Ancient Discoveries - The Antikythera Machine

[chips]

Ancient Discoveries - The Antikythera Machine

[Hunny]

Fascinating. Yea, I was taught if the dark age hadn't occurred, we'd have had the technology we have now hundreds of years earlier. They weren't just using clubs and sharp rocks anymore in that period. They came up with the sciences and made advances in metal working. Uninterrupted that would have developed, just as it had to restart and do later.

[Big Lin]

Sept 17, 2012 12:26:08 GMT Hunny said:

Fascinating. Yea, I was taught if the dark age hadn't occurred, we'd have had the technology we have now hundreds of years earlier. They weren't just using clubs and sharp rocks anymore in that period. They came up with the sciences and made advances in metal working. Uninterrupted that would have developed, just as it had to restart and do later.

Well, the Dark Ages were a bit more complex than people often realise.

It's arguable how 'dark' they really were; most of the accounts of the 'darkness' of the period come from propaganda put out by the monks.

And the Catholic Church did as much as it possibly could to try and KEEP people in darkness. They adopted the geocentric view of the universe, frowned on technology and cleanliness and regarded the Bible (which was ONLY available in Latin) as being literally true in every word and any questioning of it was 'heresy.'

But what caused the breakdown in technology during the Middle Ages was not only the malign influence of Catholicism - though that was responsible for about 70% of it - but the replacement of the old Roman Empire in the West by a feudal system with a local aristocracy who owed allegiance to a central king.

The aristos weren't much interested in technology; they came from a culture that was labour-intensive rather than labour-saving in the way it was oriented so serfdom and even slavery were favoured. The king tried to keep a tight control on the economy because he was normally fighting other rival monarchs so every aspect of things was more or less geared to a war economy rather than a more sensible approach to life.

And of course there was deliberate vandalism. The Catholics set to work to destroy as much pagan learning as they could including the murder of the brilliant mathematician Hypatia who they flayed alive on the altar of the local church as well as trying to burn down the great library of Alexandria; the Muslims finished the job by burning down the rest of the library when they conquered Egypt; and the Vikings tried to destroy as much of the learning that had survived the double whammy of Catholicism and Islam out of sheer wanton greed and vandalism.

In spite of all that the Irish in particular kept the flame of knowledge burning in Western Europe and things were never quite as bad in the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantines had 'Greek fire' a form of gunpowder that helped them to survive for a thousand years after the Roman Empire in the West had fallen.

The Chinese and Indians also had an advanced technology and science.

In Africa the Songhai Empire had a world-famous university at Timbuctoo where scholars from Europe came to LEARN at the hands of men who were every bit as clever as they were.

So really it was only Western Europe that experienced anything like a Dark Age and in every single way that could easily have been prevented.