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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

It's always worth remembering that Roman and Greek ideas (themselves partially built on Egyptian notions) in mathematics and science continued to be developed in North Africa, the Middle East and India during those 'thousand years of Darkness', and that store of knowledge was itself critical in turn to the following European explosion of knowledge beginning in the Renaissance. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Agricultural_Revolution#I...

> "A 13th century observer claimed there were "5000" waterwheels along the Guadalquivir in Islamic Spain; even allowing for medieval exaggeration, irrigation systems were certainly extensive in the region at that time. The supply of water was sufficient for cities as well as agriculture: the Roman aqueduct network into the city of Cordoba was repaired in the Umayyad period, and extended."

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It’s interesting that most people seem to forget or ignore the Eastern Roman/Byzantine empire for some reason. No state contributed more to preserving ancient knowledge and Constantinople was absolutely central to that. e.g. if it had fallen to the Arabs in the the late 600’s the dark ages would have been a lot darker an possibly would have never ended (e.g. the collapse of Roman-Hellenic civilization would have been a lot more similar to the bronze age collapse.

Also the downfall of the (Eastern) Roman Empire mostly coincided with the high middle ages and early renaissance. And contact with the empire arguably was much more important for kickstarting the renaissance than that with North Africa or the middle east.

The Byzantines sit in an uncomfortable middle for a modern intellectual. Too European to be exotic and "diverse" in the contemporary shallow meaning of the word, but at the same time too Orthodox to be culturally comprehensible to modern Westerners. Speaking an Indo-European language that is nevertheless very distant from all the current major Indo-European language groups and uses its own hard-to-read script.

I thought Ancient Greek was the 2nd most common language for people to learn after Latin if they want to understand the era.

Nevertheless the fraction among general intellectuals is todays negligible, and most current opinion makers wouldn't be able to say "Hello" in either language. This increases the civilizational distance significantly.

It used to be much higher; 100 years ago, both Greek and Latin were compulsory subjects in many schools.

Good point, I wasn't really aware of that but it did seem to play a critical role in the post-Roman centuries:

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

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