What happened to these advanced civilization of the antiquity? We have drawings of highly advanced siege engines yet it seem that after the fall of Rome we all went back to fighting with sticks for a few centuries. Why is that?
There are a lot of loss and bottlenecks along that journey, though. And many notable locations, installations and individuals. The history of instrument-making and how it is intertwined with philosophical and religious views on the skies and the topology of the universe is quite fascinating (e.g. the motivations for observing the sky, being able to produce predictions at all, crafting models, etc).
They never made an overwhelming shift to mathematical / science based civilization. They took over Syracuse with a mandate to keep Archimedes alive, but that failed. Some scholars say the only roman contribution to math was numerals.
Basically they reaped the profits of empire, and fell into the cargo cults of opulent success, abandoning the prior agricultural based common sense by never integrating new ideas in the Aristotelian domains except for to pay homage to the originating culture enough to collect taxes.
Not ready to drop a book on HN regarding the nuance of Roman evolution just yet.
While this is in part to be attributed to superstition and religion, this in turn was of material importance to navigation, aggriculture, and perhaps philosophy. Indeed, it is curious how those interrelated.
For one, nomads would need to know when it was time to move on, and where to.
The result is that even a gap of a single generation is enough for some knowledge to be lost. That's why Roman concrete was forgotten, why we can't build a Saturn V anymore, why you can't just start a chip-fab with enough money, and why it's so hard to maintain code without access to someone that designed the code-base.
Most things, even if they're written down, are more accurately modelled in someone's brain.
Maybe a few missing pieces are why Intel cant seem to figure out EUV lithography.
None of these things are trivial and probably not documented in a way where a noob could pick them up.
The death of Latin is very upsetting.
Exponential population growth is weird.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build...
The Antikythera mechanism or the somewhat inexplicable late bronze age collapse and the unidentifiable "sea people" that caused it are good examples to indicate there's some degree of cyclicality, wherein people stumble across ruins more advanced than their own civilization and wonder where they could have gone.[1]
Getting to the "why" part, Peter Turchin's work expanding on Ibn Khaldun's concept of Asabiyyah seems the most compelling to me.
You want to say he's wrong about something, say what it is and give a reason. Otherwise you're just avoiding actual critical thought.
(Also, I have no idea who Peter Turchin is. I just don't like it when people inflict their defective thinking on others.)
His own description from a decade ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a A large project he directs and uses to study this: http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/ And has produced some interesting descriptive work such as: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full
Some of his group's work [0] has been criticized on methodological grounds [1]. While some of his work may produce overdetermined models (trying to model history, considering all of the possible variables, can be tricky), the sorts of things he is interested in have been developed a fair bit, of late [2].
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 [1] https://github.com/babeheim/moralizing-gods-reanalysis [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7846.full
There's an idea of "saecula" for the ancients: that humans go through cycles because we collectively forget lessons learned, most commonly after the last who witnessed the actual events dies, ~100yrs. The word meaning changed to mean knowledge caught up in an age, that which does not transcend like God's. Hence the modern usage of secular.
For the moderns, there's an economic idea like this that I think matriculates in German Empire/1850s-WWI...
(aside: I'm astonished the more I learn about what was a super-fecund school of thought centered 1850ish at Germany/U. Humboldt, Berlin and near schools, with many well-known names in politics and the humanities: Bismark, Hegel, Marx, Bauer, Stirner, Nietzsche. And the beginning of modern physics: Plank, Einstein, Helmholtz, Boltzman, Ernst, the list basically just goes on and on; and also the beginning of the modern practice of standard doctoral/masterly degrees in the academy.)
The reason for the context is that I think it's this combo of humanities and sciences that leads to an important development: "Kathedersozialisten" (armchair social philosophers) who were very concerned with the engineering/mechanism of _society_. i.e. They are the beginning of who we know as modern economists: heavy on math and data and they begin to notice patterns...
(aside: Marx is half in this tradition: Kapital reflects Smith's eye to data, but then he bails on this in preference for his linear history as, I think, it enables his revolutionary goals.)
What they got out of an early statistical analysis of historical wealth (equity, prices, interest rates) and social dynamics (like invention, booms, busts, unrest/warfare) is that there are regular cycles. Measurable in the data. This begins to be described by Schumpeter, esp the short ~10yr "business cycle" of boom/recession, tho he also comments on the longer cycles and their international character. I think maybe this is part of Austrian economics, and that there are some political-economic reasons on the way to the world wars to explain why the American/British/French traditions don't accept this knowledge until recently.
It's picked up by Kondatriev in 1950s Stalinist Russia, who pays more attention to the long cycles as a lens into Capital analysis and development of the capitalist state. As noted, Stalin (after Marx) wanted a linear end-of-history development/confrontation with "the old modes" of capitalist thought; but Kondatriev managed to keep an open mind, learned from the data, and came up with his "K-waves" theory of 50/100/150 year long economic cycles. (He paid for his open mind with his life.)
Since, Josh Goldstein's thesis (MIT/Stanford '89) is a great recap and update for the American empire and more rigorous statistical analysis of ~500 years of price/interest/invention/war data.
Today, Ray Dalio is the CO of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund: he has a blog series on long-cycles on LinkedIn (tho unfortunately doesn't cite any of this there) and basically says we're in the falling part of a 150 year hegemonic cycle and that it's gonna get grim. And all these other guys would agree! Goldstein has been commenting on the 2020s since the 1980s.
Could it really be that our current pandemic and economic recession/depression were somehow caused together? Should we expect major wars soon? How unlikely is it that this all happened 100 years ago, and 100 years before that? (the exceptionally large cholera epidemic in 1830s Europe in the aftermath of Napoleonic wars)
In this light, it seems a reasonable hypothesis that these four: economic hardship/famine, disease, war and death; do indeed travel together, caused by people forgetting to take them seriously and therefore suffering a terrible judgement. Ofc, that's just the ancient idea of apocalypse at the end of an age.
I seem to remember that cliodynamics is really Asimov's psychohistory, but pursued in ernest, no?
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/psychohistory-and-cliod...
In such a case the criticism of not being a professional historian seem odd, as the credentials of Edward Slingerland and Bret Beheim, the lead authors of the critical papers, seem to be fairly comparable to Turchin's.
[1]https://psyarxiv.com/jwa2n/
[2]https://eslingerland.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2019/09/Historia...
[3]http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/what-came-first-big-god...
Turchin may not be right about everything (or most things), but the kind of thing he's trying to do is the path forward. The really interesting action in history (broadly construed) is all being done by people doing history within analytic paradigms, like Turchin. Look for work by people who call themselves economic historians.
> In 1592, the Japanese general Hideyoshi invaded Korea, transporting over 160,000 troops on approximately seven hundred ships. He eventually mobilized half a million troops, intending to continue on to conquer China. Over sixty thousand Korean soldiers, eventually supported by over one hundred thousand Ming Chinese forces, defended the Korean peninsula. After six years of war, the Japanese retreated, and Hideyoshi died, having failed spectacularly in his quest.
> The Imjin War "easily dwarfed those of their European contemporaries" and involved men and material five to ten times the scale of the Spanish Armada of 1588, which has been described as "the greatest military force ever assembled" in Renaissance Europe. [2]
> [2] The Spanish armada consisted of thirty thousand troops on 130 ships and was defeated by twenty thousand English troops.
The Korean peninsula is about 86,000 square miles. Japan is about 146,000. (Modern) Spain is 195,000 square miles.
The fragmentation of Europe had really severe effects on the resources it was able to muster.
But there was a remarkable economic and cultural collapse in most of the former Western Roman Empire. Large cities mostly disappeared. Literacy nearly disappeared, and was only really preserved by the Church. The extensive Roman system of taxation and the public goods it paid for (roads, aqueducts, baths, theaters, security) nearly disappeared. Without large cities, roads and security, long-distance trade collapsed and the economy became much simpler. Skilled trades that existed in the highly complex Roman economy were forgotten. Classical literature and philosophy were largely lost in the West. Essentially, urbanized classical civilization disappeared.
There's a tendency to talk nowadays about the "transformation of the Roman Empire," rather than its fall, but I find that a bit too euphemistic.
Neither of those were wide-spread in Western Europe during the Roman empire either. If you take a look at the major cities of the Roman Empire they're generally in either Italy, Byzantium, or North Africa[0]. All of which continued past the fall of Rome. Literacy rates were also questionable [1].
> Without large cities, roads and security, long-distance trade collapsed and the economy became much simpler.
Long-distance trade certainly did not collapse after the fall. While it did decrease to certain extent in the near time period, it rebound within a century or two [2].
[0] https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=4db977...!
[1] https://www.quora.com/Was-literacy-common-in-the-Roman-Empir...
[2] https://oxfordre.com/economics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190...
Literacy was much more widespread in the Roman Empire than during the Dark Ages. If you go to archaeological sites like Vindolanda, you can see letters written by fairly ordinary people to one another. There was an entire literate culture that disappeared. The reason why they're called the "Dark Ages" in the first place is because of the paucity of written records.
> If you take a look at the major cities of the Roman Empire they're generally in either Italy, Byzantium, or North Africa
First of all, Italy and North Africa were part of the Western Roman Empire. Italy fared better than Gaul and Britain until the mid-6th Century, but Rome eventually declined from several hundred thousand inhabitants in the late Empire to a few tens of thousands.
There were major cities in Gaul, the German provinces and Britain, though: Augusta Treverorum, Londinium, Lugdunum, Narbo and Rheims all had tens of thousands of inhabitants during the Empire, but during the Dark Age shrank to a small fraction of their former size.
> Long-distance trade certainly did not collapse after the fall. While it did decrease to certain extent in the near time period, it rebound within a century or two [2].
The source you cite only notes that trade "never ceased." That doesn't mean there wasn't a massive collapse. The article notes that trade continued to decline for centuries after the fall of the Empire, into the 9th Century AD. The economy of Western Europe probably did not reach a similar level of development as in the Empire until the High Middle Ages.
What I'm pointing out is that the magnitude of the declines in literacy, trade, urbanization, etc. in most of the former Western Roman Empire were striking, and that they really can be characterized as a "collapse."
And don't think it couldn't happen again. We've stored the entirety of our cultural knowledge on an ephemeral digital network that depends upon an intricate and vastly complex technological infrastructure. If that collapses, so does modern civilization, and we're back to horses and buggies.
It's not impossible but consider how many ancient human languages we still can't translate, or can only translate due to coincidence (as in the case of the Rosetta Stone with Egyptian hieroglyphics.) Translating digital information in a similar cultural vacuum would be exponentially more difficult. If that stick is encrypted, how does one even know there is information to begin with?
"Halted" and "post-apocalyptic" are strong words. The Fall of Rome was a very long and drawn out event, and plenty of technological and cultural development continued after the Fall. r/AskHistorians has many good posts[1] describing why the "Dark Ages" weren't Dark and the various advances made during the post-Rome pre-Rennasiance period.
A lot of people think that technological and philosophical progress stopped after Rome, when really it just isn't talked about. In my opinion, this is probably because it's a lot more exciting to talk about Roman architecture since many buildings still exist today, rather then the three-field system and mould-board plows that kept the population alive.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/235w3l/why_a...
Now, they didn't return to stone age of course, practical tools and technologies that were a part of common knowledge remained in use, but many advanced engineering skills were lost. Also the society drastically changed, it fell into religious fanaticism and extreme conservatism - which is the main reason why it was called the dark age actually.
While less available they were still known and studied and certainly not censored. Neo-Platonist and Aristotelian thought was very influential in the Post-Antiquity and Early-Medieval time periods: see the Desert Fathers and the Scholastics. And that's not even talking about the fact that the Byzantines were there the entire time; most "Renaissance" ideas had the origins in Medieval Byzantine thought.
As for hygiene, feel free to look at the Wikipedia article for it[1]: the sewers weren't that effective, people still threw rubbish in the streets, and the bathhouses were cesspools of disease. And that's not talking about that fact that Roman sewage and hygiene was just that: Roman. It's not like the Roman Empire was some golden age where every city in Europe lived like that. Most places it was just as dirty and filthy.
> Also the society drastically changed, it fell into religious fanaticism and extreme conservatism - which is the main reason why it was called the dark age actually. It went from being under the control of an autocratic emperor to...being under the control of an autocratic feudal lord. Saying it "fell into [..] conservatism" seems a bit off when it really just traded one man for many. Religious fanaticism I won't bother talking about (why does everyone think people suddenly became more religious after Rome?). As for the term dark ages, that's just a term Petrarch alluded to the time period with, which was then later used in reference to the fewer historical records we have for the time period. It made no reference to religious fanaticism or conservatism.
You are arguing against an ideology.
Save your breath.
This is their view of history:
Ancient Rome was enlightened. Then Christianity destroyed all the worlds great accomplishments. Then, Galileo showed everyone who was boss.
Oh yeah... a corollary to this version: Islam was as nearly enlightened as Rome and would have ushered in an age of elegant sophistication but for the no-good Crusaders.
So sad...
In reality, Ancient Rome was a brutal slave-based society where life was cheap, religious fanaticism was rampant, children were disposable, and death was glorified.
Given a choice of being an average inhabitant of the Roman Empire or an average inhabitant of medieval Europe, only the truly ignorant would choose the former.
How would you characterize things like Children's crusades (and Crusades in general), Holy Inquisition, hard prosecution of every other religion and even other Christian fractions like e.g. Cathars?
And let's keep Byzantine out of this, I was talking about West specifically. West which experienced a significant population decline, wars, plagues, and which between 1st and 10th century produced very little of anything new. No big science discoveries, very limited architecture pieces - almost all churches, the (single) religion becoming the absolute focus of any artistic and cultural life. The remaining books and educated people were forced into self-censorship, as many philosophical ideas were considered as blasphemes, and Church positioned itself as one and only gatekeeper to knowledge.
If it was like you're claiming then West Europeans wouldn't need Arabic books to learn about ancient Greece achievements (as they had), and there wouldn't be an explosion of culture and education and book production as it was after fall of Cordoba and Toledo back into the hands of Christians. Arabic library of Cordoba is claimed to have had 400 thousands books, which was estimated to be more than what the whole Western Europe had at the time. In just a few decades the number of books in Europe multiplied many times, first Universities started to be created, things started moving. Just look at the dates when the first Universities were created in Europe: Bologna and Oxford 11th century, Paris and Salamanca 12th century, etc. It's not coincidence, they regained access to the Ancient sources that were lost before and that put them back in the saddle. If all the knowledge was preserved and readily available all the time as you've claimed, this peak would never be that drastic. And also there wouldn't be "a lack of historical records" if people were writing down the facts more - instead of concentrating on religious discussions.
And yes, Francesco Petrarca was the first known to use the term Dark Ages, and he specifically meant that because of the lack of great works and authors of the Classical period. But he wasn't talking about "the fewer historical records" - he freaking lived in that time and was talking about his own feelings that the culture of his time sucks. And great that he did, because he helped change that later.
And the term certainly wasn't used only by him, and not only in that context.
The Ottomans did not take over East Rome until the 15th century, where much of the plunder was already gone to the West. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/ancient-history/fallconstan...
While the West would term the East Romans as "Byzantines" in the 15th Century, this isn't correct to say they were not in Roman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantium
Also the engineers and high ranking members of society have to resources to flee to more stable regions and carry their knowledge with them. Its also the engineers that are usually given grace or offers by a opposing forces/rivals.
If you google "Iron processing in the middle ages" you won't find Bret Devereaux' excellent series[1], yet it is a much better read than the Wikipedia page.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...