Topic: The Dark Ages?
Ok, so I was watching the History Channel's program on the dark ages last night and was really irritated by their treatment of the subject. In their typical History Channel way they glossed over the most important question of the whole topic: How did civilisation go from enlightened to ignorant and back again?
Their explanation was that the invading barbarian tribes conquered Rome and all of its outposts, plunging the world into patches of struggling tribal groups that essentially had no way to regain the architecture or learning of the past because they were so busy trying to survive. Add the rise of the Christianity cult and the devastation of the plague to that as well.
I ain't buyin' it. The concept of the "Dark Ages" never sat right with me. Even when I was younger, I remember asking my mom-who was an Art History major- how it was possible that we went from enlightened civilisations that had amazing sculpture of the human body [i.e. hellenistic period], the Roman form of government-aquaducts etc. And then suddenly, years of stupidity, backwardness, illiteracy, and inability to craft a believable image of the human form!?
I mean, for example, from this:
to this??:
Did people just forget how to sculpt!? Where were all the artisans? Why did their knowledge evaporate? And why did the plague wipe out like half the entire world?! One day it was just THERE, and it killed off everyone! The next day gone....When have we ever had an epidemic like that? Seriously disturbing and strange.
They showed a world map of how the plague spread across the globe. I swear, it looked like an image of some scientist using a dropper to introduce bacterial culture into a petri dish! There was a little black cloud that fell onto the map and then dispersed like black ink in water.
Then there's Anatoly Fomenko. A member of the Russian Academy of Science who's discovered all sorts of timeline inconsistencies with the "dark ages":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Ti … ch_Fomenko
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C_52bZxie4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaeEJeyY … mp;search=
I smell alien intervention How about you?
-Tyrannosaurus rex