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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

It's a side point, but the bit about the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment is wrong and I recommend looking for real history to read if you're interested.

Here is a thread about literacy in ancient Rome. Short answer is that it's complicated:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3huswa/how_l...

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In addition to this description of the Dark Ages/Enlightenment being wrong, it's worth pointing out how incredibly eurocentric it is ("humanity forgot how to read"). Even just in popular imagination, the 6th-10th centuries (what TFA calls "The Dark Ages") are seen as the height of literary achievement in other parts of the world (e.g. China)

Funny how the article is exactly about this happening: the inability to tell what is true when reading.

The article might be AI generated, your comment might be, both, or none of them. How will we know who is right? And if we can't, will we stop caring?

Yup. I'm not going to argue with myself, but you are correct that this is a complex and fascinating topic that deserves more attention. Space constraints led me to vastly oversimplify. If you'd like more of a rebuttal/clarification, see https://danielbmarkham.com/epistemology-wars/ but by all means challenge my assumptions and premises.

I think it might have been better to write something like a more conventional book review of the books you read? As it is, it’s unclear where you read about ancient Rome (for example). What comes from each book, versus your own opinions?

sorry to say that the only thing I can agree on in this blogpost is "Any one of these topics represent a possible future of lifetime study. Many, because of the need to shorten the discussion, have been purposefully simplified to the point of being arguably misrepresentative." For example you are kind a implicating that christanity was responsible for the fall of rome, as the people started to reject ceasars as gods. This is kinda strange, I mean yeah this hypothesis exists but so do 210 others https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/21... .You need better sources for such claims. Anyway IMO it is not strong anyway as Christanity and worldly rule made a good fit for the next 1300 years or so

My Medieval History teacher always said they were called The Dark Ages because the volume of primary sources were fewer - i.e. because they were dark to us.

Bret Devereaux covers this is in much greater detail than I can ever hope to do,[0] but essentially it's often because writing of the "Dark Ages" is dismissed because it is overly religious in nature. There is not less writing from this period, but since scribes of that era was primarily monks, they obviously had a bias in their choice of works they chose to scribed.

The reason pagan writing of pre-Christian Roman and Greek writers remain is because these works were often considered good examples for learning Latin or Greek. (Also helps that a lot of Greek writing was preserved by Arab scribes.)

Indeed, the majority of the material that survives to this day was scribed in the "Dark Ages", because of the invention of parchment (which has a much better longevity than its predecessor papyrus). Devereaux also points out other materials, that were generally just used for everyday things, were bad for longevity, and therefore few of those survive to this day. But climate here helps a lot with preserving copies,[1] hence why Egypt is generally overrepresented in everyday material from the Roman world.

[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-wa...

As originally used by Petrarca, “dark ages” referred to ignorance and lack of civilication compared to classical antiquity.

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