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What happened to these advanced civilization of the antiquity? We have drawings of highly advanced siege engines yet it seem that after the fall of Rome we all

• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• LegitShady 6y ago
  Literally the dark ages...go read up on it.
  • McRask 6y ago
    Define irony
    • LegitShady 6y ago
      meh the dark ages are well studied and any minor effort to find some information on it will get someone more and more accurate information on it than asking on HN. It's the kind of question that has a short but useless answer that fits on hackernews 'fall of rome bad for progress' but the answer you should get is to go put in some basic effort and look it up - its easy to find information on using the terms 'dark ages'.
      • belval 6y ago
        You assessment is fair, but there is a lot of data out there that you simply won't find by using Google search. One exemple is the "A collection of unmitigated pedantry" blog which I found after someone used it in a comment when replying to me. If you google "Iron processing in the middle ages" you won't find Bret Devereaux' excellent series[1], yet it is a much better read than the Wikipedia page. [1] https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/ https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
• progre 6y ago
  Rome was the fiber internet of those days. When west rome collapsed europe went back to dial-up.
  • thaumasiotes 6y ago
    That's basically correct. Rome organized things on a very large scale with high productivity. Its replacement by less-organized tiny local systems cratered productivity, and the resulting systems couldn't afford to do the things Rome had done.
    • progre 6y ago
      I came by this analogy by Dan Carlin. He was talking about "Germania" but the same applies to Sweden. When Sweden was christianized around 1000 AD this was basically equivalent to "being connected to the internet". Suddenly the vast resources (intellectual and communicational) of the catholic church where available to the (now christian) elite, giving them a huge advantage.
      • thaumasiotes 6y ago
        Expanding on the theme a little bit, here's the opening from East Asia Before the West ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231153198/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231153198/ ): > In 1592, the Japanese general Hideyoshi invaded Korea, transporting over 160,000 troops on approximately seven hundred ships. He eventually mobilized half a million troops, intending to continue on to conquer China. Over sixty thousand Korean soldiers, eventually supported by over one hundred thousand Ming Chinese forces, defended the Korean peninsula. After six years of war, the Japanese retreated, and Hideyoshi died, having failed spectacularly in his quest. > The Imjin War "easily dwarfed those of their European contemporaries" and involved men and material five to ten times the scale of the Spanish Armada of 1588, which has been described as "the greatest military force ever assembled" in Renaissance Europe. [2] > [2] The Spanish armada consisted of thirty thousand troops on 130 ships and was defeated by twenty thousand English troops. The Korean peninsula is about 86,000 square miles. Japan is about 146,000. (Modern) Spain is 195,000 square miles. The fragmentation of Europe had really severe effects on the resources it was able to muster.
• kipchak 6y ago
  Very broadly speaking we tend to now think of history or time as being fairly linear with progress being made while ancients tended to think of history as cyclical and those before them as random. The Antikythera mechanism or the somewhat inexplicable late bronze age collapse and the unidentifiable "sea people" that caused it are good examples to indicate there's some degree of cyclicality, wherein people stumble across ruins more advanced than their own civilization and wonder where they could have gone.[1] Getting to the "why" part, Peter Turchin's work expanding on Ibn Khaldun's concept of Asabiyyah seems the most compelling to me. [1]https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias
  • HenryKissinger 6y ago
    Peter Turchin is not a professional historian. He's a hack whose theories have been debunked.
    • generalizations 6y ago
      People throw around "debunked" like it's final. In reality, it's just a lazy dismissal without substance. You want to say he's wrong about something, say what it is and give a reason. Otherwise you're just avoiding actual critical thought. (Also, I have no idea who Peter Turchin is. I just don't like it when people inflict their defective thinking on others.)
      • waserwill 6y ago
        The short of it: Turchin advocates for a field of 'cliodynamics' which tries to apply math to meaningfully describe and predict social trends, especially large ones such as collapse. His own description from a decade ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a A large project he directs and uses to study this: http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/ http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/ And has produced some interesting descriptive work such as: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full Some of his group's work [0] has been criticized on methodological grounds [1]. While some of his work may produce overdetermined models (trying to model history, considering all of the possible variables, can be tricky), the sorts of things he is interested in have been developed a fair bit, of late [2]. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 [1] https://github.com/babeheim/moralizing-gods-reanalysis https://github.com/babeheim/moralizing-gods-reanalysis [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7846.full https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7846.full
• ontekhunhsentuh 6y ago
  Knowledge is passed on from master to apprentice. Nearly-universal literacy helped to alleviate this issue somewhat, but even today most practical knowledge is passed on by people working together. The result is that even a gap of a single generation is enough for some knowledge to be lost. That's why Roman concrete was forgotten, why we can't build a Saturn V anymore, why you can't just start a chip-fab with enough money, and why it's so hard to maintain code without access to someone that designed the code-base. Most things, even if they're written down, are more accurately modelled in someone's brain.
  • phkahler 6y ago
    That's why odd gaps appear. Like an article about how China can't manufacture the balls for ball-point pens, or critical parts for jet engines. Maybe a few missing pieces are why Intel cant seem to figure out EUV lithography. None of these things are trivial and probably not documented in a way where a noob could pick them up.
    • shakezula 6y ago
      Even just the specific knowledge of building a house is probably a generation removed from most people these days. It scares me to think of just how fragile we really are.
      • hnuser123456 6y ago
        Sure, but what is forgotten makes room for novel ideas which are hopefully sometimes improvements. Plus, now we have computers to write and share this knowledge so it doesn't always have to be memorized.
        • 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
          > which are hopefully sometimes improvements The death of Latin is very upsetting.
• krapp 6y ago
  The fall of the Roman empire was essentially a post-apocalyptic event for the West. The economic and political collapse of Rome's satellite states halted the progress of technological and cultural development across subsequent generations. Many ancient Greek classics, such as the works of Aristotle might have been lost forever had they not been saved by Islamic scholars. And don't think it couldn't happen again. We've stored the entirety of our cultural knowledge on an ephemeral digital network that depends upon an intricate and vastly complex technological infrastructure. If that collapses, so does modern civilization, and we're back to horses and buggies.
  • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Modern digital recordings can last for a very long time. And old USB stick dug up in hundreds of years, can be reinterpreted by a future modern civilization. They're kind of all 'saved by Islamic scholars' in that sense?
    • tylermw 6y ago
      The data on that USB drive will deteriorate over a couple decades. NAND memory generally isn't an adequate format for archival purposes.
      • beagle3 6y ago
        Indeed. The BBC’s Domesday book was put on a pre-CD glass based optical medium which should last forever, but they managed to lose reading equipment for it, and a huge digitization effort from the 80s would have been lost (they published a call for help, and eventually someone found a reader in their garage.... but it was a close call)
      • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
        Yeah I see online empirical data that shows anywhere from years to centuries, depending on temperature. So not thousands of years.
    • krapp 6y ago
• 4gotunameagain 6y ago
  oops
  • ch4s3 6y ago
    This isn't really historically correct. There was no single burning of the Great Library of Alexandria that completely destroyed it. Like many libraries of antiquity it suffered several fires and recovered, but eventually fell into decline and disfavor as other academia centers sprang up.
• rozab 6y ago
  Jonathan Blow has an excellent talk on this topic in relation to software. https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk
• sho_hn 6y ago
  In the case of the Antikythera mechanism, it turns out the knowledge and technology weren't entirely lost. There's a fairly well-established throughline now from Babylonian observation-based astronomical tables to Greek philosophical views and mathematics (and craftmanship) to Arabic astrolabes (retaining some of the gear-train tech) and then back to Europe, to the monastic astronomical clocks. Then the escapement was invented and added in, and boom you got modern industrial technology. There are a lot of loss and bottlenecks along that journey, though. And many notable locations, installations and individuals. The history of instrument-making and how it is intertwined with philosophical and religious views on the skies and the topology of the universe is quite fascinating (e.g. the motivations for observing the sky, being able to produce predictions at all, crafting models, etc).
  • jcrubino 6y ago
    The Roman were truly a successful agrarian civilization, but became lackluster in progress from there. They never made an overwhelming shift to mathematical / science based civilization. They took over Syracuse with a mandate to keep Archimedes alive, but that failed. Some scholars say the only roman contribution to math was numerals. Basically they reaped the profits of empire, and fell into the cargo cults of opulent success, abandoning the prior agricultural based common sense by never integrating new ideas in the Aristotelian domains except for to pay homage to the originating culture enough to collect taxes.
    • dragonelite 6y ago
      You mean slave labor society right, if you can't expand the empire fast enough, you "human capital" stream dries up, its like taking on too much debt and not being able to keep up with paying.
      • jcrubino 6y ago
        I meant The Romans, started out as an agrarian culture where Ceasars were more interested in tending the farm than politics that evolved into the spectacle that Rome is now known for. Not ready to drop a book on HN regarding the nuance of Roman evolution just yet.
• tokai 6y ago
  As I understand it this idea of the dark ages isn't supported by modern historians.
  • DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    The "dark ages" is a good description of what happened throughout most of Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The nuance is that the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire survived much longer, and that somewhat well organized kingdoms remained in parts of the West for a time. But there was a remarkable economic and cultural collapse in most of the former Western Roman Empire. Large cities mostly disappeared. Literacy nearly disappeared, and was only really preserved by the Church. The extensive Roman system of taxation and the public goods it paid for (roads, aqueducts, baths, theaters, security) nearly disappeared. Without large cities, roads and security, long-distance trade collapsed and the economy became much simpler. Skilled trades that existed in the highly complex Roman economy were forgotten. Classical literature and philosophy were largely lost in the West. Essentially, urbanized classical civilization disappeared. There's a tendency to talk nowadays about the "transformation of the Roman Empire," rather than its fall, but I find that a bit too euphemistic.
    • stryan 6y ago
      > Large cities mostly disappeared. Literacy nearly disappeared, and was only really preserved by the Church. Neither of those were wide-spread in Western Europe during the Roman empire either. If you take a look at the major cities of the Roman Empire they're generally in either Italy, Byzantium, or North Africa[0]. All of which continued past the fall of Rome. Literacy rates were also questionable [1]. > Without large cities, roads and security, long-distance trade collapsed and the economy became much simpler. Long-distance trade certainly did not collapse after the fall. While it did decrease to certain extent in the near time period, it rebound within a century or two [2]. [0] https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=4db97741c7dd442ea06fd05ec394f496# https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=4db977...! [1] https://www.quora.com/Was-literacy-common-in-the-Roman-Empire?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Was-literacy-common-in-the-Roman-Empir... [2] https://oxfordre.com/economics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190625979.001.0001/acrefore-9780190625979-e-558 https://oxfordre.com/economics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190...
• jtolmar 6y ago
  When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the various successor states didn't have enough organizational capacity / surplus / numbers to do things like arm permanent standing armies with advanced siege engines, or build aqueducts and long paved roads everywhere. But there was still technological advancement in plows, water mills, and crop rotation even shortly after the collapse.
• dragonelite 6y ago
  A imperial decline mostly means a lot of chaos for a couple of decades, I think the most recent example would be the soviet union. It took Putin like almost 2 decades to recover/stabilize from the western plunder of Russia in the 90s via Russian oligarchs. Russia lost a lot of brain power in that period and lost a lot of institutional knowledge which might takes generations to rebuild again. Also the engineers and high ranking members of society have to resources to flee to more stable regions and carry their knowledge with them. Its also the engineers that are usually given grace or offers by a opposing forces/rivals.