Modern folks look back on Dark Ages with sorrow, such as 1200 -750 B.C., A.D. 500 to 900, and of course, that time we spent as zoological experiments on the Isle of Patmos about 5,000 B.C., when we broke free and turned on our Ebony Masters, the Scientific Kangs of Egypt. Sure, we might really have wished to have access to Big Headed Yakub's genome-bending notes as to how he managed to make us out of Chinese, Neanderthals and his least obedient ebony slaves...
But, as we mourn the loss of our ebon creator who took the keys to that pink Cadillac in the sky from the pinnacle of the highest pyramid and zoomed off to Serious, throwing his fellow scientists under that Caucasoid bus, we should instead focus, not on the loss of knowledge, but on the great time our heroic ancestors had bursting those chains of oppression!
Our greatest epics all come from those Dark Ages: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Argonautica, the Aeneid, The Song of Roland and Beowulf, all sing of heroes of barbarian type battling evil slave civilizations or primal enemies like giants and monsters. Our best stories, our mightiest deeds, come from "Dark" ages, when sissies telling lies to their wretched slaves give way to warriors finding truth while planting those oppressors in their richly deserved graves. The Fall of Rome should be praised for freeing a million slaves. If Spartacus had been successful, Rome might have had a Dark Age then.
Below is some correspondence from the man who blogs at A Gentleman's Rapier and does some nice poetry.
BTW, you didn’t happen to come across this:
A really long read making the convincing case that what we consider events spread out over a millennium (Rome, Ravenna, Constantinople) were actually parallel to each other and ended at exactly the same time in a global catastrophe which took Europe about 100 years to get over.
It seems to fill the gap of the ‘dark ages’ satisfactorily. A nice bit of alternative history/historiography.
I managed to write a couple more poems, but have found myself so zonked out from work and I’m mostly just consuming when I’m not wanting to sleep. Maybe the consumption will pay off eventually. Only about halfway through Herodotus on my Great Books quest.
Well, didn’t intend to write so much there. Apologies for the expectoration of words! Anyway, hope you are keeping well.
All the best,
-Blognymously On Point
Interestingly, the two Jesuit chroniclers who did so much to harmonize our view of history were working at the height of The Little Ice Age and at the key period of mass New World Genocide and the exportation of British Islanders to Plantation America. They were thus acting as activist mind-control shepherds during a Grand Solar Minimum, just like the media priests of our present day.
I have often wondered at the vast gap in historical athletic records from roughly A.D. 200 to two lone records dated at 374 and 512. The author in this article does convince me that various accounts of the same events and persons from the same period were mistakenly arranged in an extended chronology. I have run into a couple dilemmas with Plantation America material, such as James Revel's poem, which is also dated under a variant author over a generation apart. I solved the problem for myself by recognizing only the earliest source, assuming the other to be plagiarized. The ideological thirst to harmonize inquiry—which is what history began as before it was turned into chronology—in the 1600s, a time of immense ideological turmoil and expansion of geographic sense, is in large degree a blurring of distinction and the missing of a point.
I am satisfied, based on my own reading on ancient athletics and the extreme conflation and compression of these events and practices by historians into an indistinct parallel, that chronology has been mishandled in my narrow historical field before I began researching The First Boxers and The Gods of Boxing and All-Power-Fighting. This experience and the author's exposition of the case for chronological revision, leads me to accept the case that history from the time of Virgil to the time of the literal relation of Beowulf, has been artificially compressed.
My inclination is to place more credence than ever in epic poetry, with its vague dates and broad truths, over our own pedantic chronologies of specifically dated acquisition.
