[redwood]

Incredibly interesting.

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..

[WalterBright]

> something comparable to what the Roman Empire had done

Not in sophistication. For examples:

The Pantheon - https://www.pantheonroma.com/en/pantheon-history/ There are no domes in Mayan architecture.

The aquaducts - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct The romans mastered the arch. The Mayans never used them.

Roman iron and steel - the Mayans used copper and gold.

Roman ships had keels - Mayan ships did not. Cannot sail upwind without keels.

Romans used the wheel - Mayans did not.

Romans used papyrus for writing, and would send letters around the empire - the Mayans wrote on bark.

And so on.

[leodler]

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 Palenque also contains both aqueducts and arches (though not used together in the Roman style): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palenque#Palace

[dyauspitr]

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.

[gwerbin]

This only makes it even more fascinating. A Bronze Age civilization, contemporaneous with Charlemagne!

[graemep]

> Europe was entering the Dark Ages

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.

[helterskelter]

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.

[pqtyw]

There was a collapse though. The plague, climate change and warfare lead to significant population declines. Especially in Italy.

[thisislife2]

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).

[tsoukase]

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.

All that in the Western part of the world...

[reactordev]

>"Is that a bad thing?"

I think they were just setting the Age of Man here. Time framing it in history so others would know when we are talking about. It's fine.

[pessimizer]

> 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."

[nine_k]

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.

[dzonga]

seems to me only the Chinese have been able to sort of withstand the test of time

[Scrapemist]

And that’s fine. Another follows after. If we leave them something.

[philipallstar]

That's how amazing Rome was - doing something far larger 1000 years prior to the Maya.

[joshmoody24]

The Americas invented agriculture thousands of years after the old world. So by comparison, they were speedrunning civilization. Before getting genocided

[lapetitejort]

All of this without pack animals or the wheel.

[renewiltord]

The Dark Ages never happened. They had electric lighting and then the sunlight came out.