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

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

#181

Post by Gibbon1 »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #151
ddebernardy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

The concept of wealth fundamentally depends on the society its created in. If I am the last person on earth, i effectively "own" the entire earth, but it means nothing. Same for a man staving to death on top of a mountain of gold. Which makes this billionaire New Zealand apocalypse compound trend all the more ridiculous, if society collapses, being a billionaire is going to mean absolutely nothing, you would think th…

More amusingly as the billionaires hide out in their bunkers someones going to be at a Goldman Sachs terminal zeroing out their wealth.

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

#182

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #151
ddebernardy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

The concept of wealth fundamentally depends on the society its created in. If I am the last person on earth, i effectively "own" the entire earth, but it means nothing. Same for a man staving to death on top of a mountain of gold. Which makes this billionaire New Zealand apocalypse compound trend all the more ridiculous, if society collapses, being a billionaire is going to mean absolutely nothing, you would think th…

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by coliveira »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #176
coliveira wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. Unfortunately this leads to another cause of destabilization at the end of the Roman Empire: Christianity. You see, Christians precipitated the destruction of the pagan culture, which was the only culture shared by all people in Europe. Not only Roman history and culture was almost erased in that change, but also the oral traditions of nations around the Roman Empire that were also converted by t…

"Christians precipitated the destruction of the pagan culture, which was the only culture shared by all people in Europe." ? 'Pagan culture' is not some unified set of cultural norms. Rather, it's a broad category of possibly totally unrelated activities. Some of them codified via Rome (but those were adapted to Christianity) and then other, local ones. The Christians in 300 CE were the most organized group on the co…

I am not saying the Christianity lead to the decline of the written word, education, and governance. I am saying that it contributed to the end of oral traditions that were the only form of history known by non-Romanized pagans. It also lead to the destruction of many monuments and collections of books associated to pagan traditions in Rome.

I also don't believe that Christianity had the power to destroy civilization. They were just the result of the decay of economic power of Rome, which lead the people to organize around something other than the traditional government structure. It also had to do with the idea that the old gods were failing to defend Romans, so why not joining this new cult that seems to protect the poor and dispossessed.

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

#184

Post by phkahler »

viburnum wrote: post #56
xefer wrote: post #28

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…

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.

> 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.

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

#185

Post by scarmig »

ardit33 wrote: post #156
coliveira wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imme…

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…

You can't compare Britain in the post-Roman area with Rome at the height of empire.

London in the "Dark Ages" didn't have aqueducts. But Londinium was part of the periphery of the empire, and it also never had aqueducts. There's not that much information to be gained by cherry picking the elements of the central core of the Roman Empire and asking why they weren't present in far flung areas in the post-Roman era.

Skeletons show that people were relatively healthier (at least in the periphery) after Rome had fallen than when Rome had dominated these regions.

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

#186

Post by hodgesrm »

heraclius wrote: post #159
hodgesrm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) an…

The Pirenne thesis is superficially plausible. However, McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy, which represents perhaps the most innovative approach in dealing with a paucity of evidence to date, suggests otherwise. “About one in seven eastern travelers I have uncovered set out from the Arab world (49: 14 percent of 340). They were mostly Christian and Hellenic. That so many appear from research geared to the B…

Thanks, McCormick looks like a really interesting source. This seems to support the notion that however you define 'Dark Ages' the darkness was in Europe, especially the north and west, not necessarily elsewhere.

Conditions were quite the opposite in many lands conquered by Moslem forces, as shown by the art, mathematics, literature, military technology, economics and other evidence characteristic of highly functioning societies. It's not surprising travelers felt safer there. I'm thinking for example of the Umayyad Califate.

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

#187

Post by cerealbad »

jcranmer wrote: post #98
cerealbad wrote: post #39

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 rif…

> 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…

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.

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

#188

Post by drb91 »

admax88q wrote: post #121
drb91 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 q…

> 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.

My point is that it’s the existing that contributes to culture, not knowledge that something once existed.

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

#189

Post by _jahh »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #179
ardit33 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I read somewhere that skeletal remains show people got taller after the end of the Roman empire. And then started getting shorter through the Renaissance right up till the agricultural revolution in the early 20th century.

they no longer paid their Roman taxes and could eat more of their own harvest

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

#190

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

ivanhoe wrote: post #128

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 si…

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

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