Amazing to think at the very moment Europe was entering the Dark Ages, the Vikings were starting to raid, and Muhammad was having his visions, this civilization had built something comparable to what the Roman Empire had done in italy..
Doesn't seem nearly as black and white when you consider the Mayans were themselves way ahead of all of Europe with their use of elastomers, effectively creating vulcanized rubber over a thousand years before Charles Goodyear.
Hard to consider this that sophisticated in the twenty-first century but their use of the number zero also predates Europe by hundreds of years.
The Mayans used the corbeled vault, which is much more primitive than the arch. There's a reason people who invented arches never went back to the corbeled vault.
Compare any of the Mayan buildings with the Roman Coliseum in sophistication. I've been through Chichen Itza and spent some time looking closely at the construction of it and the neighboring buildings. I encourage you to do the same.
The Roman "style" of aqueducts used arches so they could cross valleys while maintaining a constant slope. I don't think the Mayans had that, and the Mayan aqueducts didn't seem to be very long, like 200 feet vs the Roman miles long ones.
The Romans also had hypocausts, which were a method of piping in heated air under the floor to warm the house.
The Medieval Iberia still used similar conducts to heat the cities and villages. It's impressive how much of the Roman empire (from the street layouts to home architecture) into the cities.
In the 90s the same people who today refuse to admit the Mayans were, on the whole, less advanced than the Romans were 100%, absolutely, no-contest foaming at the mouth to lynch Samuel Huntington for being an unrepentant racist, I mean, for releasing "Clash of Civilizations"
To be fair, the Romans had so many cultures they could draw their technology from- the Chinese, the Indians, the Middle East, etc. The Roman Empire was kind of a group project with three or four groups.
The Mayans were essentially isolated on their continent.
It should be noted that while in general metallurgy was less advanced in America, there also was a domain where it was more advanced than in the rest of the world.
There is one metal that has been discovered by the South-American natives, before the contact with Europe, and which was unknown elsewhere: platinum. The Europeans have learned from them about platinum.
Moreover, not only the South-Americans had discovered platinum, but they had also developed a technology to make objects of platinum. This is no small achievement, because platinum was impossible to melt or forge with the means available at that time.
The South-Americans had worked around this, by inventing a form of powder metallurgy. To make things of platinum, they sintered platinum powder and nuggets with gold.
This technology has been lost after the Spanish occupation, so the Europeans have developed techniques for platinum processing only much later, around the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century.
While platinum itself had been unknown in the rest of the world before the contact with South America, some platinum-group metals had been known, i.e. the natural alloy of osmium with iridium was known in the ancient Egypt, Greece and Roman Empire, in the form of nuggets that were mixed with those of gold in alluvial deposits. However none of the ancient Mediterranean people discovered any method for forging or melting the Os-Ir nuggets, so they were called "adamant", i.e. "untamed" (which has been distorted in the modern "diamond"). This was the original meaning of adamant/diamond. Only after the wars of Alexander the Great in India, the Europeans have learned about what are now called "diamonds", which were then named by the Greeks and Romans "Indian diamonds", to distinguish them from the Os-Ir diamonds. Later, the knowledge about Os-Ir nuggets has been forgotten and the references to them in Hesiod, Platon or Pliny the Elder have been mistranslated until now.
The Mayan discovering platinum and maybe working it a bit had no perceptible effect on their civilization, if only because a few bits of it did not provide an opportunity to use it.
Iron and steel, on the other hand, are transformative to civilization and the Romans made extensive use of it. For example, nails make it easy to build wooden structures.
(Gold and silver are also rather useless for pre-industrial civilizations, as they are not strong enough. Their usage was confined to decoration and currency.)
Platinum was worked mainly in the territory of present Colombia and Ecuador.
Some jewelry may have been traded until North America, but they would have been certainly rare by the Mayan.
Because the South-Americans did not have iron or iron alloys, but they had rather abundant gold and silver and platinum, the usage of precious metals was not confined to decoration and currency. For instance the use of nails made of gold-copper-silver alloy was frequent and also various tools were made from such a gold-copper-silver alloy (named "tumbaga" by the Spaniards).
Pure gold, silver or copper are extremely soft, but their alloys can have a decent strength, even if not comparable to steel.
The discovery of platinum in South America had a significant impact on the entire human civilization.
Initially the Spaniards have despised the metal because, unlike for the gold and silver that they took back to Europe, nobody would give anything in exchange for the unknown platinum, and they also did not know how to work the metal into useful things. Hence the Spanish name of the metal, "platina", as a diminutive of "plata", i.e. silver, as at that time it was much less valuable than silver.
Nevertheless, platinum samples have been taken back to Europe, and eventually, in the middle of the 18th century they have arisen the curiosity of the chemists, who began to study its properties.
After it was established that platinum is an ideal material for vessels used in chemical research, due to its resistance to chemical reagents and high temperatures, platinum has played an exceedingly important role in chemistry around the end of the 18th century and during the 19th century, i.e. during the time when the majority of the chemical elements have been discovered, frequently during analyses performed in platinum vessels.
Other early important use of platinum was for the standards of mass and of length of the metric system, which ensured an accuracy and reproducibility of the measurements much better than anything before that.
I have mentioned these things precisely because they are very little known by the general public and even by those who are supposed to be professionals in such domains. Because of this, references are scarce.
References about the platinum technology in South America before the arrival of the Europeans:
"Ancient Platinum Technology in South America, its use by the indians in pre-hispanic times", by David A. Scott and Warwick Bray, Institute of Archaeology, University of London, 1980.
"Metallurgy of Gold and Platinum among the Pre-Columbian Indians", Nature, 1936.
About the knowledge of the natural osmium-iridium alloy in the ancient Mediterranean world, there are several archaeology articles with chemical analyses of Egyptian gold artifacts, most of which contain as inclusions small nuggets of osmium-iridium alloy, whose cause is the fact that the gold was collected from river deposits, where the gold nuggets and the Os-Ir nuggets accumulate together, so when the gold was melted it incorporated the Os-Ir nuggets. (For instance: "The analysis of platinum-group element inclusions in gold antiquities", N.D. Meeksa, M.S. Titea, a British Museum Research Laboratory, London WC1B 3DG, England)
These archaeological finds match perfectly the description of adamant from Plato (in "Timaeus" and in "The Statesman"), where adamant is described as the "knot of gold", which is found together with gold, but it cannot be shaped like gold, because it is too hard and impossible to melt. The same description of adamant is provided by Pliny the Elder in his tenth book, which adds besides it the description of the Indian adamants, which are completely different from the classical adamant, being octahedral crystals, not metal nuggets, which matches what are now called diamonds.
The earliest reference to "adamant" is at Hesiod, who describes how Gaia has made a sickle blade from "grey adamant", for the castration of Uranus, which makes no sense as a reference to modern diamonds, which are neither grey nor suitable to be forged into a blade, but it makes perfect sense as a reference to the grey Os-Ir alloy, the hardest metal known to Hesiod, which humans were too weak to forge, but surely a huge goddess like Gaia should be able to forge. Other references to Os-Ir adamant are in Aeschylus (Prometheus is bound with chains made of adamant; another use that makes perfect sense for a metal, but which would be impossible for fragile diamond crystals, which cannot be forged into chain links) and in Theophrastus.
There are a few other articles about the history of platinum and platinum-group metals that have relevant information about all these things, but I do not remember now the titles or authors.
The fact that by searching the Internet you can find a lot of incomplete or even completely incorrect information about many things proves that one should never trust the answers given by an LLM for any really important question, because an LLM will provide the information most likely to be found in its training sources, while truth cannot be based on democracy. On the contrary, much too frequently the majority opinion is more likely to be incorrect, than the minority opinion.
The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture. There was a genuine decline at the fringes, which includes Britain which maybe why it was so ingrained in Anglophone culture, but also history written by imperialists like Gibbon who thought the decline of Empires an intrinsically bad and regressive thing.
The Eastern Roman Empire went on, the western broke up into successor states. Some things got worse, some things got better, there was progress made (especially for women and people at the bottom like slaves), and the early medieval period laid the foundations for progress later on.
> Muhammad was having his visions
Is that a bad thing? I know less about the history of that region than some others, but I think you need to look at prior conditions in places such as the Arabian peninsula to assess that.
The European Dark Ages was also a narrative largely invented by the Renaissance, which was trying to distinguish itself from what came before. Material wellbeing did improve overall, but that was because a huge portion of the population was killed off from the plague, freeing up tons of resources.
It wasn't a straight jump from Columbus or the Iberian unification, the Enlightenment and the late Middle Ages overlap a lot. I'd say from 1200's things began to 'instituonalize', from first proto-parliaments, to Iberian Fueros, to different merchants and thinkerers eroding the Ancient Regime a little by supporting capable people with the money of rich people (Maecenas? in Latin).
They probably meant that Muhammad was on his way to become a prophet and a future leader who would lay the foundation of the Islamic empires that would span around most of the world (while at the same time, Europe's decline had begin).
From the peak-civilization of Ancient Greeks a steady slow decline started and continued until the calamity of 5th cent AD. Pick your start of middle ages sometime there.
For a very long time a dark cloud was hiding the sun of wisdom until the scientific and other conquests came over. Pick your end there.
> The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture.
They definitely did. Books stopped being published, even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution, and basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments that make current postmodern academic culture look reasonable.
We don't know what normal people were doing, technology advanced at a snail's pace, we don't even know where many cities and towns were located. We know far more about the Romans and the Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe. We're very lucky that some sense of religious nostalgia for the Classical age (from the fact that the Christian religion was an outgrowth of the late Roman state) kept them from losing or destroying all of the knowledge and documents of antiquity.
The Western world was saved from 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants. It wasn't that they were geniuses, but that they thought that there was some value to the individual other than service to the imbred descendants of Roman generals. This reinvented the concepts of philosophical disagreement and intellectual productivity in Europe.
The "there was no Dark Ages" revision is from people who would love to take us back to the Dark Ages. Nostalgic for the rule of elites, unfettered by the opinions of a population kept uneducated and on the edge of starvation. People associate the slaver culture of the US South with hillbillies, but they associated themselves, with their elaborate gowns and ballrooms, with a renewal of European culture, with the slaves playing the part of the serfs.
Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago. Somehow, with their weakness, Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness.
We've gone from a history described entirely in terms of nobles arguing with and sleeping with each other to a present entirely described in terms of oligarchs arguing with and sleeping with each other. The last few hundred years will one day probably be described as the "Popular Period." Historians will describe it as the short span of history in which it is trivially easy to find the price of a loaf of bread, or the rules of card games. "At least 20% of the commercial writings from that period have survived."
The Dark Ages were named in hindsight, with soft start and end dates, purposefully chosen. This period encompassed the Little Ice Age that put Europe in a long period of unusually cold and wet years included volcanic darkening events culminating in 536. That was the canonical "worst year" for humans to live. 4 years later, the Plague of Justinian wiped out tens of millions of people. It was a dark time, to say the least.
> even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution
Medieval Christian societies were by and large certainly less brutal than ancient Greek and Roman states which were based on conquest and subjugation and extreme exploitation of slave labour. While admittedly some things did regress we have to thank Christianity for introducing the concept of universal human right (at least on a basic level) which is not something that existed in any shape or form back in e.g. 0 AD.
> basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments
Scientific method was pretty much invented in Christian universities. Of course the model they were operating on was "somewhat" flawed but the methods they invented to reason about it were certainly a stepping stone to
> Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe
Yes there was an ~200-300 year gap.
> 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants
The same people who brought back witching burning (coincidentally a wide spread ancient Roman practice which the church tried to stamp out with various degrees of effort and success during most of the early to high middle ages)?
> Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago.
lol... let's not get silly. Just how much technological progress do you think there was between e.g. ~ 300 BC and 400 AD? It was clearly much less rapid than e.g. between 1000 and 1400 AD.
> The same people who brought back witching burning
Seems like it was more complex than that :
> Authors have debated whether witch trials were more intense in Catholic or Protestant regions; however, the intensity had not so much to do with Catholicism or Protestantism, as both regions experienced a varied intensity of witchcraft persecutions.
> The Witch Trials of Trier took place in the independent Catholic diocese of Trier in the Holy Roman Empire in present day Germany ... Between 1587 and 1593, 368 people were burned alive for sorcery in twenty-two villages, and in 1588, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant in each
> The son of a Puritan minister, Hopkins began his career as a witch-finder in March 1644 and lasted until his retirement in 1647. Hopkins and his colleague John Stearne sent more accused people to be hanged for witchcraft than all the other witch-hunters in England of the previous 160 years
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Hopkins
Note that in Scotland and England, witches were hanged, not burned.
Generally it seems it was mostly in areas where Catholicism and Protestantism were in close contact and had compete for believers or in protestant dominated areas.
The Spanish inquisition for the most pairt maintained the medieval view that witchcraft could not exist from a theological perspective and continued prosecuting belief in it as a heresy.
I'm not defending the church, though. They declared witchcraft to be an irrational superstition to delegitimize pagan beliefs a few centuries earlier yet had no qualms about embracing the same beliefs to gain a competitive edge when competing against protestants.
That happened in the Englightenment era too. The censhorship, tortures and whatnot, I mean.
>Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness.
Yeah, unlike the champions on killing 'witches', you know, the Germanic protestants.
Meanwhile, the Spanish Inquisition was depicted as brutal, but, trust me, you would prefer to be trialed by them that some bastard ruthless lord or worse, the villagers being more brutal than the Church itself.
Read about Alphonse X and the Book of Games. A book from the 13th century, Middle Ages, and yet more knowledgeable than the 90% of the self-called "Enlightened" Anglo-Saxon/Germanic protestants reinventing the wheel after the School of Salamanca from similar origins.
Humanism? Trades and agreements between nations? Modern Economics on value and production? It's all there from that School in Castille.
Amazing, but it's also terrifying that the Maya civilization then faltered, instead of getting onto the exponential development spiral. The great Roman civilization also faltered, but at least the Byzantium continued to carry some of its achievements. The great Arabian civilization was for some time more advanced than European (which was in the middle of the dark ages), but it also did not stay progressing for too long. There's no guarantee that our current "western civilization" line is not going to falter and decline in a similar way.
The Chinese being a continental empire, andin particular bordering the Mongol hordes, have basically been a continuous cycle of growth and collapse for 1000s of years. It can be argued they are headed for yet another collapse.
This is part of the civilizational collapse narrative. It is definitely true in a way.
I think that how much it would end up mattering depends on how well solar tech would withstand a civilizational collapse.
I think that a proto-industrial society with photovoltaics and batteries would be able to bootstrap itself back up to the present state, even without easily exploitable fossil fuels.
I've heard a few people say we've already drilled all of the easy-to-get oil, so the next civilization may not develop using oil.
But maybe all that means is they will master some other technology that we did not. It seems like previous civilizations have mastered technology that we cannot figure out.
> It seems like previous civilizations have mastered technology that we cannot figure out.
That was true for a while (e.g. in Britain they spent 500 years figuring out what the colonising Romans had done to try and recreate their advances), but I don't think we're now in that situation. The best thing would've been to mostly convert electricity to nuclear in the 1980s, as by now we'd be handing over ultra advanced nuclear designs and low carbon to the future. Now we're just playing catch-up with the 1980s.
Colonialism never really ended it just transitioned into a different form, sometimes even very overtly like parts of africa are still using the french colonial currency union (CFA) for example, the IMF keeps the global south in debt entrapment with structural adjustment programs designed to prevent development. etc. etc. we never really left them alone
> IMF keeps the global south in debt entrapment with structural adjustment programs designed to prevent development. etc. etc. we never really left them alone
Countries invite IMF assistance. If they wanted to be left alone, all they have to do is do nothing. If IMF loans didn't have strings attached, they wouldn't be able to borrow money, as it's those strings which build bond investor confidence. The entire point of IMF assistance is to avoid being cutoff from international borrowing for being horrible credit risks (again).
The root cause of national debt problems is primarily government corruption, but also mismanagement, often at the behest of populist politics that excuse economic policy failures by, e.g., scapegoating outside forces. The US isn't immune to this problem, either, it just happens that the US had, albeit intermittently, long enough runs of solid financial management (e.g. Hamilton during the Founding) that it could grow an economic base that could withstand intermittent periods of mismanagement without the entire economy collapsing (yet).
Even when a country is dealt a really crappy hand at the outset, it's not irreversible. Haiti is the poster child for crushing debt unfairly imposed by foreign powers, yet the Dominican Republic had the same history, but managed to overcome it. In some instances, interventions blamed for keeping Haiti oppressed were precisely what helped the Dominican Republic flourish. Likewise, nobody hears about the IMF success stories, just the failures; and it's not because the former don't exist or are rare.
> government corruption
> mismanagement
> populist politics
> interventions blamed for keeping Haiti oppressed were precisely what helped the Dominican Republic flourish
The rhetoric transitioned into exactly this, instead of believing they were subhuman uncivilized people we needed to save from themselves (the white mans burden), it seamlessly transitioned into neoliberal ideas of sound economic theory seeking a "scientific" rationalization of why those neoliberal policies forced onto them fail them consistently and how it's actually all their fault. Any sovereignty is reframed into dangerous intolerable "populism" that needs to be crushed by any means necessary, including crushing sanctions and blockades (stop hitting yourself), covert actions, coups and military interventions.
I certainly didn't assign moral fault to anyone or any group. Indeed, framing it as a moral problem is, IMO, one of the problems here. A country isn't run like a business; similarly, collective morality doesn't look anything like individual morality, assuming it's even a thing at all.
Corruption being a root cause for impoverishment is a fact. How corruption arises, and how to get out of that local equilibrium, is a difficult collective action problem without any easy answers, though there's countless books on political and economic development that explore it. Colonial oppression is a horrible explanation as it has very poor predictive power, unless you define colonialism in a conclusory, tautological way; and even then, it does zilch in terms of identifying effective solutions. Indeed, relying on an oppression narrative is one of the ways corrupt governments and elites justify and excuse the consequences of their policies.
That said, "corruption" isn't a great explanation, either, but it's certainly better than the colonialism morality narrative. Unless someone has lived in some of these poorer countries and witnessed the extremes of corruption, they tend to equivocate all kinds of corruption, and when from wealthier, more democratic countries are unable to distinguish or even imagine what severe, pervasive corruption looks like and how it effects every aspect of society.
I'm not convinced you really mean that, but I agree they shouldn't. Although we've invaded countries that tried that (and are in the process of invading a few more while we are speaking).
> though there's countless books on political and economic development that explore it
we clearly have read very different books on the matter. What is the answer to corruption given by neoliberalism? Isn't the very policies enforced and implemented in the global south believed to combat corruption? Hasn't that demonstrably failed them? But people like me take issue with the whole corruption narrative, we would argue the west, especially the US is the most corrupt nation on the planet by scale, we just don't call that corruption, we just give it names like "lobbying" or "stock buy backs" and make it legal.
> Colonial oppression is a horrible explanation as it has very poor predictive power
You can see colonialism from space, with old rail lines and other infrastructure leading from the mines to the coastal cities, it literally shaped their geography, their colonial history is the single most important unimaginable violent event that has ever happened to these nations, its inseparable, it shapes their past, present and future. It has absolutely predictive power, it shaped them and our grasp on them to this very day is undeniable reality for those nations.
> unless you define colonialism in a conclusory, tautological way
We absolutely have to study colonialism as a distinct, special thing, we need to understand how this legacy shaped them and our(western) relationship to them to this day. We didn't just pack our bags and left them alone. Everyone recognizes that, it's not like we don't care, we do all kinds of things in development, its just we should observe why this all made so little progress despite 75 years, billions in aid and one failed IDF program after the other.
> relying on an oppression narrative is one of the ways corrupt governments and elites justify and excuse the consequences of their policies
you could say the same about the corruption narrative, it ignores things like effects of globalism and military interventionism too, and has served our own elites VERY well.
> That said, "corruption" isn't a great explanation, either ...
> Countries invite IMF assistance. If they wanted to be left alone, all they have to do is do nothing ….
Right. Countries that were stripped of anything and everything (lit-fucking-rally) and then left to fend for themselves when it suited the looters, they were enslaved (in every sense), "do" these things, "invite" these things! Yup. That's exactly what happens.
Just the blacks in USA and the browns in the Indian Subcontinent are backward because they "invite" those backwardness, all they have to do is stand on their feet, and how it is spelled around the West, "pull their weight". So it is.
It is kind of fascinating how the rhetoric shifted from the 'white mans burden' and scientific racism of colonialism to the modern day liberal international order with their purpose built institutions and their 'nobel prize in economics'. Like today it's: of course we buy coffee and cocoa beans for cheap from them, transport them and add 500% of the value to the final product, that's just how economics works, are you stupid? The 'its just in their blood, it's nature' became 'its just economics 101', it just happens to keep them under our crushing boot, it's nature. The contradictions are wild.
I'm happy other people are thinking about this. One of the big stories over the fast years that few know about is a number of the French colonies kicking off the shackles. Can they make it on their own or with their new Chinese and Russian "friends"? Guess we'll see.
This platform is 90% just comfortable shitlibs living in the imperial core, so can't expect much. I think BRICS is the best thing that ever happened to the global south, if only to provide a counterbalance to the western 'empire of chaos'. As a Kenyan official put it: "Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture."
The Americas invented agriculture thousands of years after the old world. So by comparison, they were speedrunning civilization. Before getting genocided
Amazing to think at the very moment Europe was entering the Dark Ages, the Vikings were starting to raid, and Muhammad was having his visions, this civilization had built something comparable to what the Roman Empire had done in italy..