Racialized chattel slavery, witch burnings, systemic genocide against natives, bad diets from excess sugar, bloodier holy wars, yet they still had no sewage systems. At least the medieval period had an excuse that they had to start all over from scratch.
The only thing they had going was art and literacy.
>yet they still had no sewage systems
what the frick are you talking about?
did you mean to say
>interior plumbing was very rare
?
The European dark Age ended with Charlemagne, when he implemented the Latin alphabet. Dark ages are characterized by a lack of written accounts, but we have plenty from the Middle Ages.
one could say that the lack of written accounts at that time was precisely because of societal collapse, going back to primitive ways of living
True, but the reason it's called a dark age isn't because it sucked, but because we don't know shit about it when we did the periods before and after. The period after the bronze age collapse was also a dark age.
There are times when things really sucked like during the 30 years war or the plague but it's still not a dark age.
i guess some would say that the living standards of the early middle ages were indeed a downfall from peak rome, but then again, with all the revolts and corruption that ended up with rome's demise, maybe roman life wasn't that great for most of the populace
this
Enlightenment pseuds, philosophy reading clubs, and anticlerical groups like the Grand Orient have pulled the wool over the eyes of the public for too long.
That's not the only reason.
There were plenty of library burnings and other assorted vandalization of archives that happened in the centuries after Charlemagne. One that comes to mind is the burning of the Library at Glastonbury. Nobody knows what was written there, and we don't have those records so it appears dark, but that doesn't mean they didn't write anything.
Something similar happened to the Vatican Archive when the HRE sacked Rome in the early modern period. Entire tomes were thrown into gutters, burned, or carried away to places unknown.
>societal collapse, going back to primitive ways of living
That's not really accurate. Most people lived exactly the same kind of lives before and after the fall of WRE. In fact, it's said that in Italy the governance of the Goths was actually better and more fair to the common people than the ailing Roman system they replaced.
>The period after the bronze age collapse was also a dark age.
The so-called "Greek Dark Age" never even happened. It's a chronological abberation caused by Victorian Egyptologists trying to massage the king lists into something coherent with their other fanciful takes on time. There's no literally archaeological evidence those purported few centuries ever occurred.
>it's said that in Italy the governance of the Goths was actually better and more fair to the common people than the ailing Roman system they replaced.
The goths were a continuation of the Roman Empire. They were a warrior elite ruling side by side with a Roman civil aristocracy. Lombard rule was the dark age for Italy, both in terms of records and the situation.
>systemic genocide against natives
Didn't happen, they wanted to use them as slave workers, conquer or convert them, not exterminate them.
>bad diets from excess sugar
The average person didn't consume "excess" sugar and if you compare it to the 19th century or beyond, they didn't consume much sugar at all.
>bloodier holy wars
Not holy wars, those were wars between Christians.
>they still had no sewage systems
They did, but only very few cities were large enough to actually need a proper sewer system until the 19th century.
>At least the medieval period had an excuse that they had to start all over from scratch.
No, they continued where the Roman Empire left off. There obviously were a few hundred chaotic years, and societies had to adjust to the end of slavery which had been the foundation of the Roman economy, but they certainly didn't start over from scratch. For example, one of the most important factors that gave Western Europe an edge over the rest of world was the extremely common use of wind and waterpower. Windmills and watermills had existed in the Roman Empire, but weren't built in large numbers until the High Middle Ages. By the end of the Middle Ages, Europeans had even invented the overshot waterwheel which was way more efficient.
>library burnings
Their impact is usually way overstated. Parchment and paper made from rags (which was basically all paper until the 19th century) decay relatively fast, so books had to be copied/reprinted all the time anyway. Losing one copy in a library doesn't mean that important knowledge was lost. If it was important, there were many copies of it. In fact, a lot of ancient writing was lost because those whose job it was to copy old texts decided that they weren't important enough and prioritized other texts for copying.
>Their impact is usually way overstated.
It's not. The Vatican lost so many important documents during the sack it's actually unreal.
They have an extraordinarily difficult time tracing the paper trail of the succession of their bishops past this point in history for this very reason. And that's a huge deal for their religion.
>books had to be copied
It's not like there were just a bunch of copies floating around. Look into the work of archivists like John Dee, he had a library filled with many rare and irreplacable books that were simply dissappeared by Calvinists during his time on the continent in service of the Queen.
>If it was important, there were many copies of it.
Not necessarily. In fact, if something were exceptionally important there might never be more than one copy made to limit the spread of it's knowledge.
> It's not like there were just a bunch of copies floating around. Look into the work of archivists like John Dee, he had a library filled with many rare and irreplacable books that were simply dissappeared by Calvinists during his time on the continent in service of the Queen.
You realize they had printing presses since the 15th century right
Okay?
Were you under the impression that Dee's collection was published?
>Were you under the impression that Dee's collection was published?
Wow changing the argument when the truth becomes inconvenient like do you really believe that people from that time period are ignorant when it was literally the renaissance
What truth?
>it was literally the renaissance
You have no literally idea what you're talking about.
see
>You have no literally idea what you're talking about.
Neither do you
>Didn't happen, they wanted to use them as slave workers, conquer or convert them, not exterminate them.
That is genocide. They weren't just slave workers, they were dying in numbers so high that Spanish friars were having a moral crisis over it
hell yeah
>oh the burning of the National Library of Brazil doesn't matter
>because the unique recordings of extinct indiginous languages were copied and stored in separate locations
>r-right?
>b-because the technology to make copies existed for decades prior to the incident.
No.
>dude it was literally the
"information age"
>what do you mean none of the digital records survived the happening and you are living in the new dark age without even realizing it
ishygddt
>b-but I archived the page, what you mean they deleted the archive because the archived website creator said the n-word?
threadly reminder that about half or more of all hyperlinks that have ever been made are dead now
and the deadening has only just begun
Only half, are you sure?
>bad diets from excess sugar
Are you moronic?
Now we have the internet and social media which is even worse.