The Dark Ages are a myt-

It's from a peer-reviewed journal user.

cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/div-classtitlecharting-the-rise-of-the-west-manuscripts-and-printed-books-in-europe-a-long-term-perspective-from-the-sixth-through-eighteenth-centuriesdiv/0740F5F9030A706BB7E9FACCD5D975D4

>without southeast europe
Snowniggers

>without the only part of Europe that wasn't shit at the time

What's the point?

>people don't distinguish between the high middle ages and the early middle ages when they're arguing about muh dark ages

500-1000 AD Western Europe was pretty fucked.

1000-1500 was a period of mostly slow progress.

>Yurop wasn't a poor shithole in the Middle A-

What the fuck happened to China after 1820? Opium Wars?

>what is per capita

The industrial revolution happening in Europe and not in China.

China was basically stuck as an agrarian economy until like the 1970s

That proves that they are a myth though

so the dark ages was in the 6th century?

The rise pretty much aligns perfectly with the spread of paper production in europe

How is continuous growth with the exception of one century a dark age? Was Sumerian civilization a dark age because theit tech was behind mideval Europeans? The Dark Ages were not a stagnation, but a consistently improving recovery period.

But recovery from what? Doesn't that imply a decline of some sort in the first place?

Snowniggers destroying Western Rome.

>people who are under constant threat of invasion by Vikings, Saracens or Magyars don't produce as many manuscripts as people who live in more peaceful centralized states with a strong church

Yet it seems 9th and 10th century Europe was doing better than 6th century Europe.

9th century Europe did better thanks to the Carolingian Renaissance, then it declined again in the 10th century when the Frankish Empire broke down. I don't know it that's crazy, but I would imagine that a lot of manuscripts from previous centuries were lost in the chaos of that era, so they went unrecorded by history.

But what really got Europe out of stagnation was the Gregorian Reform that made the Church more independent from secular authority and strenghtened its power. For all that people like to blame the European stagnation on Christianity and the Catholic Church, it was they who got it out of it.

We took a long time to rediscover lost Greco-Roman technology. It's a fact. Romans had more advanced mining and agricultural techniques than us until the 19th century, the abacus was lost until the 11th century, they had better concrete, nanoengineering, they were extremely skilled at painting and sculpting, etc. I'm sure I'm missing a lot more stuff as well: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_technology
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_technology

>nanoengineering

Dunno, seems the opposite to me. All these places ended up writing the most manuscripts since it seemed like they actually had things to write about between the raids and the bureaucratic and diplomatic attempts to curb them. Ireland, Southern England, Northern France, the Rhineland, Provence, Northern Italy, Bavaria, and Sicily were the most advanced regions in Western Europe, and basically where almost all our manuscripts for the era come from.

There is also steam power used by the Greeks, greater knowledge of astronomy (as evidenced by the Antikythera mechanism), plate armor, buildings created with concrete, water dams and use of perspective in murals and painting.

Lets face it, the ancient world btfo the medieval world out of proportion. Of course the dark ages refers only to Western European history from 6th to the 10th centuries ad. The muslim world and the Byzantine empire were at their strongest intellectual and political high point at the time.

>The 4th-century Roman Lycurgus cup is one of the earliest known examples of nanoengineering

Addendum: Aristarchus of Samos theorized about the heliocentric model 1800 years before Copernicus.

I think no one denies that there was a decline and then a collapse of Greco-Roman civilization between the 3th and the 6th centuries.

The controversy is if that was caused by Christianity.

>I think no one denies that there was a decline and then a collapse of Greco-Roman civilization between the 3th and the 6th centuries

There are a ton of fags on Veeky Forums that do.

The secret is to point and laugh.

Romans had even an archaic form of virtual reality used to simulate 3D viewing in their frescoes: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3044421.stm

>Judging manuscripts by copies rather than unique texts
>literally just showing the evolution of printing
>using it to propagate the "dark ages" bullshit

HOL UP
>Collapse of Centralized government
HOL UP
>Loss of inventions and scientific knowhow such as concrete.
SO YOU WUZ SAYING
>It takes a whole village to raise a single cavalryman. Private armies.
SO YOU WUZ SAYING
>Robber barons, lesser nobles who do not obey the king, endemic warfare.
WE WUZ PEACEFUL, STABLE, & ADVANCE N SHIET?

Actually historical scholarship over the last 50 years has turned away from the idea that there was a collapse at all. It's why the periodisation of "Late Antiquity" exists at all. It's more 'transformation' now. The historiographical mainstream appears to have passed Veeky Forums by. Not since Peter Brown's 1971 book has the idea of the "dark ages" been given much credence outside of places like Post-Roman Britain, the northern Balkans and northern Hispania.

Here's my opinion on this: there was decline and stagnation in artistic, scientific and technological fields, then Europe started gradually recovering around 1200 AD (based Thomas Aquinas and such), but then it was devastated by the black plague in 1346, setting progress back. 1450 is when we make the jump to modern era and get on equal or superior footing to the ancient world, mostly due to this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_scholars_in_the_Renaissance

>historiographical mainstream appears to have passed Veeky Forums by

This applies to literally everything Veeky Forums says. Please nuke this board.

>has turned away from the idea that there was a collapse at all

Why is this.

As far as I understand, it's mostly because modern academics are spineless pussies and don't want to offend Christians.

Western Europe was not just recovering but actually developing art, science, and technology in regions that didn't have much to start since the 8th century, and the 13th century was mostly when these developments reached a fever pitch. Rather than be devastated, the Black Death helped spur Europe's already advanced economy further because of the upset in old labor demographics, and it had been gaining on the Classical world before the influx of Greeks in the Renaissance who were mostly around to teach Renaissance hipsters.

not an argument

I wasn't trying to make one.

I just don't know why the academic community changed its conclusion.

It seems pretty open and shut that Western Europe experienced a sustained decrease in social complexity between 200 and 700 AD.

>art

Debatable. The art looked very shitty outside of Late Middle Ages Italian city-states.

>didn't have much

Romans never expanded beyond the Italian peninsula now?

Not in the North Sea and Rhineland, or Germany.

>I just don't know why the academic community changed its conclusion.

I'm not sure they did so much as a few newer historians are trying to revisit the period with a bit more nuance but nothing to radically change the idea that several things declined in Late Antiquity - even if some other things got better or laid the foundations for future development.

I suspect that political correctness is at work.

When Greek civilization collapsed, we have no problem calling the period afterwards a dark ages, but when Roman civilization collapses it's suddenly Late Antiquity because you don't want to remind somebody of Edward Gibbon and trigger everyone.

I thought that initially too, then I read a lot of it. There's some pretty sound arguments by people like Averil Cameron that undermine the idea that the world just went into a vegetative state for 700 years. It was a traumatic period, sure, but it was a time of massive cultural flowering, religious vigour and widespread change, after what had been a pretty stagnant few centuries under the Roman Empire. That's how the theories go anyway.

Historical revisionism has been the vogue since the 1960s and 1970s, though things are starting to tilt back more towards a nuanced middle ground where Late Antiquity wasn't rosy and peachy, but a time of brutality and plague in which the modern world as we know was it formed from the ashes of the classical world.

>When Greek civilization collapsed, we have no problem calling the period afterwards a dark ages

You mean the Geometric period? I think that's called the dark age because there is quite literally nothing from that period that is written down. The Greek population became completely illiterate. Meanwhile in supposedly Dark Age Europe there were still hundreds of renowned scholars like Gildas, Gregory, Bede and Cassiodorus. There's just not much with which scholars can re-evaluate the period. All they know is stuff like the Iliad and Odyssey were transmitted down through that period by bardic poets until writing developed again in the 8th century.

>without Southeast Europe
>no manuscripts were produced except for the regions where they were produced
Wow that's some fantastic graph right there

If I'm not totally out of order, I think it's reasonable to say that things were totally fucked in between 600 AD and 800.

Vikangz were niggers until they got Christianized and the Magna Germania Germanics had plenty of contact with the Romans to absorb some of their civilization despite not being part of the empire.

Depends where you were. The traditionally wealthy regions like Francia and Italy suffered some contraction, sure, but they were still filled with cities, wealth, churches, bishops etc. Places that had previously been shitholes when the Roman Empire had been around like Germany began to flourish and urbanise.

Places like Britain on the fringes of the old empire were completely fucked though. The 400-700 transition from Roman Britain to England is probably the most traumatic period of European history.

And all of these developments took place between the 8th and 12th century, which was my point - these places weren't part of any recovery but regions that were actively improving from next to nothing, forming new cities and trade routes that spanned the North Sea.

>Germans were never influenced by the Romans meme
>disregard that even the Germanics who sacked Rome were Christian and very Romanized

>>Germans were never influenced by the Romans meme
No one said the Germans were never influenced by Rome.

>looking for an argument where there isn't one

Hey yo Europe didn't make nothing, well except these guys they don't count.

HAHA must be so dark.

wew lad

Germany began to flourish and urbanize because they had strong contact with the Romans despite not being a part of the empire and because they were ruled by the Franks later, the most Romanized Germanics.

I didn't suggest that at all. Germany beyond the frontiers though still remained a barely urbanised shitheap for another century or two after the WRE fell. Having some extra gold, fancier swords and the agglomeration of a few villages into larger settlements does not an advanced urban society make.
There is, after all, a reason why so many Germanic tribesmen crossed into the empire to make their fortune. It's like saying that because Mexico is influenced by the United States and lots of them go over there that they somehow are of the same economic sophistication.

The Rhine region was the focus of early urbanisation due to its exposure to the empire and its where the Merovingians set up shop during the 400s-700s.

Well actual GERMANS were not. Germanics were, such as the Franks or the Visigoths but those were not the ancestors of modern Germans who had to be baptized by the sword much later, like the Saxons.

>When Greek civilization collapsed, we have no problem calling the period afterwards a dark ages

The Greek Dark ages were prior to classical Greek civilisation, not after.

If strong contact with Rome was all that mattered, Germany wouldn't have waited for several centuries after the collapse of the WRE to develop the way it did in the early Middle Ages. No one is saying there was no Roman influence in the first place, we're saying that Western Europe didn't actually recover in many places because there was nothing there to recover in the first place.

Yeah, but after Mycenaean civilization.

>Mycenaean = Greek

It's called the Greek dark ages, isn't it?

They weren't Hellenes but all of this was physically happening in Greece.

>Germany wouldn't have waited for several centuries after the collapse of the WRE to develop the way it did in the early Middle Ages

That was due to indirect Roman influence coming from the Franks who were the most Romanized Germanic people.

Yes but it's like saying ancient Greeks are the same modern Greeks. It's ignoring the vast cultural and ethnic gulfs between the two civilizations.

The ancient Greeks found the Mycenaean to be incredibly alien to themselves, with their bizarrely huge walls mistaken for the works of the Cyclopes.

I was just talking about the Greek dark age and the difference in historiography compared to the Western European dark age.

Also

>inb4 Germans somehow caused the Bronze Age collapse

Which isn't disagreeing with our point - Rome itself didn't somehow develop Germany which then somehow collapsed and then somehow recovered. It was built up from literal scratch centuries later. That it was under the influenced of the Romanized Franks doesn't change anything.

I bet the fucking snowniggers did this

>Accounts vary as to the Dorians’ place of origin. One theory, widely believed in ancient times, is that they originated in the north.

AHHHHHH

The Dark Ages are real only if you mean the period between the fall of the WRE and the rise of Charlemagne in the region now known as Western Europe.

Century of shame.

You do realize that the time period between 11th and 15th century is when the Catholic Church was at its most powerful?

>myt-

There is one letter left, you dumb shit. Thats not how you write down a mock interruption.

Its percent of world GDP.
The rest of the planet got better, and as India and China stagnated, they became a lower percentage of total output.

Tell us all about the international standard for representing mock interruptions.

>that china rebound
th-thanks nixon

two or more sounds left

Weirdo.

It doesn't help that China lost multiple foreign wars, experienced inflation due to Spanish silver, lost its monopoly on many things, and eventually entered a series of revolts and civil wars.

He's right in that the interruption is done badly in the OP, even if the rule he put forward is nonsensical.

The word "myth" doesn't contain at "t" sound, so stopping at "myt" makes absolutely no sense.

>Western Europe's share in world GDP doubled during the Middle Ages and reached present day levels

You fags ever going to get tired of proving yourselves wrong?

OK here's a quizz for all you mentally challenged 89IQ idiots.

If a business goes from 0 to 100 in sales in 2015, and then stays at 100 throughout 2016, which was the more successful year?

I would be concerned with the obvious stagnation in 2016, looks like I only started my business in 2015

They only raced past the Muslims in the Late Middle Ages because the Mongols destroyed Persia and Baghdad.

>china has the 2nd highest gdp in the world today
>is essentially still a 3rd world country
is this pic supposed to make an argument or something

The Middle East was already stagnating by then. And the West would hardly have "raced past" anyone if it had been in the middle of "Dark Ages".

>The Middle East was already stagnating by then

Proofs? Muslim Iberia was way more advanced than snownigs at the time. Like half of notable medieval "European" scientists are from there.

Well can you name any notable achievement in the past 1000 years that didn't happen in Western Europe?

>>written text is the only form to judge a civilization, all other forms are null
In a civilisation where writing exists, yes.

It's one of the core aspects of civilisation.

China artificially kept itself as a "third world" country for speedy growth, but it's beginning to transition now into a service economy not unlike Europe and the US. It'll start looking "first world" in a couple of years.

Not him, but it's a shame the graph lumps 500 years together from 1000 to 1500, since that times is what marks the beginning of European rise and Middle Eastern decadence. Muslim Iberia was pretty much a meme by the 1300s, not completely eradicated for 2 more centuries only because it wasn't worth the effort.

>>people who are under constant threat of invasion by Vikings, Saracens or Magyars don't produce as many manuscripts as people who live in more peaceful centralized states with a strong church
Yeah and? That doesn't disprove the dark ages, it's just a reason for it, which cements further that it existed.

Gel ink was invented in Japan

gellyroll.com/

How does one define success?

Yes, the Muslim Iberians made their scientific achievements from 1000 AD and onwards mostly: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medieval_European_scientists

I'm sure there are a lot of other Muslim, Chinese and Indian scholars that contributed a lot during that period as well.

>It'll start looking "first world" in a couple of years.
It already does if you stay in the cities. It feels like 1900 America, i remember.

Did America have half baked housing and deteriorated (yet basically still new) buildings all around?

1908 Monosodium glutamate production (invented by Kikunae Ikeda)
1916 Cultured pearl (developed by Tokichi Nishikawa, Tatsuhei Mise and Kokichi Mikimoto based on work by William Saville-Kent)
1926 Outdoor TV antenna (most commonly used type invented by Shintaro Uda and Hidetsugu Yagi)
1937 Rice cooker (invented by the Japanese Imperial Army)

Further, the Japanese basically pioneered advanced digital technology we constantly use.