7 years ago

In German it's "das Mittelalter", ie middle ages.

dstick• 7 years ago

Middle Ages? Or is that an even broader period?

jedberg• 7 years ago

"The unrecorded ages"

jcranmer3• 7 years ago

Early Middle Ages is common, generally dating from "the fall of the Roman Empire" (which is itself a very ambiguous term) to around 1066.

The collapse of the Roman Empire from the 3rd to the 7th century (the process is somewhat more gradual than depicted in popular culture, and the timing depends on where you lived in the Roman Empire) resulted in a serious loss of administrative capability and economic and military coordination within the former empire. The only organization that remained for the Western Roman Empire was the Church, and even this was quite attenuated and didn't have the same reach the Roman Empire enjoyed at its height. The Carolingian dynasty did manage to piece together a successor empire that could have became a revival of the Roman Empire, but the succession practice of divvying up the lands between sons meant that the union didn't last long. On top of this, the Viking raids provoked a challenge that the nascent empires were unable to cope with.

The term Dark Ages arises from the very real decline of writing within Western Europe during this time, given that historians have historically been very biased towards surviving written accounts. Furthermore, for the Protestants in the Renaissance, the fact that the Catholic Church was the primary remaining artifact of Roman rule and therefore the dominant factor throughout most of this era caused them to emphasize the notion that nothing of cultural importance happened in this era, extending it to encompass the entire Medieval period until the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance. In more recent historiography, the Dark Ages has been more compressed in time to encompass parts of Late Antiquity and Early Medieval, with the exact time period more dependent on which region you're talking about.

btilly2• 7 years ago

The Roman Empire's collapse was more drawn out than that.

The Empire split into Eastern and Western empires under Constantine. The Eastern half got renamed to the Byzantine Empire and it lasted until the successful Ottoman conquest in 1453.

This is not to be confused with the Holy Roman Empire which was not holy, nor Roman, nor a true empire. But which survived until Napoleon conquered it in 1806.

andysomniac• 7 years ago

In UK archaeology, a popular term is "Migration Period"

methehack2• 7 years ago

My guess is the older brother was named by the younger brother, the Enlightenment. They were "dark" because they were fundamentally anti-enlightenment; further it was hard to see through them to the classical period as they tried to burn most of those books. Personally, I think it's a fine name. The inquisition! What a show!

goto11• 7 years ago

No, the term is by Petrarca from early Renaissance.

methehack2• 7 years ago

Ah -- makes sense -- same idea though s/Englightenment/Renaissance/g

ohaideredevs3• 7 years ago

I first ran into this theory in the only "alchemy" book (as in, I have no idea what it's actually about) where the author seemed immensely intelligent. Of course, I was too lazy to actually research any of his claims, but he was pretty eloquent:

"Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception. How to reconcile the unreconcilable? How to adjust the testimony of the historical facts to that of medieval art works?

The chroniclers depict this unfortunate period in the darkest colors. For several centuries there is nothing but invasions, wars, famines, epidemics. And yet the monuments --- faithful and sincere witnesses of these nebulous times --- bear no mark of such scourges. Much to the contrary they appear to have been built in the enthusiasm of a powerful inspiration of ideal and faith by a people happy to live in the midst of a flourishing and strongly organized society.

Must we doubt the veracity of historical accounts, the authenticity of the events ... they report, and believe along with the popular wisdom of nations, that happy peoples have no history? Unless, without refuting en masse all of history, we prefer to discover the justification pf medieval darkness in the relative lack of incidents. Be that as it may, it remains undeniable is that all the Gothic buildings without exception reflect a serenity and expansiveness and a nobility without equal. If, in particular, we examine the expression of statues, we will quickly be edified by the peaceful character, the pure tranquility that emanates from these figures. All are calm and smiling, welcoming and innocent. "

Dwellings of Philosophers -Fulcanelli

mistrial9• 7 years ago

both alchemy and astrology mix metaphorical and symbolic (psyche) information with worldly, factual information; if your direction is science and factual information, not a great place to explore IMO. If your brain is activated by elaborate language, symbols and art, and factual is not the goal, why not?

ArtWomb• 7 years ago

Etienne Gilson makes the argument for the designation: "Christian Philosophy," as folks turned to Gospels and revealed truths for inspiration. It offers a clear separation from "Greek Philosophy". As well as encompassing sub schools of thought such as Apostolic, Thomist, Neo-Augustinian and what have you.

In any case, keep the Medieval content coming as it provides the antidote to modern cacophanies. Even putting on a nice instrumental shwam performance on youtube can immediately tune the senses for quiet monastic contemplation ;)

I believe there is a very active and academically rigorous Telegram or Slack channel with >500 members devoted to the period. But I've since deleted both apps and can't recall what it was called!

The trend in Digital Humanities now of course is "collections as data" and performing full corpus linguistic and sentiment analysis.

Internet Medieval Sourcebook Full Text Sources

https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/sbook2.asp

Reprogramming The Museum

https://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2011/papers/reprogramming...

caiocaiocaio• 7 years ago

Most of the time historians use the phrase 'Dark Ages', nowadays, they mean the time from roughly the mid-sixth century to about Charles Martel, where there are only a handful of written and architectural records remaining, almost all from the margins of Europe. His examples are mainly before or after that time period.

But even accepting his much more broad time period - and one of his examples is more than 100 years after the time period he himself defined at the beginning - he offers very little evidence that isn't extremely well known to anyone with a passing knowledge of that time period. Plus, his examples are literally hundreds of years apart. It's pretty disingenuous to claim the society that produced the tomb of Childeric I is the same society that produced some paintings roughly 800 years later.

astrodust3• 7 years ago

There's probably more records remaining than we realize because of the rampant recycling of old parchment.

FabHK2• 7 years ago

Palimpsests are well understood and mostly accounted for, I'd have thought?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest

ganzuul• 7 years ago

Or they started using papyrus, which does not age well.

AFAIK the 'Dark Ages' refer to our lack of records only, and the rest is misunderstanding.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu• 7 years ago

Much more in-depth article on the same topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/

Twisol• 7 years ago

Taking nothing away from the article itself, this bit rubbed me the wrong way:

A simple little mental test is just to quickly imagine a European scene from that era. Now: was the sun shining? Of course not.

It strikes me like one of those "follow the ball" scenes in which a multitude of other things happen, but you're not paying attention because you're focusing on the ball. The state of the sun didn't matter for the details I was imagining. If I had been asked "Now: was it nighttime?" the answer would have been the same: no, of course not. I wasn't thinking about the sky.

btilly2• 7 years ago

Now: was the sun shining? Of course not.

Interestingly, if we're talking about 535-536, it may well not have been! Or at least not very well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%...

beat4• 7 years ago

"The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history. What was going on in the Islamic world? In China? The Dark Ages of Western Europe were the brilliant Tang dynasty in China; and the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.

drak0n1c• 7 years ago

European Dark Age is not used as a global descriptor, it is regional. Just as China and the Islamic world had their own Dark Ages as well.

szemet• 7 years ago

Also, we should rename the Thirty Years' War to "Thirty Years' War in Europe but mostly peace elsewhere", and then we can can call World War I and World War II simply War I and War II - if we assume by default that every event is global (maybe we should add "except Switzerland,etc..." there too...)

Just joking: IMHO if someone knows what dark ages was, usually know where it was... It is that simple!

beat4• 7 years ago

It's not that simple, though. A lot of people - a lot of people - have no idea that during the "Dark Ages", huge swaths of the rest of the world (larger than Western Europe) were going through a Golden Age. It took me rather a while to realize that myself.

And, since WWI was fought in large part over colonial resources and Japan was involved, and since Japan was a major power in WWII (and China was involved as well, if only as Japan's victim), I'm pretty satisfied with "World War" as descriptors.

toasterlovin• 7 years ago

Yeah, the language of this website is English, which is a European language. Which means that most of the audience is European or live in a country that traces its cultural heritage to Europe. So of course the stuff on here is Eurocentric. Just like the view of history that you find in Chinese publications will be primarily Sinocentric, etc.

muricula• 7 years ago

That's a real stretch. Not only are there a number of countries where English is sometimes/often spoken but isn't the dominant cultural heritage (India, S. Africa, Liberia just to name a few) but we're on a programming language website with a truly global audience. We should not assume a eurocentric view of history in any case.

mveety• 7 years ago

It’s supposed to be a Eurocentric era: it happened in Europe. You wouldn’t talk about Charles Martel or Pepin the short living in the era of the Tang Dynasty just as much as you wouldn’t talk about Tang Gaozu living in the Dark Ages.

factsaresacred2• 7 years ago

"The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history.

That's like describing 'The Great Leap Forward' as a Sino-centric view of history.

"The Dark Ages" refers to a time as well as a place. Specifically, Western Europe.

beat4• 7 years ago

Is it, though? I think it's clear that "Great Leap Forward" was China-specific, but "Dark Ages" isn't really taught as specific to western Europe.

Which is the problem.

Amezarak3• 7 years ago

the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.

This is a very misleading description of what happened. The early Muslim conquests caused major disruption in the Middle East, otherwise known as the Roman and Persian Empires, as cities which had been full of scholarship and prosperity for centuries were invaded and the population conquered, enslaved, and sometimes killed, with the concomitant destruction of libraries and learning. There is a major disruption of the written historical record during this time period comparable to what happened in the Dark Ages or even worse.

It wasn't until after the "explosion of Islam" that the Muslims gradually realized the value of the Greek texts that were preserved during their conquests and everything settled out such that scholars were able to return to their work.

beat4• 7 years ago

Those same Muslim scholars were the ones who preserved and promoted Greek texts that were destroyed by early Christian fanatics.

gonehome5• 7 years ago

This seems like a perfect example of someone who needs to read pg’s essay “write like you talk”: http://paulgraham.com/talk.html

I don’t get an intelligence vibe from this style of writing - it mostly just sets off my bullshit alarms.

ohaideredevs3• 7 years ago

I understand where you are coming from, but this guy came off as intelligent to me DESPITE all the alarms going of. That's not to say he wasn't trolling.

mikeash3• 7 years ago

That’s good advice but it’s also highly dependent on culture and time. It’s food advice because the English-speaking culture of today values writing that sounds like speech. It may not have been good advice at all for someone writing in 1920s France. And beyond that, it’s really hard to apply this sort of advice to a translation.

gonehome5• 7 years ago

I’d argue it’s good advice for people that value clarity over sounding smart.

I’d guess there were people that valued this in most times and cultures.

dpark15• 7 years ago

Yes and no. It’s valid that values change and perhaps in the past this sort of dense, self-important prose was the preferred way to write. No doubt many even today would say it sounds more intelligent or educated. However, if the goal is to write in a legible, understandable, comprehensible way, then this has never been a good way to do that. (Indeed, many scholarly works are still written this way, and they are far less accessible as a result. People might feel smarter for reading them but they probably get less from them than if they were written simply.)

As for the translation, I’m not clear when this was actually translated. The stuff I’ve found indicates a publishing date if 1999. If that’s accurate (and it well may not be) then I think it’s entirely reasonable to expect translators to write easy-to-read text in a modern style. I understand the desire to carry the “spirit” of the work through the translation, but I’m not sure that’s what’s at fault when translations read this way. I wonder if translators enamored with the work are trying to use difficult phrasing to make it seem more impressive or educated. I also wonder if sometimes native sentence structure is being replicated in English, where it comes off try-hard when it’s really just an awkward transliteration.

gunnihinn• 7 years ago

It’s food advice because the English-speaking culture of today values writing that sounds like speech.

And lord forbid us for writing in a way or about subjects that don't please as much of the potential readers as possible. They might not click on our data-mined ads if we did. The fucks.

pthomas5512• 7 years ago

Yeah, written English corresponds to spoken English more than in a lot of other languages, where the vocabulary and grammar can vary considerably between the written and spoken word.

gp7• 7 years ago

When you write like this a lot, you end up talking like it, too.

coldtea4• 7 years ago

You should use those alarms on PG's writings:

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

As for the particular author, he was born in another culture (not all cultures appreciate the matter-of-factness as-you-talk anglo-saxon style of writing, many prominent European writers have called it "barbaric" and "only good for business"). He was also born in a whole other era.

dpark15• 7 years ago

many prominent European writers have called it "barbaric" and "only good for business"

Snobs in general tend to look down on people who don’t place value on pomposity for its own sake.

pthomas5512• 7 years ago

Yep, it's extremely mistaken (but very American) to assume that American preferences on writing style prevail in all other languages and regions. To take one example, in written German the passive voice is often considered better style, whereas in contemporary English it's the exact opposite.

EliRivers2• 7 years ago

Having read the article, I disagree. What "style" of writing? The sentences aren't excessive, the language is all fairly common (the author even takes pleasure in simplifying "scramasax", clearly inviting us to take pleasure in it as well). What's wrong with it?

It's not meant to be a list of purely literal facts. It's entertaining and a pleasure to read.

As for Paul Graham's opinion piece; well, that's just silly. Something written is inherently different to something spoken; they have different strengths, different attributes, different purposes and, should they have the same goal, can best achieve that goal in different ways. Why choose to discard the strengths of the written?

dpark15• 7 years ago

Fossuser’s criticism was not directed at the article at all. It was directed at the Fulcanelli quote given by ohaideredevs.

The Dwellings if Philosophers (as translated) starts out with “Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception.” This says so little with such absurd wording that it’s almost word soup.

ABCLAW2• 7 years ago

The first paragraph of the quoted piece is a nightmare. The first sentence of the second and third paragraph are poorly drafted as well. In the rest, the verbose recounting fits the theme and does not distract from the point.

As a writing exercise, let me re-write the piece:

"What happened during the Middle Ages is unclear and the evidence we use to understand it is contradictory. Reviews depict the period as one filled with conflict and struggle, but artistic works dated to this period - from the calm, serene looking statues to the expansive, aspirational Gothic architecture - instead hint that they were created by happy people in a flourishing society.

Perhaps the lack of recorded history in this period is the result of peace and a lack of notable incidents rather than war, famine and disease."

The idea is interesting but bite-sized when stripped of the pomp.

UnhelpfulYoda4• 7 years ago

I think the issue is that the author doesn't establish a clear thesis from the very beginning. Additionally, the bizarre nature of the thesis and long run-on sentences only serve to confuse the reader as to what it is exactly that he is trying prove or disprove.

selimthegrim• 7 years ago

Wait until you get ahold of Fomenko

hluska• 7 years ago

I can’t claim to be a big fan of Fulcanelli’s, but in the same text, he talked about how philosophers would communicate with ciphers. I have absolutely no proof of this, but wouldn’t put it above Fulcanelli to embed coded messages in his writing, or to write in a way that suggests a cipher. Again, I have no proof, other than that he fancied himself the man who rediscovered alchemy in the 20th century and, since many alchemists embedded codes in their writing, I can see him playing the part.

ohaideredevs3• 7 years ago

It's a common theme - that it's all a very clever cipher - that the metals, planet alignments, etc are either code for chemical reactions or "transformations of the soul." I got into it as a teenager, but called it quits at some point, because while Fulcanelli is vague, he is at least a competent human being. That much can't be said for the authors of most "alchemical", and similar, texts.

Also, it's funny to track the biographies of the most commonly known Occultists; Crowley, Dee, Parsons - all accomplished before they got into the occult, and declining after.

maldusiecle• 7 years ago

There are people who talk like that. What's your problem with it in particular? I don't find any of its sentences especially difficult to parse.

colechristensen3• 7 years ago

First, it is a century old translation from French. What might sound perfectly normal in French might sound silly in English if you do a literal translation. Matching the tone between languages might significantly change the message.

For example, to use the English versions of French words...

To say "I'm sorry" in French you say "I am desolate"

Talking about a broken phone or a stomach ache you would say they are deranged.

Much of French vocabulary came into English but very often with some distance in meanings and usage. Often in translating you have the option to use exactly the same word with maybe a small spelling change, but you end up sounding ridiculous because of the shift in meaning or intensity.

Second, essentially what boils down to shaming people for not communicating the way you want is wrong. Not that I am saying you are directly or intentionally harassing someone, but (despite my distaste for how it is often used) things like this could be called microaggressions, making people uncomfortable using their language.

I experienced a lot of that growing up. In a place far from cities where people were generally less educated (and those that were left to find jobs) and I read a lot. I still struggle with the unconscious bias that people don't want to hear what I have to say or wouldn't understand or would respond with discouraging things.

Looking back, I'm not trying to say you are doing anything particularly negative, BUT be careful. Diversity can come in lots of ways, using language a little differently is one of them, and a little understanding (like how hundred year translations from French are going to sound a little … florid) helps with perspective.

javert• 7 years ago

what boils down to shaming people for not communicating the way you want is wrong

Which is exactly what the second half of your post is, but moreso than the person you are criticizing.

There is no point in having a discussion board if people are going to be criticized because something they said with sincerity might offend somebody. That is the nature of speech.

antidesitter2• 7 years ago

shaming people for not communicating the way you want is wrong

No. It's not always wrong.

byproxy• 7 years ago

I think I'd rather talk like I write.

That is, if I can improve my writing significantly...

the_af5• 7 years ago

What is specifically triggering your bullshit alarms? I'm intrigued. I like to think my own bs alarms are very sensitive, but in this particular case they remain silent; the prose seems only mildly flowery to me, and no assertion seems like pseudoscience or quakery.

dragonwriter2• 7 years ago

PG’s essay is good advice for modern American culture when addressing what it is explicitly framed as being for: maximizing the number of people who will read through your writing.

It may not be ideal for other goals, including maximizing utility of your work (or persuasiveness z for persuasive writing) to people who do read it. Different forms of expression between writing and speech, which differences are also different by purposes and intended audience of the writing, have evolved for real reasons.

dang• 7 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741077 and marked it off-topic.

anovikov• 7 years ago

Dark ages are mostly about to relative lack of written texts from the period due to widespread illiteracy. There are more texts from V century BC left than from VII century AD, for example (in the Western Europe, that is).

xefer• 7 years ago

The thing that stands out for me about this period is the lack of a "descent from antiquity". [1]

There is no well-established genealogical descent in Western Europe from antiquity to the modern era. Familial lines of descent can be traced to the very late Roman period, and from the early medieval period to the modern era. But there is a chasm that can't be crossed because the societal norms that allowed families to be traced broke down for some time and only reformed later.

To me this is a concrete symptom of a fairly severe disruption. How it's labeled is an interesting discussion, but clearly something happened.

[1] See deeper discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity

choeger2• 7 years ago

Thanks for that link.

viburnum• 7 years ago

That’s not societal breakdown, that just means the inbred aristocracy doesn’t go back to antiquity. Society and its rulers are not the same thing.

ddebernardy2• 7 years ago

Still, there were families in those days with unfathomable wealth. If memory serves me well, one was so wealthy that when they sold their land after becoming Christians they caused a real estate crisis across the Roman Empire. (Source: The inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham, one of the early chapters.) And just a few centuries earlier, Julius Caesar arguably was one of the richest to have ever lived on earth. It's sensible to expect that families with that kind of wealth to leave a trace in their ancestry. And yet with rare exceptions they did not.

phkahler• 7 years ago

Society and its rulers are not the same thing.

I wanted to make that point when I read this line:

> But the Avars ruled Central Europe for over two centuries, and it is not a given that their civilization had no worth and did not represent a future we would have flourished in.

A civilizations worth is always measured by those who might seek to control it. You could have a bunch of people getting on just fine, living out perfectly normal lives. But if there isn't any way for them to produce excess - be that labor output or extraction of natural resources - then they are not seen as valuable and will not be written about.

mason55• 7 years ago

Do we know, is this because of a change in society, such that it became difficult or less important to track these things? or is it because of a change in the people, for example people of Roman descent mixing with local tribes, like the Franks, and the local tribes didn't have the traditions of tracking the things that would allow us to trace this back?

cerealbad3• 7 years ago

Tribal cultures tend to have long and complex, even tedious oral histories and initiations into them. With a knowledge keeper, shaman, druid, healer etc. Could be that the old druid power structure was in decline and so the typical transmission of information was interrupted. We know a similar thing happened later to the midwives/fertility women who were persecuted as witches with I suspect dire consequences to infant mortality rates. Originally it's hard for me to believe that people could be that stupid, but if pre-romans you had a loose confederation of naturalist-priests which kept practical knowledge shrouded in magic ritual as a means of exerting power any intergenerational disruption would be catastrophic. I think the Scandinavians have a slightly clearer picture of their descent due to the later expansion of the new religion into their territories. If reading declines I wonder if people will move back to a digitally transmitted oral history as a type of living memory which quickly becomes too vast to comprehend and may lead to similar transmission problems in the future with historians studying unimportant but vast repositories of codebases, the clay tablets of our day to piece together what went wrong with the C++ culture.

coliveira8• 7 years ago

The only reason for this is that power changed from Romans to tribes in Northern Europe. If you trace genealogies, you'll see that modern families descend from tribal leaders in Northern Europe, and these ancient kings had nothing to do with the old power elites of Rome. Of course, the thing is not so simple, because with the help of Catholic Church there were some marriages arranged between the so-called barbarian rulers and noble families in Rome. So the powerful Roman families still survive in some way, but not in a direct lineage like it was before the fall of Rome.

golergka• 7 years ago

My family history, for example, have always seemed weird in that regard. Genealogy up until 11-12th century is pretty straightforward and documented, with notable rabbis and doctors, but then it jumps straight to legends and familiar family names from antiquity, without any information from Dark Ages straight out missing from any records. And other old Jewish families I know are very similar: all genealogical information just vanishes for these centuries, even if there are older reliable sources picking up the story from antiquity and beyond.

nonbel2• 7 years ago

Very interesting, I hadn't heard of this issue.

Others have reported issues with archaeological and historical evidence from this same period, proposing that up to 700 years of mainstream chronology shouldn't be there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745763

Especially interesting from your link is that all the royal lines of Europe trace their origins to Charlemagne, who according to these alternative chronologies was probably a myth.

jdminhbg• 7 years ago

For an opposite perspective, Bryan Ward-Perkins' "The Fall Of Rome: And the End of Civilization" is a readable-by-the-layperson argument that the end of Roman authority in Western Europe resulted in significant falls in trade, health, literacy, cultural achievement, and more: https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807...

La-ang• 7 years ago

Synopsis: Not as dark as we thought, but still dark..lmao

8077628• 7 years ago

tl;dr: they had nice jewelry, so it wasn't really dark

I don't understand why people feel the need to whitewash this, aside from a preexisting religious motive or mindlessly being contrary. Civilization went backwards after Rome fell. It took centuries to rediscover and reincorporate those parts of Western culture.

I worry that too many people secretly want to go back to being serfs.

cerealbad3• 7 years ago

I would love to see a reasonable explanation for the rapid development of Western Europe. The henge circles all across the world (including the new world) show an advanced mathematics and astronomy for thousands of years before the rise of settler empires say parity ~9000 BC. Jump forward all the way to the late 1800s and despite the glacial pace of social change in Russia they are still designing one of the best rifles and bullets in the world, in use for 100+ years. The success of social organisation must stem from some mixture of accelerated development due to geographic sheltering and island vs mainland conflict- with the island empires (Spain, Portugal, Dutch)proving they don't need to fight landwars if the can control global shipping lanes. The interplay between Japan, China and Korea reminds me of England, France and Germany. Russia plays a role as a cultural glue between these two remote spheres but because of its size proves to be ungovernable. South East Asia gets ignored much like Eastern Europe. Italy, Greece, India, Iran and Egypt great middle civilizations are paralyzed by their ancient past insular and corrupt. Most of Africa, America and Eurasia are mysteries because of contact contamination.

If the answer is a universal religion plus a sea faring civilization gives you world power it still makes me wonder why it took until the late 1400s to kick off. Had the Romans avoided debasing their currency and managed their bureaucracy better couldn't they develop an ocean crossing trireme by the 800s maybe 1000s? So much time has gone by and humans are still just stumbling around unable to organise or understand the emergent forces their complex networks generate. The loss of life due to famine, disease and war in the previous millenium is at a shocking scale of proportionality to the existing populations affected by it. A mistake is being made by not teaching history thoroughly, say 2-3 years of intensive world history for all children. You could introduce a lot of concepts as they emerge in context from religion to agriculture to mathematics, music and politics.

ghaff3• 7 years ago

It's more about attempting to quantify the level of civilization than theorizing about underlying reasons, but I found Why the West Rules for Now a reaaly interesting chronicle about the West (and China) over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_West_Rules%E2%80%94For...

cr0sh• 7 years ago

If the answer is a universal religion plus a sea faring civilization gives you world power it still makes me wonder why it took until the late 1400s to kick off.

I'm not sure it would fit the idea, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples

jcranmer3• 7 years ago

I would love to see a reasonable explanation for the rapid development of Western Europe.

Rapid and development in what sense? This topic is sort of contaminated by the fact that most askers of the question have a circular definition that refuses to countenance the concept that Western Europe might have been far from dominant (e.g., in areas such as quality of life or health).

In terms of how Western Europe came to politically dominate the world, this essentially boils down to them deciding to arm their trading fleets and have them act as a military force against competitors, and then snowballing the resulting profits into more powerful navies (and armies) that the other countries couldn't keep up with. The technological gap often wasn't near as wide as people usually assume it to be, and there are several instances of Western powers getting their asses kicked by natives, but the Western powers could afford to keep up the pressure for decades or even centuries if need be, whereas the native peoples had less ability to recover from attrition. At the same time, European powers were also able to achieve highly centralized states that prevented them from collapsing due to internal struggles mid-snowball, which is generally the historical case for large empires (see: Aztec, China, Inca, Rome).

cerealbad3• 7 years ago

Specifically in the power to kill at a distance. From cannonball to bullet to firebombing and nuclear airburst. The advancement made seems unreasonable and curiously asymmetric. Communicating instantly across the globe sure, even travelling to other celestial bodies fine. But the idea that a small group of people thousands of miles away can decide to evaporate millions without any warning or reasonable form of defense would seem insane to anyone from the pre nuclear age escalating retaliation keeping global peace is an absurd tragedy.

coliveira8• 7 years ago

Western Europe is not so special as people imagine. The Greeks and Romans managed to conquer pretty much everything that was important for them at the time, and they did it centuries earlier. The difference for Europe is that they were able to build on top of ancient knowledge passed down by Greeks and Romans. With modern technology they were able to reach everywhere in the world and create armies that were almost impossible to defeat. I think earlier empires were much more impressive for doing so much with so little knowledge.

michaelscott• 7 years ago

I have a pet theory about this and the development of "advanced" civilization in general, that civilizations always advance relatively rapidly due to constant conflict. It doesn't necessarily have to be military conflict, but it generally seems to have been right up to the 20th century.

Because Europe is geographically small, the probability of neighbour conflict is always very high especially when that small space contains such a high degree of variation in language and culture. If you add a particularly ambitious, capable and politically-placed individual to that mix like an Alexander the Great you tend to get empires forming.

I don't think this is specific to Europe at all; Asia has experienced similar rapid development throughout its history, many times being very technologically advanced from a global perspective, and the origin of smaller empires like the Aztecs, Iroquois and the Oyo in other parts of the world.

api• 7 years ago

I view the dark ages as just a big recession following the collapse of Rome. It's not that nothing happened. Often very important things happen during recessions. It's just that there was little macroeconomic growth.

smacktoward• 7 years ago

The true “dark age,” of course, was the early 1940s when, simply as a side effect of industrial killing, great swathes of the past disappeared. One small yet major example—the extraordinary series of paintings of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, made in the 1170s either by the saint herself or under her supervision, disappeared in the general catastrophe that unfolded in Dresden in early 1945. We only know what they looked like (except from black‐and‐white photos) through accurate and beautiful copies painted by a group of nuns, by sheer chance, in the 1930s.

This feels like a weird argument. Yes, the paintings were lost. But we have tons of documentation about them! We have records of their creation by Hildegard of Bingen. We have photographs and reproductions to tell us (imperfectly, but still) how they looked. We know they were taken to Dresden, and we know when -- 1945. We know that Dresden suffered a devastating firebombing by the Allies in February of that year, and we know that nobody has been able to locate the paintings since that firebombing occurred. In other words, we may not have the paintings themselves anymore, but we can construct a pretty reliable history of them -- what they were, how they were created, and when they were (sadly) destroyed.

That's a very different situation than we're in regarding post-Roman, pre-Carolingian Europe. There are hundreds of years in there where we have practically no documentary evidence for anything. Kingdoms rose and fell, wars were won or lost, languages and faiths adopted or abandoned, and we can't even begin to tell any of those stories today, because nobody was keeping records. Who can say how much art was created and then destroyed in this period that we'll never even be aware existed? Who knows how many geniuses there were whose insights have been lost forever?

None of this is to say that what happened in Dresden in 1945 isn't a tragedy; it absolutely was, and for lots of reasons beyond just the loss of some paintings. But the loss of something that we know existed (and can even look at photographs of!) is very different than destruction so total that it even obliterates the possibility of remembrance.

drb912• 7 years ago

This is a very specific, narrow interpretation of the dark ages. It is not a good term to use in any circumstance, which the article illustrates well.

Secondly, in the event of societal collapse, I'm not exactly looking for a great work of art. I image we lost far more texts through preventable destruction and lack of preservation than we lost novel texts written during the post-roman european collapse. I think the quote illustrates a meaningful parallel.

But the loss of something that we know existed (and can even look at photographs of!) is very different than destruction so total that it even obliterates the possibility of remembrance.

Categorically different maybe, but consequentially equivalent. I can rattle off a ton of lost texts, but that's mostly meaningless and these works hold virtually no cultural value compared to works we can actually read and engage with.

admax88q• 7 years ago

but that's mostly meaningless and these works hold virtually no cultural value compared to works we can actually read and engage with.

You've basically defined away the problem. If its lost then we can't read and engage with it and therefore has no cultural value.

I mean sure, things we don't have by definition can't contribute to culture today. But that is a useless tautology when talking about lost works.

coliveira8• 7 years ago

The so-called dark ages are not much worse than other periods of human history when there is were no large government institutions. With the end of the Roman Empire in the west, Europe came to be ruled by local tribes, in the same way that happened throughout history. Europeans demonstrated to be as barbarians as any other group of people in the world that had no strong institutions to protect society from their immediate power urges. It took centuries for larger government institutions to form again.

ardit332• 7 years ago

Not correct. They were much worse indeed.

Remember, Romans had a fairly advanced society, and buildings, architecture, and infrastructure. Roads crossing whole regions, (the highways of the time), aqua-ducts, ways to dispose sewage, etc...

This all slowly degraded and eventually disappeared with the fall of the empire.

Stone building were replaced by mud huts, and I don't know about you, but not having running water in your town, or paved roads to the next town or port seem like huge drawbacks to life quality.

The first Anglo-saxons that came in Britania, after the Roman left lived in what you would call downright primitive huts made by either mud or wooden planks with mud in them.

That and the constant warring, in many ways, it was a huge set-back for the people there.

wallace_f5• 7 years ago

This seems so overly simplistic, and perhaps misleading. Not just because, as evidenced in the article and is consensus among scholars, that the pejorative term, Dark Ages, itself is misleading. But There seems to be so much other blatant evidence which calls your premise into question. After all, Caeser made his name as he led a conquest with what was not fundamentally different to a warring tribe, and marched it back into Rome as a final affront to Cato and the state of Rome.

Bayart3• 7 years ago

Europe came to be ruled by local tribes, in the same way that happened throughout history. Europeans demonstrated to be as barbarians as any other group of people in the world that had no strong institutions to protect society from their immediate power urges.

It really wasn't. As Roman imperial faded in, agents that were Roman auxiliaries filled the void with the support and help of local authorities, chiefly senatorial families and the Church (filled with members of senatorial families), which kept being a structuring force for society during lulls in civil government.

Stable government recovered relatively quietly and frankly certain areas were better off in terms of peace after the Western part of the empire « collapsed » than during the strife preceding it. Areas that were really worst off got ravaged by civil war, not tribal violence (such as is the case with Italy).

I recommend Karl Ferdinand Werner's books on the subject, the transition between Imperial Roman Gaul and Frankish(-Roman) Gaul. But his paper La "conquête franque" de la Gaule : itinéraires historiographiques d'une erreur (The "Frankish conquest" of Gaul : historiographical itineraries of an error) is enlightening and short, if you can read French.

The narrative of the Late Antiquity/Early Medieval "barbarian invasions" is known to be complete rubbish, don't fall for it.

acqq4• 7 years ago

That's a very different situation than we're in regarding post-Roman, pre-Carolingian Europe. There are hundreds of years in there where we have practically no documentary evidence for anything.

It is even more specific. Eastern Roman Empire remained functional until it fell to the Ottomans in 1453 AD.

But in Britain there were not even coins between the years 410 and 600 AD:

http://www.numsoc.net/darkages.html

"History has proved time and time again that when money is in short supply – the people turn to a token or obsidional coinage, no matter how base, rather than do without money as a medium of exchange completely. This has been demonstrated by siege coinages, lead tokens, brass farthings and merchants’ tokens over the millennia."

But there was nothing for these two hundred years. Not even foreign coins, and not any kind of substitute.

That's why these years are considered completely dark there. And that's why it looks like a real collapse there. So whenever we speak about some dark ages we have to be aware also about which land area we talk about.

Balgair2• 7 years ago

The Dark Ages were very much regional, with separate areas undergoing their own eras of 'darkness' and losing communication with the rest of the world.

Interestingly, Ireland during the 400's to 600's was something of a bastion of Catholicism and 'western/classical' thought in their monasteries. Even though Britain was very pagan and 'dark', Ireland remained 'enlightened' at this time (though the populace was still very 'dark' and pagan in Ireland).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ireland_(400%E2%80%...

Under this regional definition of 'dark ages', even today they occur. Lost tribes in the Amazon, the populace of North Korea, very rural towns in Alaska, etc. all can be considered to be in 'dark' ages to some degree or another.

fallingfrog• 7 years ago

David Graeber’s book “debt: the first 5000 years” has some passages on this. I think they just bought everything on credit, and continued to give prices in denarius even though nobody had any. Then periodically they would settle debts in a circle, so to speak. They also had a system of debt sticks where they would snap a stick in half, each party getting one, then when the debt was settled the “stock” and the “foil” were matched together and discarded. It’s a fascinating system but basically the point of the book was that during large sections of human history coinage wasn’t the method people used to buy things, and right now we’re moving away from coinage again as most people use credit cards and so forth for purchases.

diminoten• 7 years ago

Has anyone else here heard of the historical conspiracy theory (I don't know how else to describe it) that the european dark ages literally never happened, and the Gregorian calendar simply skipped those years entirely?

It's pretty fascinating as a concept, though it hits many obvious pitfalls (what about all the stuff that's said to have happened during those years?!?!) and I'm not versed enough in the "theory" to give it justice.

It's certainly fun to think about, even if it's complete nonsense!

edgarvaldes• 7 years ago

The Phantom time hypothesis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis

jonjacky• 7 years ago

You might be thinking of Fomenko's New Chronology, presented in a series of books that were popular in Russia in the 1990s. It sounds very far-fetched:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)

nonbel2• 7 years ago

I actually thought this on my own after watching some history channel series about the first millennium AD, roman empire, whatever. I was struck at the similarity of some events that were supposedly separated by hundreds of years, almost as if it was the same story told from a different perspective.

Then I found Anatoly Fomenko, Gunnar Heinsohn, Herbert Illig, etc had investigated this.

I'll add another link to the two already shared by sister responses: https://www.q-mag.org/the-1st-millennium-a-d-chronology-cont...

Definitely a fascinating topic. I emerged from that rabbit hole unconvinced but definitely with far more doubt about the reliability of the mainstream chronology.

UnhelpfulYoda4• 7 years ago

San Francisco disproves this thesis. It's impossible to build anything new, because of inane historical significance given to even the most decrepit cow palace or laundromat. I can only pray that San Francisco experiences a "Dark Age" where ugly old crap is replaced with shiny new towers.

vanderZwan• 7 years ago

Easy there, Le Corbusier[0]. That may be your preference, but others, like me, have seen enough giant glass monoliths to last a lifetime.

Also, are you aware that you're implicitly saying that you would love it if San Francisco was bombed or suffered a big earthquake or some other horrible disaster like that just because you don't like its architecture? I doubt you intended that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier

z3phyr3• 7 years ago

A "Dark Age" means a time where the stuff which is happening is not recorded or documented. It does not mean "Starting from scratch"

cocochanel• 7 years ago

The Dark Ages are only dark to us.

z3phyr3• 7 years ago

And hence the name. Because there is only us who can name.

choeger2• 7 years ago

I think the most plausible explanation is the lack of slaves that stems from the steady downfall of the Roman empire. When Germanic warlords were pretty much forcing their way into the empire they actually accepted the life style of Romans. But a few hundred years later they switched to feudalism. Why, though?

I think that the Roman empire was founded on a source of cheap labor, slaves. It allowed for massively productive agrarian complexes and thus fueled trade and literacy. But when the empire got into trouble, the price of slaves must have risen massively. The consequence must have been famines and less labor for anything else than crops, in particular less professional soldiers.

coliveira8• 7 years ago

You can only maintain slaves if you have a powerful army capable of defeating other civilizations and maintaining them captive. That's how ancient empires did it, it is also how Europeans and Americans did it in the new world. During early middle ages each location had armies that were good enough only to barely keep their own survival. So, slavery was out of question as a practical way to get labor. They had to organize their own society into social classes to guarantee that someone would do real work. Instead, Romans could just start another war or trade the already existing slave population.

wanderer2323• 7 years ago

One should be aware reading it that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European Renaissance in shaping our modern art and culture.

Not saying that this particular article is necessarily an example, just wanted to bring an attention to the fact that the this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently and everything presented on it might turn out to be as neutral and scientific as reporting on other hot-button issues of today.

sapienti sat

antidesitter2• 7 years ago

that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European Renaissance

What's your evidence for this claim?

this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently

What are you talking about?

jimclegg• 7 years ago

It's not that people are diminishing Europe's role, it's that Europe's role wasn't as big as euro-centric historians claimed.

The two most prosporous civilizations in human history had their richest periods during the European Dark Ages into the Renaissance but China and India are not even mentioned usually (when only 5 people could do long division in Europe, Indian mathematicians were discovering the basics of calculus, many centuries pre-Newton & Leibniz).

Truth is most of the knowledge "discovered" by Europe during this period was mostly translated from old Chinese/Indian/Greek texts (math/science/etc) and made available to Europeans via Persia.

ocschwar• 7 years ago

Some time around the early 500's, the Roman-British people pushed back against the Saxon invasion. We know this from archaeological and numismatic finds.

Yet we have no idea who the hell led this beyond the legends of King Arthur.

Dark enough for me.

ghaff3• 7 years ago

I just finished Michael Wood's In Search of the Dark Ages. It's pretty amazing how little and how limited the evidence we have to inform us about the better part of 500 years of British history.

nostrademons• 7 years ago

I've wondered recently if historical prominence and quality of life are anticorrelated: if the civilizations we think of as biggest and greatest are the ones that were the worst to live under. Or, more provocatively, if civilization is just relationship dysfunction on a grand scale.

What is civilization? It's centralization of power, increasing specialization of roles, usually higher population density, greater interconnectedness between people, a dominant ideology & discourse, and subordination of individual will to collective power. We look at the Romans or the Mongols or the Aztecs or the Pax Britannia or Pax Americana as great civilizations because there is something there that us, as observers centuries later, can point to and hang our minds on.

But what does life look like for individual humans under one of these civilizations? The Romans practiced slavery on a grand scale; the Mongols conquest, the Aztecs human sacrifice; the British colonialism; and the Americans capitalist exploitation.

There is a movement, today, that life should be more focused around local communities, person-to-person interactions, individual freedom, authenticity, and a return to human-centric ideologies. What would such a society look like to future historiographers? Communications would revert to person-to-person interactions rather than massively published tracts. Much of it would be ephemeral; Snapchat or Whatsapp rather than the WWW or Twitter. There's no need to fix communications into a tangible medium or distribute it widely when the audience is a single human being at a single moment in time. Large infrastructure projects would essentially become impossible, as getting the required cooperation from different interests without a monopoly on coercion becomes unrealistic. Think of NIMBYism on a society-wide scale. Trade might continue, but rather than organized supply-chains, it reverts back to supplying individual wants.

To an observer a millenia in the future, it would look like a collapse of civilization, because there would be no big entities that they could look at and say "That's how people lived back then." But to the individual human living in the moment, it could instead be viewed as a return to freedom, community, and person-to-person relationships, all of which are valued highly by nearly everyone (particularly today). Both viewpoints are true; the difference is in the scale that the observer observes them.

BishopofAgde• 7 years ago

When you don't have large civilizations typically most people will be subsistence farmers, so you don't have much time to pursue other interests. You might not have warfare on a grand scale but you still have it. But now you don't have professional soldiers to protect you, so if someone comes knocking you have to take up arms yourself or abandon your home. Travel is dangerous without maintained roads and patrols. Without that you don't have easy communication which means a lack of ideas being spread.

This isn't a refutation, but I can think of plenty aspects of life improved during a pax. I don't think going wildly in either direction is ideal.

ivanhoe3• 7 years ago

Those were the dark ages because previously there was a highly developed civilization with its sophisticated culture, art, science, technology and liberties, and then the western world sunk into an era where almost all of it was temporarily forsaken. It fell into the darkness and chaos (at least from the point of people who lived in the Roman empire). Barbaric tribes raided the lands, many local wars again started since there was no central rule anymore, Catholic church imposed insanely strict rules - pushing art and science knowledge and skills of humanity hundred of years back. Ideas of health and sanitation and hygiene that Romans cared a lot about were practically non-existent, so diseases ravaged the population. And then came the plague and killed more than half of the population and the rest mostly fled to country-side leaving many fortified cities completely uninhabited. It doesn't mean that people were stupid or that they didn't craft pretty things back then, of course they did and the conquering tribes also had their primitive culture and crafts, but it was very limited and heavily sanctioned by church, unlike before, and almost all art was reduced to just religious themes or simple decorations. In Byzantine Empire there was even a brief period of iconoclasm, when it was forbidden to show any humans in paintings, like in Islam. So, yes, maybe it wasn't the world from Mad Max movies and there was no Orcs, but it wasn't that far away from it as the author makes it sound. Just compare it to the renaissance (which was still lagging behind classic era) and you'll see how dark it really was.

betterunix2• 7 years ago

To be clear, the science, knowledge, and skills of humanity continued to advanced during the European dark ages. Outside of Europe there was the Islamic Golden Age and the Tang Dynasty period of China. The scholarship and science of the Islamic Golden Age actually continued the intellectual development of the Romans (which is why we still have the Elements and other Greek works), probably because the Caliphate had conquered so many important Byzantine urban centers.

ivanhoe3• 7 years ago

Absolutely, Dark Ages is the event local to Western Europe, although IMO the rise of church power had negative impact on the Byzantine Empire too. They've kept the culture and knowledge of Ancient Greece and Eastern Roman Empire, but contributed very little to it, unlike Arab scholars who made a significant progress under the Omayyad caliphate.

ApolloFortyNine2• 7 years ago

I agree completely.

Perhaps it could be argued that the Roman Empire was simply ahead of their time, but we went from engineering marvels (of their time) such as the Roman aqueducts [1], the Pantheon [2], or the Colosseum [3], which held 50-80k spectators in 72AD, to very little of note for 100s of years following.

What I find intriguing is that the Roman Empire even 'discovered' steam power in the first century [4]. Unfortunately, they seemed to have only saw it as a toy, rather than realizing its full potential. It's fascinating to me to think about how far ahead we could be had the Roman Empire not fallen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

hetman• 7 years ago

Roman metallurgy was really not at a point to make practical use of steam power on a scale that made it more effective than using slaves. Crucible steel, a bare minimum, wouldn't come to Europe for over a millennium. They simply did not have the materials engineering to build useful pressure vessels.

People get weirdly romantic about how easy these ideas would have been to implement; there's this weird conception that we should have been able to go from late antiquity Rome to early industrial revolution England in a matter of a couple centuries.

This ignores two things. First executing seemingly simple ideas can still require incredible expertise in a range of fields. Nuclear bombs are conceptually simple but building them still seems to require the economy of a nation state.

Second, Roman knowledge wasn't lost. It was all still there in the Byzantine Empire yet strangely they weren't sending rockets to the moon in the 1200's. The centres of knowledge simply migrated, and in every place knowledge grew and expanded. Whether work by Byzantine or Muslim scholars, science wasn't put on pause and without their contributions, we would not have advanced to where we are today.

baud1472582• 7 years ago

very little of note for 100s of years following.

I'd say that the cathedrals are something of note.

Bayart3• 7 years ago

What "held science back" was the obsession with sticking to Greek dogma.

Health and sanitation degraded with the Renaissance more than anything (which WAS a regression in many aspects). Before that the general practices hadn't much changed since Roman times, save for infrastructure gradually getting worse.

And it's not like the Ancient world was immune to massive plagues, it's just not part of our collective imagery anymore.

baud1472582• 7 years ago

Regarding the catholic Church, one could make the argument that it helped preserve and translated Antic texts in the monasteries. And there are a few point on which society regressed in the Middle Ages: human trafficking for slavery disappeared in the Middle Ages (but not slavery, since one could argue that serfdom is a form of slavery) and reappeared in the age of enlightenment; the place of women improved during that time too.

ivanhoe3• 7 years ago

Church also played important role as a base for scholars, giving smart people the basic education and a chance to live without having to work hard to survive, so they had time to study and learn and think. However, in the beginning monasteries did preserve some knowledge, but severely filtered and censored selection. Also there wasn't that many books there as one might think. When Toledo fell back into the hands of Christians in 11th century its library had (significantly) more books than all of the West Europe together. Only after that the effort on translating books really took off, the first Universities started forming, and the shapes of new civilization started to take shape again.

cosmodisk• 7 years ago

What I find fascinating is that a good number of people discussing this could probably have equally interesting discussions on Java or algorithms,which won't be same on your average history forum...

william3• 7 years ago

People say this but we have very little knowledge of (and literature from) the time period before and during Beowulf.

However, it would be fair to argue that the Dark Ages ended during the High Medieval period, rather than the Renaissance.

skookumchuck• 7 years ago

Recently I watched a documentary about the Arthurian legend. Essentially nobody has been able to prove or disprove the existence of King Arthur. That part of history in Britain is pretty much a blank as to who was running things and how things worked.

analog31• 7 years ago

Something bothers me about the author's notion that we don't have stuff from the "dark ages" only because it was ground up and recycled. Okay, but we do have stuff from before that time, that somehow survived the same conditions.

UnhelpfulYoda4• 7 years ago

What a bizarre perspective on the issue of whether or not the "Dark Ages" are incorrectly named.

The author seems to think that the term stems from the extent to which historical buildings were lost or re purposed. With that kind of logic, you could similarly say that abandoned towns are the height of civilization.

In other words, a very muddled thesis, followed by muddled, ill fitting justifications.

The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

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