The Dark Age ? What do you know about it ?

davidsheep88

davidsheep88

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Here we will go to see about the time of the dark ages after the giants of the bible and also after the fall of Rome. And we will ask what other dark ages happen even talk about why, the happen ?
 
There's a lot wrong with this presentation ...
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I just binge watched The Last Kingdom and the subsequent movie. I know it's fiction based on history but it was interesting to learn how England came to be.
 
There have been various dark age where civilizations ceases to exist and time was lost.

 
Oh well is it in another section then ? I do apologize just wanted to talk things off normal stuff.
 
One of the greatest classes I ever took in college was the History of Medieval Art. Even with that name, the semester began with the earliest known art forms (Venus statues, cave paintings, etc.) and concluded with 20th century art. It may have been an art class, but it was the most informative history class I ever attended. When it comes to art, there was no such thing as a "dark age". The art was beautiful and amazing. It wasn't a dark age because it was a terrible time period. It was dark because Rome fell and along with Rome went their record-keeping. There was a lot going on in Europe during this period and it wasn't dark compared to any other age.

But that was what I learned in that class.
 
As ever, people assume that because written materials are lost, there's a conspiracy at play ...

It's worth noting there is not one Renaissance – scholars generally identify:
The Carolingian Renaissance (8th and 9th centuries),
The Ottonian Renaissance (10th century),
The Medieval Renaissance (12th century),
The Italian Renaissance (14th-15th centuries).

All were marked by a period of renewal in the arts, literature, architecture, education, etc.

Meanwhile we had a 'Little Ice Age', pandemics and other stuff to deal with.

On the downside, with the collapse of the Empire and the emergence of European dynasties and nationalism, wars become really something awful.

In the Dark Ages video above, the narrator talks of Petrarch – but he was a romantic who idealised Greek and Roman culture with scant actual knowledge of it. Meanwhile we had Platonism and Aristotelianism alive and well in the universities – but he was alive during the Black Death, a plague that killed 30-60% of the European population, so any other time probably looked more inviting ...

And the old saw of the average age being 30 – again, wrong. Child mortality brought the average down, but if you survived to 20, you could look forward to your three score and ten. Child mortality was no better in Greek and Roman times, nor really improved until more recent times.
 
moralorel said:
One of the greatest classes I ever took in college was the History of Medieval Art. Even with that name, the semester began with the earliest known art forms (Venus statues, cave paintings, etc.) and concluded with 20th century art. It may have been an art class, but it was the most informative history class I ever attended. When it comes to art, there was no such thing as a "dark age". The art was beautiful and amazing. It wasn't a dark age because it was a terrible time period. It was dark because Rome fell and along with Rome went their record-keeping. There was a lot going on in Europe during this period and it wasn't dark compared to any other age.

But that was what I learned in that class.
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I remember a short series on PBS hosted by Sister Wendy Beckett many years ago. For such a brief series she really made me appreciate a good deal more about art.

But I still find myself drawn to the cave paintings. Picasso and Dali (and Escher!) are interesting, Monet and Rembrandt are beautiful, Michelangelo and DaVinci are inspiring...but I always find myself returning to the roots, to the source, and asking "why?" Why did we even bother to begin with?
 
juantoo3 said:
I remember a short series on PBS hosted by Sister Wendy Beckett many years ago. For such a brief series she really made me appreciate a good deal more about art.

But I still find myself drawn to the cave paintings. Picasso and Dali (and Escher!) are interesting, Monet and Rembrandt are beautiful, Michelangelo and DaVinci are inspiring...but I always find myself returning to the roots, to the source, and asking "why?" Why did we even bother to begin with?
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I am impressed by the ancient artwork of sites such as Gobekli Tepe. Humans were supposedly just hunters and gatherers. Yet they put together such amazing artwork at that site. We can only speculate why they put so much effort into the masterpiece. Not bad for stone age hunters.
 
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It wasn't a dark an age as some people say it was. At the same time the Islamic Empire was going through a very light age (750 to 1250) both in the 'Abbasid lands and Andalusia (Muslim Spain and Portugal) and soon afterwards, the creation of the great dynasties of Ghana, Mali, Songay and Nigeria in West Africa. Great civilizations in Timbuktu and also India and China (paper, gun powder and great mysitical schools of Islam). Even in Europe itself there were great intellectual developments (see St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Anselm of Canterbury and the age of scholasticism in Catholic lands).

Irish monks were copying out great works of Antiquity that would have been lost without them not to mention the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and the translation movement head by Hunayun ibn Ishaq where translations were actually awarded with the weight of the book in gold.

Many Jews, Muslims and Christians made great intellectual contributions and later on in Muslim Iran and Syria through the amazing philosophical progress of the great Shaykh al Ishraq Yahya al Suhrawardi and his Illuminationist philosophy which corrected many mistakes made by the Peripatetic school in both logic and metaphysics
 
st.clementofrome said:
It wasn't a dark an age as some people say it was.
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Indeed not!

st.clementofrome said:
At the same time the Islamic Empire was going through a very light age ...
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Yes, European historians can be very Euro-centric.

st.clementofrome said:
Even in Europe itself there were great intellectual developments (see St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Anselm of Canterbury and the age of scholasticism in Catholic lands)
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Not forgetting St Thomas Aquinas was aware of and obviously respected (if not entirely agreed with) Ibn Sina (Avicenna) – and Ibn Sina was influential on the thinking of Albertus Magnus, tutor to Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church and influential on Meister Eckhart. Albertus – theologian, philosopher, metaphysician and alchemist – also studied Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd (Averroes).

Apropos of nothing – one of my daughters underwent a groundbreaking medical treatment yesterday on the vagus nerve (connected to a cardiac problem) and Ibn Sina wrote on the nerve ... he was considered a father of western medicine ...

st.clementofrome said:
... through the amazing philosophical progress of the great Shaykh al Ishraq Yahya al Suhrawardi ...
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I'm just now looking at the works of Henry Corbin, heavily influenced by Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi and Mulla Sadra ...
 
The dark age is what changed the time, what would happen if the dark age didn't happen instead an age of light happen. Our destiny and history wuld of been different if science would of existed. Brings the question how things would of changed.
 
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