Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 July 28

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July 28

No dark ages in middle east

Why wasn't there a dark age after Muslim armies conquered the Middle East like there was in Europe after Germanic armies invaded Europe?

There wasn't really one in Europe either, it was just invented by people in the Renaissance who had ridiculously high opinions of themselves. See Dark Ages (historiography). Adam Bishop (talk) 09:12, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

I thought pretty much the opposite: that the term was invented by a bloke* who had a high opinion of the period preceding the Dark Ages? *who arguably lived before the Renaissance, but leave that to one side --Dweller (talk) 09:44, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Read Bryan Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization: the case for the fall of Rome leading to a heavy decline in quality of living is pretty strong. Although "Dark ages" is perhaps still an unfair term for the period I guess."Brustopher (talk) 20:36, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

I don't understand the question. What's the purpose of the last part ("like there was in Europe") if "Muslim armies" didn't conquer Europe? Asmrulz (talk) 09:38, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Aren't the early Middle Ages until the time of Charlemagne called the dark ages?

Historically I tend to think of places like Egypt and Asia Minor as being more toward the "center of civilization" with the largest access to a wide range of knowledge. I think if you look at the great physicians and inventors of the Roman Empire, a lot of them came from or lived in points east. The Romans are typically given credit for absorbing a lot of knowledge from the Greeks, and held only temporary or tenuous control over much of Europe. So medicinal herbs such as opium, which was a mainstay of the surgical procedures of antiquity, became essentially unknown in Europe once trade collapsed, forcing the adaptation of local substitutes of varying effectiveness; by the time Paracelsus came back with his "stones of immortality" it sounded like witchcraft.

Of course today, with the brutal events in the news and isolation from world trade and science, it seems like the Middle East has fallen almost completely into a lasting Dark Age - I'm thinking really though credit goes at least all the way back to Wahhabi for this one; also the Ottoman Empire's status as the "sick man of Europe" seems relevant. The fall of empires such as Rome didn't happen in a year or a century ... it was very slow, and not altogether monotonic. Wnt (talk) 10:28, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

• Whatever you call the period from the Late Roman Empire (at least in the West) to maybe the 11th or 12th century, didn't urban life, economic life, especially the monetary economy, the centers of learning, intellectual and artistic life and population size all experience a drastic reduction in Western Europe, if not a collapse? But by the 11th century or 12th century I think Europe was experiencing a resurgence. So this may not necessarily coincide with the traditional concept of the "Dark Ages". Contact Basemetal here 10:35, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

My understanding of the primary meaning of the term is that, to quote from the lede of the Article, "the period is characterized by a relative scarcity of historical and other written records at least for some areas of Europe, rendering it obscure to historians." That there was no comparable "Dark Age" in the period of Muslim domination of the Middle East the OP refers to is because the Muslim cultures of the time (as well as many of those over which they held sway) were relatively literate and there are a good deal of surviving records.{The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 212.95.237.92 (talk) 12:29, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Western Europe had its Dark Ages hundreds of years ago. The Middle East's Dark Age is happening now. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:43, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

How so? Adam Bishop (talk) 14:51, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

When religion becomes the major focus of society, learning ceases. Ergo, the dark ages. It happened with Christianity, now it is happening with Islam, where changes are opposed for religious reasons, and you have religious zealots create crusades or jihads. GregJackP Boomer! 15:40, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Nah. Adam Bishop (talk) 16:04, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

• I guess the Condemnation of 1277 didn't really happen. Nor did Michael Servetus get burned at the stake either, for teaching things that the Church disapproved of, like the circulatory system and non-trinatarian issues. Or Giordano Bruno, or any number of others. I guess that the pope didn't order Galileo to abandon heliocentricism.
• "The Dark Ages were ushered in not by barbarians but by the fundamentalist ideologues and bookburners of the church hierarchy who waged a systematic war of repression not only against the Roman classical religion and other faiths (including dissident Christian ones) but against mostforms of secular learning and literacy itself." Michael Parenti, Blaming the barbarians, 58 Humanist 38 (1998).
• We are seeing the same thing today, where religious fundamentalists are trying to stop the teaching of science. GregJackP Boomer! 03:50, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

The Condemnation of 1277 targeted the religious claims favoring astrology and an eternal world with no beginning, not scientific claims. Furthermore, the ideas could be studied by theologians as historical beliefs, they just couldn't be taught as true. To draw a modern parallel, one cannot teach the Mahayuga cycle as scientific fact, but you can learn about it in the religious studies department.

Michael Servetus was executed by Calvinists, not the Catholic church, and was executed purely for religious teachings. Was that wrong on civil grounds? Yes. But it had nothing to do with science.

Giordano Bruno was executed because of his theological teachings, such as pantheism. Again, wrong on civil grounds, but still ecumenical politics unrelated to science. Unless you want to claim that every star in the universe does indeed have its own Earth, with another you who is doing things slightly differently, so that some form of everyone gets into Heaven. And no, Bruno wasn't suggesting multiverse theory, he didn't know about wave-particle duality.

The Pope ordered Galileo to teach his ideas as hypothetical until he got more evidence for them, but was otherwise fine with them being taught. Galileo's response was equivalent of some modern worker starting up a blog (with no attempts to hide names) titled "my boss is a shithead and I'm totally going to beat him up" and wondering why he gets fired. If Galileo hadn't been so blockheaded about it, he would said "fine," taught the ideas as a hypothesis, and used his students to help him gather evidence. Instead, he chose to start shit.

I guess there wasn't an entire medieval religious movement dedicated to education, which developed the scientific method, and introduced Europe to optics, magnetism, and gunpowder. I guess Occam's razor wasn't named after a Franciscan friar. I guess a pope didn't promote Arabic numerals in Europe and reintroduce Western Europe to the abacus, armillary sphere, and Aristotle. I guess a pope didn't try to hire professors for universities or call for Western Europe to study Greek. I guess the Black Death was a plot by the Catholic Church to force people to focus more on surviving.

Pretending that the relationship between science and religion is only negative only plays into the "religion vs science" narrative that your average Young Earth Creationist buys into. It's also historical revisionism rooted in early modern Protestant sectarianism. Ian.thomson (talk) 04:49, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Right. To put things more simply, GregJackP may have noticed that these things took place up to 1000 years after the "Dark Ages" and for the most part did not even occur in the Middle Ages at all. We're not even having remotely the same conversation here. Adam Bishop (talk) 14:05, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Indeed. I think presenting learning and religion as opposites is a simplistic caricature. Religion was still a major focus in Europe during the Renaissance. Gandalf61 (talk) 16:12, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

The Crusades reintroduced ancient Greek thought to Europe. The problem wasn't that Europe was arguably more religious, the problem was that they simply didn't have much data available due to larger problems completely disconnected from religion. Imagine that you've got three siblings growing up, and you've know for a fact that one of them's going to die before you turn 10, and another before you turn 20 -- if you don't die yourself. When you're old enough to work the fields, that's what you do. The Church is actually willing to try to teach you how to read, even read some Latin, all for free, though you can't afford the private lessons or the equipment to learn how to write. That's nice and all, but it's not going to stop your children from starving -- but despite knowing that, you don't really know for sure what is going to stop your children from starving.

Now, in that situation, you might say that the peasant was the religious one -- but they would have said "no, religion is the priest's job." The idea that religion should be the focus of one's life usually resulted in charges of heresy (see Cathars, Meister Eckhart), and was something that markedly separated early Protestantism from the Catholicism of the time.

If anything, learning and religion were tied together in the middle ages, and even in the renaissance, when the thinking "to know the world is to know the mind of God" became popular.

The idea that education or science was worse in the middle ages because of religion is the irreligious (originally Protestant/anti-Catholic) equivalent to the Fundamentalist evangelical claim that homosexuality destroyed Rome -- a religious myth that replaces history. Ian.thomson (talk) 12:30 pm, Today (UTC−4)

Assuming that the questioner is referring to the drastic drop in standard of living and cultural achievement in Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries, the Muslim conquest of the Middle East was very different from the barbarian invasions of western Europe. The barbarians who invaded western Europe were interested in looting and personal aggrandizement. Few showed much interest in maintaining state structures, the well-being of the public, or cultural achievement. Also, their conquest itself caused economic harm partly due to pillaging but also through their disruption of trade routes and the institutions that facilitated economic activity. By contrast, the conquering Muslims had as their ideological goal the establishment of a just and righteous society. (See Rashidun Caliphate.) While the wars of conquest certainly involved destruction, once the conquest was complete, the Muslim conquerors, especially under Umar, aimed to maintain social order and promote economic activity, not least to boost tax revenues. Also, unlike the barbarian invaders of Europe, early Muslims valued learning, probably in part because of the centrality of the Quran to their religion. Marco polo (talk) 18:58, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Germanic people overrunning the western part of the Roman Empire was a consequence, not a cause, of the collapse of the political and economic structures there. Already around 300 the capital of the empire was moved to the East, then people tried to mess with political structures (Tetrarchy, etc) to try and fix things, and around 400 the empire was split. All of this before the Germanic people started pouring in. None of this seems to indicate things were going to plan. What caused all this? Population collapse? Tax revenue collapse? Epidemics? Family values collapse (no kidding! some have even blamed homosexuality)? General "moral" collapse? Growth of slavery? (Free peasants being put out of business by competition from slave labor, which forced them to move to cities, hence reduced both fertility rates (slaves were less fertile than free people and urbanized people less fertile than rural people) and tax revenues (free labor is more productive than slave labor)?). The Romans themselves did not seem to understand why things were falling apart. Some even blamed the Christians and the fact that people stopped sacrificing to the gods. Contact Basemetal here 20:51, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Sugar of lead. Seriously. See Jerome Nriagu. And, of course, the other, less counter-intuitive, theories mentioned in the linked article. Tevildo (talk) 21:20, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Just read Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. An interesting twist in the context of the OP's question is the so called "Pirenne thesis" that not only did the Germanic people not cause the "dark ages" but that it was in fact the Arab Muslim invasions in the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, that caused not "dark ages" in the Middle East, but the Western European "dark ages", by cutting off Western Europe from international trade routes. Of course this thesis, like any other having to do with this topic, has its critics. But I thought this is an amusing twist in the tale you might enjoy. Contact Basemetal here 23:25, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Correct, the vandals, visigoths, and other Germanic peoples who featured prominently in the final epoch of the western empire were generally invited, or indeed sometimes dragged, into entanglements involving the Italian peninsula and neighboring regions through the machinations of Rome's own feuding factions. Indeed, by this point, the notion of what distinguished a true roman from members of these ethnicities had begun to blur. Snow ^{let's rap} 10:24, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

It isn't true really that the Germanic tribes were simply "invited" into the empire. Rather, when they threatened to invade, an effort was often made to buy them off through land grants on the frontier in return for a commitment to help defend it. See, for example, the aftermath of the Battle of Adrianople. Basemetal's argument that the western Roman empire was in serious decline before the Germanic migrations is an old one, but Bryan Ward-Perkins argues compellingly in The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization that the economy and institutions of the western empire functioned fairly well into the late 4th century (after overcoming a 3rd century economic and demographic crisis), and that a serious decline set in only in the 5th century, when the barbarian invasions simultaneously severely damaged the tax base and required greatly increased military expenditure. The empire just couldn't cope financially, and therefore could not repel the invaders. Ian Morris's recent Why the West Rules—For Now supports this argument. Marco polo (talk) 13:54, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

When a 70 year old with a heart condition dies of a flue that a healthy 20 year old would barely notice was his death caused by his heart condition or his flue? When someone with AIDS dies of pneumonia did he die of AIDS or of pneumonia? Are those people arguing the exact same influx of people would have brought down the Empire at the height of its power, for example under Trajan? What are those people saying? That there were no structural fundamental problems with the Empire and that, had not this unfortunate series of events occurred entirely by chance the Empire could have lasted another 2000 years? I don't know what they mean that the late 4th century empire functioned fairly well. There were long term trends such as urban settlements getting smaller and smaller, agricultural land left uncultivated, etc. Was this suddenly reversed in the late 4th century? We're getting into the philosophy of the concept of cause. No wonder there are more than 200 theories regarding what happened to the Roman Empire. An added problem is that the event has such symbolic value that many people bring their agendas when examining the evidence and use it to make a wider point. Note how Ian Morris's book is not even a book on the end of the Roman Empire at all. If it uses someone else's theory to push its point of view, that can hardly be called two historians reaching the same conclusion independently. Contact Basemetal here 16:15, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Well, we can parse the semantics of "invited" here until the cows come home, but that would miss the gist of what I was getting at. What is a certainty is that the late western empire made extensive use of German foederati as auxiliaries to conventional legions, both within Italy and (increasingly in the decades immediately before the sacking of Rome) in buffer regions near the peninsula. If not for this practice (and the role these forces played in the internal power struggles of the empire, also just prior to its fall), there would have been very different conditions than those which enabled Alaric's invasions of both the western and eastern empires, from the regions his people had been allowed to settle immediately north of both their capitol regions. Remember also that Stilicho's downfall set off a massacre of thousands of Germans, including many within Italy itself, which caused many of their surviving comrades to flock to Alaric, driving said invasions. My point was, and remains, that the Germans were not some outside unified state invading another. They were a collection of peoples who were already deeply involved in a complex manner with Rome's military function and politics and their invasions were the result of a perfect storm of conditions, in which the late western empire's questionable leadership played an important role. Snow ^{let's rap} 10:54, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

Rome's problem was they didn't have the mechanical clock. Asmrulz (talk) 18:28, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

respectable interconnections

I was watching a YouTube video. It was a promo for a documentary called USS Arizona: The Life and Death of a Lady. At the beginning, they showed the launching of the USS Arizona (BB-39) at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There were some delegates from the State of Arizona. A girl from Prescott was also there. They used champagne and some Arizona water in the battleship's launching. I suddenly remembered the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots who perished battling the Yarnell Hill Fire. (They were stationed with the Prescott Fire Department.) All of that triggered an idea. At least 19 long-stemmed roses and some Arizona water should be sent to the USS Arizona Memorial. There, in a special ceremony, those mentioned items can be dropped onto the decks through the opening in the floor, to remember the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots. (I'm well aware there are some USMC personnel entombed within the Arizona. One of the Granite Mountain Hotshots served in the USMC.) I know it would cost a fortune for the 19 long-stemmed roses, the Arizona water and the shipping charges. What's the best way to go about completing that type of task?2604:2000:712C:2900:CCBC:9979:1653:FCB1 (talk) 07:45, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Click on your own wikilink to the USS Arizona Memorial. Scroll to the External Links section and click on Official Website. Choose the Contact Us link in the left margin and make your proposal directly to the administrators of the memorial. 184.147.131.217 (talk) 12:17, 28 July 2015 (UTC)