Someone on a message board once told me the time just before Christ, that was the real modern age. The age of Caesar and Alexander the Great, Pythagoras and Hippocrates. They had clocks, they had computers. The only thing they didn't have oddly was the lightbulb. Go figure. Then Christianity was introduced and the Dark Ages followed. But you know Carl Sagan once pointed out, what if that original modern age continued? Where would we be by now? Probably interstellar travel and faster than light speed. Time travel too and travel to other dimensions. Plus we'd cure hunger and all disease. Think about it.
The times of ancient Egypt and the birth of Jesus, only give us 2 points in time of how human intelligence has advanced and regressed. But in reality, how many times has this happened. Don't forget that you can put a plus or minus sign before infinity. In reality, thinking about the start of AD, should the resurrection not have given us a few clues. Then who invented the sand bucket that governments around the world order us to put our heads in when we ask too many questions. A final point. Since we are led to believe in one God. Where do those little green, grey and white men who keep popping up every day go to church. TS Elliott may have had the right idea. ‘A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.’ And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling And running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, And three trees on the low sky, And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And feet kicking the empty wine-skins, But there was no information, and so we continued And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory. All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.
That is wrong on so many levels... Everything before JC? All hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution? That is a long stretch. Also computers? There were some exotic mechanical devices that we call "computers" sometimes, but nothing ever remotely related to the digital era ones. The post seems focused on an Eurocentric narrative and the Greek or Greco-Roman antiquity. They had some interesting advanced ideas for the time, but also serious limitations. - Politically and socially fragmented. Intellectual work was the prerogative of slave owning elites, most of the population was wasting potential intellectual resources. Fragmented city states could not gat anything near the infrastructure and funding modern states can provide to science. - for long stretches of time and amongst many authors they had a strong ideological distaste for applied science. It was seen by many of the most important philosophers as a pure idealistic "l'art pour l'art" and endeavour, not something to be applied. - before the introduction of arabic/indic numerals arithmetic was extremely rudimentary. The writing system did not allow for more. They had fantastic developments in geometry, everything done today in basic education, a lot even in high school was already there. But they were really bed with numbers, numerical side explorations exploded somewhere from late renaissance onwards, I think, with a nod to all the precursors. Dark Ages did not follow Christianity as such, but the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West (there was still the eastern Byzantine Roman Empire live and kicking until Ottoman conquests in late Middle Ages). When the empire crumbled local chieftains and tribes stated to reassert their own political power and struggle for dominance. It was way more political and military than religious. Also the Dark Ages were not really that dark, and the Antiquity was not really that bright. It is a reductionist narrative started in renaissance, and later emphasised by neoclassicist liberals, for their own creation myth needs. You can make a very good argument for "Dark Ages" to be way more advanced than Antiquity both socially and scientifically.
