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Very unconvincing article. Would have been better if it had stuck to the core assertion that "The fall, like the rise of a civilisation is a highly complex oper

by nkoren 9y ago

Very unconvincing article. Would have been better if it had stuck to the core assertion that "The fall, like the rise of a civilisation is a highly complex operation which can only be distorted by oversimplification. It may be taken as axiomatic that there was no one cause of cultural collapse." Yes, the actual causes of civilisational collapse are complex and varied, and do not exist to satisfy any particular narrative. And yes, these stories (most notably Easter Island) have been distorted and by modern polemical desires. And yes, with a few exceptions, "collapse" doesn't mean the total obliteration of a culture or their way of life. But to twist this into "Do civilisations collapse?", with the answer being "no", is wrong. If you were living in Rome in 477, then your civilisation was collapsing. The fact that Latin would still be the language of the elite for more than a thousand years, or that Corinthian capitals would never cease to be carved, or even that there were people in Constantinople, thousands of miles away, still contentedly calling themselves "Romans", would provide very little succour, or otherwise argue against the fact that the civilisation you grew up in and depended upon was comprehensively fucked. The same goes for the Maya, the Mycenaeans, the Harappa, and innumerable other civilisations. Any time you see population levels in precipitous decline, accompanied by a dramatic loss of technological and organisational capabilities, you are seeing evidence of some extremely unhappy individuals whose civilisations are, for them, collapsing. Arguments to the contrary -- on the basis that it's unevenly distributed, or that there will be elements of cultural continuity -- are academic. Experiential reality is that civilisations DO collapse.

paganel 9y ago
> Very unconvincing article. Would have been better if it had stuck to the core assertion that Sure is. In the parts of the world where I'm living (EasternEurope - Northern Balkans) the retreat of the Romans and the subsequent waves of migratory peoples sure as hell looked like a civilisational collapse, even archaeologically. When the Romans were here they had indoor bathrooms and heating, they had writing, they had amphitheaters, but after they left (or were wiped out, no-one knows for sure), which happened roughly between 250 CE and 300 CE, then another 600-700 years would pass until writing would make its archaeological presence felt again (around year 1000), ~1400-1500 years until regular theater shows would be held again (in the late 1700s) and even now half of the country doesn't have indoor bathrooms like the Romans did (my parents don't, for example).
- Retric 9y ago
  Indoor bathrooms did not go away on some specific Tuesday, they also where not that common around 250 CE. The real question is what happens to the 98% of the population that actually maintain day to day civilization not what happens to the people who make it into history books even as a footnote of a footnote.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    They very likely did. It takes a single small war for destroying what is already constructed, and then the population realizes they can't build those anymore because the know-how is dispersed, and many key people aren't around anymore.
    - Retric 9y ago
      I don't think this was a know how thing so much as an efficiency issue. If you're rich you can have a servant to draw water and maintain a chaimber pot easily. However, having indoor plumbing in an area that freezes is a complex issue that requires a lot of infrastructure and maintenance. Outside of novelty factor the gains seem minimal relative to the costs. Now, indoor plumbing has larger benifits for city's, but again I suspect it was considered not worth the cost instead of simply being 'lost'.
      - namlem 9y ago
        It probably started with cost due to economic collapse, but eventually people would have lost the know-how as well.
        Retric 9y ago
        I don't agree that economic collapse is the correct term as it suggests total production drops alongside things like hyperinflation etc. Rome allowed for an incredible amount of wealth transfer, but the total economic output of Europe at say 500CE was not significantly lower than the total economic output of Eurpoe at say 200CE. Watermills were developed by the Romans, but continued to improve though the middle ages. Iron smelting has a long history, but was improved though the middle ages. You can look at a huge range of productivity increases throughout the middle ages as yields improved due to constant innovation.
yxhuvud 9y ago
If you were living around 477 you were probably a slave, and the fall of Rome coincided with the ban of slavery, so you probably ended up better off just BECAUSE "civilization" was dying. Good riddance.
- dash2 9y ago
  Where's the evidence for this? This answer (https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070607071114AApaIqD https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070607071114A...) suggests slavery persisted long beyond 477.
- WillReplyfFood 9y ago
  Goodbye slavery, hello indentured servant. No longer temple building, instead raise those churches, no longer public cruxifictions, instead heathen burning. No longer useless conquests, instead holy crusades.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    If you check, I think you'll find that about 600 years passed between major temple building and major church building.
- Veen 9y ago
  The alternative may have been a gradual improvement of moral and ethical thinking, leading to the end of slavery, while retaining the benefits of civilization and its technological achievements. There were anti-slavery thinkers at the time. Revolution and other types of civilizational collapse essentially never lead to a reduction in suffering or misery, as the 20th century attests. Inequality may be reduced, but that's just because every one is poorer. But it's a moot point because slavery didn't end in 477.
- rhcom2 9y ago
  Instead of being a Roman slave, you could become a Vandal slave or a Hun slave though.
maze-le 9y ago
> If you were living in Rome in 477 Then your civilisation was in a constant state of flux beginning at least in the 230s with the advent of the "barracks emperors". The "fall from grace" of the roman civilisation was a lengthy process with several changes not only to roman society but also to the tribes surrounding Rome (better organization due to trade- and military links to Rome; introduction of advanced metalurgy; christianity). I bet, for the people living in that time period, as a roman citizen of the Western Empire, not much would have changed, except for some details in taxation and military conscription. Oh yes, and the dude you pay taxes to was now a military leader of germanic descent who called himself King, instead of a individual of the roman aristocracy, who called himself Emperor. In retrospect though, this date can be seen as a definitive turning point with no way back to the days of the past. But only due to the fact that a title (Emperor of the West) was abolished. If anything, the West was 'comprehensively fucked' long before that date.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >I bet, for the people living in that time period, as a roman citizen of the Western Empire, not much would have changed, except for some details in taxation and military conscription. Oh yes, and the dude you pay taxes to was now a military leader of germanic descent who called himself King, instead of a individual of the roman aristocracy, who called himself Emperor. In fact lots have changed, except if you constrain the consideration only to rural places. The life of a citizen in Rome before and after the collapse would have been very different (that said, the collapse indeed took centuries to be completed).
- oblio 9y ago
  > Oh yes, and the dude you pay taxes to was now a military leader of germanic descent who called himself King, instead of a individual of the roman aristocracy, who called himself Emperor. Even that was not a major factor at the time. Several emperors had already been of Germanic origins, plus many others were of non-Latin origin and had been from quite early on. Also not all emperors were former Roman aristocrats. At the time it was probably much less of an event than one of the two recent sacks of Rome.
ThomPete 9y ago
To the people living in the time it happened I think it's fair to say that civilizations don't collapse in the way we normally think about collapse.
golergka 9y ago
> If you were living in Rome ..at any time, your lifespan wasn't enough to experience the whole collapse - only local ups and downs. If you were living in 477, you only had distant stories and chronicles about Pax Romana. The tectonic change was too slow for any particular person to experience.
- quotemstr 9y ago
  People regularly lived to be 70 and 80. Not as many as today, but enough.
  - boomboomsubban 9y ago
    The Pax Romana ended three hundred years before 477.
- PopsiclePete 9y ago
  That's not true about the lifespan. Surviving into your 40's was not as common, but if you made it to 50, you'd make it to 60 or even 70, why not. It wasn't that rare. We live longer on average now because medicine can cure so much in the early stages of our lives.
ptero 9y ago
> The fall, like the rise of a civilisation is a highly complex operation which can only be distorted by oversimplification I agree with this and actually think the article does a decent job of arguing this case against the alarmist approach "X killed civilization A; let's put a lot our efforts in combating X now", which seems to be getting more and more common today. > Any time you see population levels in precipitous decline, accompanied by a dramatic loss of technological and organisational capabilities, you are seeing evidence of some extremely unhappy individuals whose civilisations are, for them, collapsing. It seems to me that you are switching definitions somewhat. I understood the article's "civilizational" collapse to mean a level of decline that, once the society crosses some Rubicon, is irreversible within a generation or two. If I understand your argument you are using collapse from personal perspective: enough people see their lives collapse or decline enough. To me, that second definition is a lot less severe. If you look at Eastern Europe during the second world war (Cambodia of Pol Pot's times, etc. etc.) those events are likely to be viewed as a collapse by many people suffering through them, the civilization is not lost and society bounces back within at most a couple of generations once the stimuli are reset.
- adrianN 9y ago
  The difference between localized collapses today and in the late Bronze Age is that today's communication and trade is so much faster that rebuilding within a couple of decades is feasible. Knowledge isn't really lost and what material goods have been destroyed can quickly be manufactured and imported from elsewhere. This was not the case for most of human history. Once you lost people knowing, e.g. how to forge metal, that knowledge had to be rediscovered mostly from scratch. Trade has been extremely slow, so rebuilding infrastructure was much more difficult. Luckily we haven't seen a globalized collapse and a dark age in quite some time.
  - dbingham 9y ago
    Computer modeling suggests climate change might just do it though. The disruptions that come from it would only continue to become more extreme post-collapse -- and our ability to quickly adjust in such a way as to reduce them would be destroyed with civilization -- making rebuilding difficult or impossible. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/m...
interfixus 9y ago
If you were living in Rome in the year 477, I wonder if you were deemed part of a cranky unmentionable fringe for expressing the idea that your civilisation was decaying and indeed collapsing all around you.
- olavk 9y ago
  No, the Roman culture always considered themselves in a state of decline compared to the mythical "golden age", so that would be the mainstream viewpoint.
  - PopsiclePete 9y ago
    Hell, many Americans today consider the US to be in decline compared to some equally mythical period of the 1950's when men were men, women knew their place, and youngsters respected their elders.
    - dboreham 9y ago
      That period wasn’t totally mythical as it corresponded to a time when much of the rest of the world’s production capacity had been destroyed by war and many of the world’s great countries had been empoverished fighting said war, and 10’s of millions of people in other countries had been recently killed by war. As a result the USA enjoyed a one-time huge commercial advantage that may not have been obvious to everyone (and it seems still isn’t).
- quotemstr 9y ago
  477 wasn't that bad. Ravenna was capital, but Rome itself was kept in decent shape. The forum continued to be swept. The aqueducts kept working. Still, at the time, the population was declining and civic upkeep became harder and harder. The Senate still met. There are stories of thieves stealing whole statues while poorly paid watchmen slept or we're bribed not to notice. It reminds me a bit of Detroit. Still, the structure of the city was fairly well preserved. It wasn't until the Gothic Wars in a few decades until Rome was utterly wrecked and depopulated. The city changed hands five or six times, and armies frequently cut the aqueducts, never to be repaired. The last recorded act of the Senate was in 603. Then, around 900, a few earthquakes caused the final collapse of long neglected buildings. Nobody cared to fix them, but they did use the rubble for other construction over the next few hundred years. (Not that there was that much new construction: Rome's population crashed from over a million to 30,000.)
flexie 9y ago
Did the British Empire collapse? Yes (and it’s political influence seems to continue it’s diminishing). Did the collapse happen while the life of ordinary Britains improved greatly? Yes. Did the USSR collapse? Yes. Is the quality of life for the ordinary Russians better today? Yes. Holy Roman Empire, Greek civilisation, Roman empire: Same story
- smallnamespace 9y ago
  > Is the quality of life for the ordinary Russians better today? Maybe today it is better, but that didn't help the millions of Russians who drank themselves to an early grave since the 90s: http://www.aei.org/publication/russias-demographic-disaster/ http://www.aei.org/publication/russias-demographic-disaster/ > Russia witnessed 6.6 million more deaths in this fifteen-year period than would have occurred if the country had merely sustained the mortality schedules from two decades before. http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/09/02/dying-russians/ http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/09/02/dying-russians/ > By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner. Sadly, the poor, rural, white parts of America are going through a similar demographic crisis right now, while the rest of the country is busy vilifying them as racists. Systems collapses have very negative consequences for those who depended on the old system.
  - literallycancer 9y ago
    The only bad thing about the collapse of Soviet Russia is that it didn't happen sooner.
- colechristensen 9y ago
  Those are nations, not civilizations. Civilization in the 20th century and some significant time before that was global and ever increasingly so. The USSR and British "collapse" were the loss of empires, not a collapse of civilization. The systems of society were shuffled but not destroyed.
  - 9y ago
quotemstr 9y ago
Collapse denial is one of the more frustrating parts of contemporary historiography. It feels rooted in contemporary post-modernism in academia: if we acknowledge the possibility of "collapse", then we create a rank order of civilization, in which the pre-collapse society is "better" than post-collapse society. Since, under modern postmodern doctrine, all societies are equally worthy, "collapse" therefore doesn't happen. It's this mental impulses that drives us to utter drivel like "Rome never fell". I strongly suggest Greg Ward-Perkins' books on the subject.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
autokad 9y ago
i agree, just because a few remnants of a civilization continue on doesn't mean it didn't collapse. perhaps they are confusing collapse with complete, absolute annihilation.

by nkoren 9y ago

paganel 9y ago

> Very unconvincing article. Would have been better if it had stuck to the core assertion that Sure is. In the parts of the world where I'm living (EasternEurope - Northern Balkans) the retreat of the Romans and the subsequent waves of migratory peoples sure as hell looked like a civilisational collapse, even archaeologically. When the Romans were here they had indoor bathrooms and heating, they had writing, they had amphitheaters, but after they left (or were wiped out, no-one knows for sure), which happened roughly between 250 CE and 300 CE, then another 600-700 years would pass until writing would make its archaeological presence felt again (around year 1000), ~1400-1500 years until regular theater shows would be held again (in the late 1700s) and even now half of the country doesn't have indoor bathrooms like the Romans did (my parents don't, for example).

Retric 9y ago
Indoor bathrooms did not go away on some specific Tuesday, they also where not that common around 250 CE. The real question is what happens to the 98% of the population that actually maintain day to day civilization not what happens to the people who make it into history books even as a footnote of a footnote.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  They very likely did. It takes a single small war for destroying what is already constructed, and then the population realizes they can't build those anymore because the know-how is dispersed, and many key people aren't around anymore.
  - Retric 9y ago
    I don't think this was a know how thing so much as an efficiency issue. If you're rich you can have a servant to draw water and maintain a chaimber pot easily. However, having indoor plumbing in an area that freezes is a complex issue that requires a lot of infrastructure and maintenance. Outside of novelty factor the gains seem minimal relative to the costs. Now, indoor plumbing has larger benifits for city's, but again I suspect it was considered not worth the cost instead of simply being 'lost'.
    - namlem 9y ago
      It probably started with cost due to economic collapse, but eventually people would have lost the know-how as well.
      - Retric 9y ago
        I don't agree that economic collapse is the correct term as it suggests total production drops alongside things like hyperinflation etc. Rome allowed for an incredible amount of wealth transfer, but the total economic output of Europe at say 500CE was not significantly lower than the total economic output of Eurpoe at say 200CE. Watermills were developed by the Romans, but continued to improve though the middle ages. Iron smelting has a long history, but was improved though the middle ages. You can look at a huge range of productivity increases throughout the middle ages as yields improved due to constant innovation.

yxhuvud 9y ago

If you were living around 477 you were probably a slave, and the fall of Rome coincided with the ban of slavery, so you probably ended up better off just BECAUSE "civilization" was dying. Good riddance.

dash2 9y ago
Where's the evidence for this? This answer (https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070607071114AApaIqD https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070607071114A...) suggests slavery persisted long beyond 477.
WillReplyfFood 9y ago
Goodbye slavery, hello indentured servant. No longer temple building, instead raise those churches, no longer public cruxifictions, instead heathen burning. No longer useless conquests, instead holy crusades.
- mcguire 9y ago
  If you check, I think you'll find that about 600 years passed between major temple building and major church building.
Veen 9y ago
The alternative may have been a gradual improvement of moral and ethical thinking, leading to the end of slavery, while retaining the benefits of civilization and its technological achievements. There were anti-slavery thinkers at the time. Revolution and other types of civilizational collapse essentially never lead to a reduction in suffering or misery, as the 20th century attests. Inequality may be reduced, but that's just because every one is poorer. But it's a moot point because slavery didn't end in 477.
rhcom2 9y ago
Instead of being a Roman slave, you could become a Vandal slave or a Hun slave though.

maze-le 9y ago

> If you were living in Rome in 477 Then your civilisation was in a constant state of flux beginning at least in the 230s with the advent of the "barracks emperors". The "fall from grace" of the roman civilisation was a lengthy process with several changes not only to roman society but also to the tribes surrounding Rome (better organization due to trade- and military links to Rome; introduction of advanced metalurgy; christianity). I bet, for the people living in that time period, as a roman citizen of the Western Empire, not much would have changed, except for some details in taxation and military conscription. Oh yes, and the dude you pay taxes to was now a military leader of germanic descent who called himself King, instead of a individual of the roman aristocracy, who called himself Emperor. In retrospect though, this date can be seen as a definitive turning point with no way back to the days of the past. But only due to the fact that a title (Emperor of the West) was abolished. If anything, the West was 'comprehensively fucked' long before that date.

coldtea 9y ago
>I bet, for the people living in that time period, as a roman citizen of the Western Empire, not much would have changed, except for some details in taxation and military conscription. Oh yes, and the dude you pay taxes to was now a military leader of germanic descent who called himself King, instead of a individual of the roman aristocracy, who called himself Emperor. In fact lots have changed, except if you constrain the consideration only to rural places. The life of a citizen in Rome before and after the collapse would have been very different (that said, the collapse indeed took centuries to be completed).
oblio 9y ago
> Oh yes, and the dude you pay taxes to was now a military leader of germanic descent who called himself King, instead of a individual of the roman aristocracy, who called himself Emperor. Even that was not a major factor at the time. Several emperors had already been of Germanic origins, plus many others were of non-Latin origin and had been from quite early on. Also not all emperors were former Roman aristocrats. At the time it was probably much less of an event than one of the two recent sacks of Rome.

ThomPete 9y ago

To the people living in the time it happened I think it's fair to say that civilizations don't collapse in the way we normally think about collapse.

golergka 9y ago

> If you were living in Rome ..at any time, your lifespan wasn't enough to experience the whole collapse - only local ups and downs. If you were living in 477, you only had distant stories and chronicles about Pax Romana. The tectonic change was too slow for any particular person to experience.

quotemstr 9y ago
People regularly lived to be 70 and 80. Not as many as today, but enough.
- boomboomsubban 9y ago
  The Pax Romana ended three hundred years before 477.
PopsiclePete 9y ago
That's not true about the lifespan. Surviving into your 40's was not as common, but if you made it to 50, you'd make it to 60 or even 70, why not. It wasn't that rare. We live longer on average now because medicine can cure so much in the early stages of our lives.

ptero 9y ago

> The fall, like the rise of a civilisation is a highly complex operation which can only be distorted by oversimplification I agree with this and actually think the article does a decent job of arguing this case against the alarmist approach "X killed civilization A; let's put a lot our efforts in combating X now", which seems to be getting more and more common today. > Any time you see population levels in precipitous decline, accompanied by a dramatic loss of technological and organisational capabilities, you are seeing evidence of some extremely unhappy individuals whose civilisations are, for them, collapsing. It seems to me that you are switching definitions somewhat. I understood the article's "civilizational" collapse to mean a level of decline that, once the society crosses some Rubicon, is irreversible within a generation or two. If I understand your argument you are using collapse from personal perspective: enough people see their lives collapse or decline enough. To me, that second definition is a lot less severe. If you look at Eastern Europe during the second world war (Cambodia of Pol Pot's times, etc. etc.) those events are likely to be viewed as a collapse by many people suffering through them, the civilization is not lost and society bounces back within at most a couple of generations once the stimuli are reset.

adrianN 9y ago
The difference between localized collapses today and in the late Bronze Age is that today's communication and trade is so much faster that rebuilding within a couple of decades is feasible. Knowledge isn't really lost and what material goods have been destroyed can quickly be manufactured and imported from elsewhere. This was not the case for most of human history. Once you lost people knowing, e.g. how to forge metal, that knowledge had to be rediscovered mostly from scratch. Trade has been extremely slow, so rebuilding infrastructure was much more difficult. Luckily we haven't seen a globalized collapse and a dark age in quite some time.
- dbingham 9y ago
  Computer modeling suggests climate change might just do it though. The disruptions that come from it would only continue to become more extreme post-collapse -- and our ability to quickly adjust in such a way as to reduce them would be destroyed with civilization -- making rebuilding difficult or impossible. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/m...

interfixus 9y ago

If you were living in Rome in the year 477, I wonder if you were deemed part of a cranky unmentionable fringe for expressing the idea that your civilisation was decaying and indeed collapsing all around you.

olavk 9y ago
No, the Roman culture always considered themselves in a state of decline compared to the mythical "golden age", so that would be the mainstream viewpoint.
- PopsiclePete 9y ago
  Hell, many Americans today consider the US to be in decline compared to some equally mythical period of the 1950's when men were men, women knew their place, and youngsters respected their elders.
  - dboreham 9y ago
    That period wasn’t totally mythical as it corresponded to a time when much of the rest of the world’s production capacity had been destroyed by war and many of the world’s great countries had been empoverished fighting said war, and 10’s of millions of people in other countries had been recently killed by war. As a result the USA enjoyed a one-time huge commercial advantage that may not have been obvious to everyone (and it seems still isn’t).
quotemstr 9y ago
477 wasn't that bad. Ravenna was capital, but Rome itself was kept in decent shape. The forum continued to be swept. The aqueducts kept working. Still, at the time, the population was declining and civic upkeep became harder and harder. The Senate still met. There are stories of thieves stealing whole statues while poorly paid watchmen slept or we're bribed not to notice. It reminds me a bit of Detroit. Still, the structure of the city was fairly well preserved. It wasn't until the Gothic Wars in a few decades until Rome was utterly wrecked and depopulated. The city changed hands five or six times, and armies frequently cut the aqueducts, never to be repaired. The last recorded act of the Senate was in 603. Then, around 900, a few earthquakes caused the final collapse of long neglected buildings. Nobody cared to fix them, but they did use the rubble for other construction over the next few hundred years. (Not that there was that much new construction: Rome's population crashed from over a million to 30,000.)

flexie 9y ago

Did the British Empire collapse? Yes (and it’s political influence seems to continue it’s diminishing). Did the collapse happen while the life of ordinary Britains improved greatly? Yes. Did the USSR collapse? Yes. Is the quality of life for the ordinary Russians better today? Yes. Holy Roman Empire, Greek civilisation, Roman empire: Same story

smallnamespace 9y ago
> Is the quality of life for the ordinary Russians better today? Maybe today it is better, but that didn't help the millions of Russians who drank themselves to an early grave since the 90s: http://www.aei.org/publication/russias-demographic-disaster/ http://www.aei.org/publication/russias-demographic-disaster/ > Russia witnessed 6.6 million more deaths in this fifteen-year period than would have occurred if the country had merely sustained the mortality schedules from two decades before. http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/09/02/dying-russians/ http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/09/02/dying-russians/ > By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner. Sadly, the poor, rural, white parts of America are going through a similar demographic crisis right now, while the rest of the country is busy vilifying them as racists. Systems collapses have very negative consequences for those who depended on the old system.
- literallycancer 9y ago
  The only bad thing about the collapse of Soviet Russia is that it didn't happen sooner.
colechristensen 9y ago
Those are nations, not civilizations. Civilization in the 20th century and some significant time before that was global and ever increasingly so. The USSR and British "collapse" were the loss of empires, not a collapse of civilization. The systems of society were shuffled but not destroyed.
- 9y ago

quotemstr 9y ago

Collapse denial is one of the more frustrating parts of contemporary historiography. It feels rooted in contemporary post-modernism in academia: if we acknowledge the possibility of "collapse", then we create a rank order of civilization, in which the pre-collapse society is "better" than post-collapse society. Since, under modern postmodern doctrine, all societies are equally worthy, "collapse" therefore doesn't happen. It's this mental impulses that drives us to utter drivel like "Rome never fell". I strongly suggest Greg Ward-Perkins' books on the subject.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

autokad 9y ago

i agree, just because a few remnants of a civilization continue on doesn't mean it didn't collapse. perhaps they are confusing collapse with complete, absolute annihilation.