Dark Age Obscured (History)

[Mick Harper]

By the usual happy coincidence, I was digging out a piece Hatty and I did about the Greek Dark Age (put on hold for the present book) to send to a Fomenko-ist, when this turned up on medium.com

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

Those who lived in complex urban centers abandoned them. They moved to the foothills of mountains or in rural places remote from towns.

Villages from a previous, less refined era replaced sophisticated urban planning. Humans began to live in mud houses rather than brick structures.

As inhabitants watched their cities filling up with the dead and diseases spread, they fled. The new towns in the foothills lacked the sanitary levels found in urban areas, and it would be some time before it was restored.

The intricate international trading system imploded. Though trade was carried out among the new upcoming settlements, the volume wasn’t the same. The accounting systems, which documented every tax receipt and trade agreement, vanished.

Weights and measures which were common among the civilizations of the era stopped being used, barring Egypt and Assyria.

Farmers were given instructions on when and how to harvest their crops since management during the Bronze Age was centralized and top-down. Because of the world collapsing, such commands stopped coming from the top, and the farms were gradually abandoned.

Art and crafts also suffered during this period. Lacking royal patronage, the pottery post Bronze era was significantly poorer than the beauty seen before. Because humans had to undertake several activities for daily survival, devoted potters may have died out, and the craft suffered.

Steady on, old chap, we have women and children among our readers. But we here are more concerned with history. There's an awful lot to write about and I bet there was no shortage of Jeremiahs queuing up to tell us about it. "Gripe, grips, gripe; winge, winge winge" signed 'Disgusted of Tigris Wells'.

[Mick Harper]

Remember what you must have in order to declare a Dark Age. Or what you mustn't have. Take pottery. Now that's something human beings have been doing since the Stone Age. And pottery lasts in the ground since the Stone Age, so there's no disguising whether human beings are doing it or not. So that definitely qualifies the Sea Peoples' Dark Age -- every single one of them forgot how for six hundred years.

By the by, they used to say this about our own Dark Age but it was so ridiculous that they have ceased saying it. I don't know the current status of 'British Pottery 400 -1000 AD' but I expect something has been cobbled together. If that isn't a mixed metaphor. Roman shoes survived but not so much Anglo-Saxon ones. They had to go barefoot, dummy.

Then there's the literacy bit. That's much more modern, c 3000 BC, but just as useful so everyone forgetting how it's done is just as puzzling. Though not perhaps as puzzling as doing it much the way they did it after they'd remembered again. We call that 'folk memory' in the trade.

I have to say though that the idea of living in the country being less healthy than living in towns is absolutely true. Have you been out there lately? There's shit all over the fields. Come on, Farmer Giles, get that reversed polythene bag, start picking it all up and then putting it in a wheelie bin. Not Dark Age Farmer Giles's obviously, they've lost the knowledge of the wheel. And now the state's collapsed, they can forget about Assyrian set aside payments.

Good point about the Decline of Art though. The Turner Prize tries for the same effect but it just doesn't do it for me.

[Mick Harper]

We are often inveighing against the academics' insistence on conflating what used to be the Dark Agers and what used to be the Middle Ages so they are now one seamless whole, the better to hide the join. This came from academia.edu this morning

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

Fresh in!

[Mick Harper]