[beat]

"The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history. What was going on in the Islamic world? In China? The Dark Ages of Western Europe were the brilliant Tang dynasty in China; and the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.

[mveety]

It’s supposed to be a Eurocentric era: it happened in Europe. You wouldn’t talk about Charles Martel or Pepin the short living in the era of the Tang Dynasty just as much as you wouldn’t talk about Tang Gaozu living in the Dark Ages.

[szemet]

Also, we should rename the Thirty Years' War to "Thirty Years' War in Europe but mostly peace elsewhere", and then we can can call World War I and World War II simply War I and War II - if we assume by default that every event is global (maybe we should add "except Switzerland,etc..." there too...)

Just joking: IMHO if someone knows what dark ages was, usually know where it was... It is that simple!

[beat]

It's not that simple, though. A lot of people - a lot of people - have no idea that during the "Dark Ages", huge swaths of the rest of the world (larger than Western Europe) were going through a Golden Age. It took me rather a while to realize that myself.

And, since WWI was fought in large part over colonial resources and Japan was involved, and since Japan was a major power in WWII (and China was involved as well, if only as Japan's victim), I'm pretty satisfied with "World War" as descriptors.

[losteric]

When you read that chapter in K-12, the textbook was no doubt very clear to put the Dark Ages in context of European history... you, and many other students, simply forgot. An elaborate or nuanced name wouldn't have helped retain time/location.

To be fair, other regions of the world have never heard of "the Dark Ages". History is too big for the layman to avoid simplification.

(although, renaming it "the Lost Ages" seems like it would help clarify things)

[HeWhoLurksLate]

> It's not that simple, though. A lot of people - a lot of people - have no idea that during the "Dark Ages", huge swaths of the rest of the world (larger than Western Europe) were going through a Golden Age. It took me rather a while to realize that myself.

I am one of those people, too- I only found out while watching James Burke's Connections series a few years back, and then reading way too much Wikipedia.

[Amezarak]

> the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.

This is a very misleading description of what happened. The early Muslim conquests caused major disruption in the Middle East, otherwise known as the Roman and Persian Empires, as cities which had been full of scholarship and prosperity for centuries were invaded and the population conquered, enslaved, and sometimes killed, with the concomitant destruction of libraries and learning. There is a major disruption of the written historical record during this time period comparable to what happened in the Dark Ages or even worse.

It wasn't until after the "explosion of Islam" that the Muslims gradually realized the value of the Greek texts that were preserved during their conquests and everything settled out such that scholars were able to return to their work.

[beat]

Those same Muslim scholars were the ones who preserved and promoted Greek texts that were destroyed by early Christian fanatics.

[Amezarak]

What exactly are you referring to? Early Christians didn’t have the political power to destroy Greek texts, and Muslims didn’t arrive on the scene until 600 years later, so they could not have saved Greek texts from Christian abuse. And even then, Constantinople was the major and often sole source for many Greek texts, particularly after the collapse precipitated by the Muslim invasions and subsequent wars; many of them spread to the West when Roman scholars began fleeing wear and revitalized interest in Greek language and learning.

The main reason a lot of classical learning fell into disuse in the West was that the Germanic peoples migrating in didn’t care much, and there was a language barrier - most stuff was in Greek, and they only knew Latin, for the most part. With a very few exceptions, nobody was going around actively destroying stuff. Indeed, the Church is the main reason so much was preserved in the West, particularly some later popes that took a keen interest in the preservation of ancient texts. Easily the worst thing the West did was the burning of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, because again, the Byzantine Empire, even what remained of it by then, was a real center of learning and probably easily the biggest surviving repository of books on the planet at the time, so undoubtedly we lost some texts then.

This isn’t really a religion vs religion thing - the Christians came into an existence in a society and region already steeped in Greek learning, and slowly assumed political control over the region. The Muslims were in an entirely different situation: they were from an underdeveloped region and came into the Middle East via conquest. They simply didn’t know what they had, and the violence of the conquests was a major setback. In some ways, the region never really recovered - that and the Mongol invasions.

[slurry]

That's simplified history at best. Greek texts were much (much) better preserved in the Byzantine empire, and were lost to the West mostly because people forgot Greek and copies decayed.

[blancheneige]

This has been debunked many years ago and is only perpetuated by wishful and disingenuous revisionism. Ancient Greek texts were being translated in the heart of France half a century before Arabic texts reached the kingdom. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/world/europe/28iht-politi...

[factsaresacred]

> "The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history.

That's like describing 'The Great Leap Forward' as a Sino-centric view of history.

"The Dark Ages" refers to a time as well as a place. Specifically, Western Europe.

[beat]

Is it, though? I think it's clear that "Great Leap Forward" was China-specific, but "Dark Ages" isn't really taught as specific to western Europe.

Which is the problem.

[factsaresacred]

> Is it, though?

Yes, I believe so. I'm not even sure the Dark Ages are taught outside of countries with European heritage.

Nevertheless, anywhere the topic is discussed, it's usually mentioned in comparison to other periods of European history. That alone tells us that it's a term intended to describe regional rather than global events.

[dragonwriter]

> but "Dark Ages" isn't really taught as specific to western Europe.

Er, even 20 years ago when I was in college it was taught as both largely a misnomer and a label applied to a (somewhat ambiguously bounded, especially as to the ending point) period of Western European history.

[toasterlovin]

Yeah, the language of this website is English, which is a European language. Which means that most of the audience is European or live in a country that traces its cultural heritage to Europe. So of course the stuff on here is Eurocentric. Just like the view of history that you find in Chinese publications will be primarily Sinocentric, etc.

[muricula]

That's a real stretch. Not only are there a number of countries where English is sometimes/often spoken but isn't the dominant cultural heritage (India, S. Africa, Liberia just to name a few) but we're on a programming language website with a truly global audience. We should not assume a eurocentric view of history in any case.

[drak0n1c]

European Dark Age is not used as a global descriptor, it is regional. Just as China and the Islamic world had their own Dark Ages as well.