Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > Speaking of which (damn ranting and subject changing!) I think the > Medieval Ages were a stain on our history. I read somewhere how at the > beginning of that dark time there was actual *loss* of technology: they > had these aquaducts and pumps and mechanisms and whatnot from the Romans > and didn't know how to repair them anymore, so they just let them go > decrepit. Very scary.
Jerry Pournelle defines a Dark Age as a time when not only is the knowledge of how to do things forgotten, but even that these things are possible. Usually folks’d ascribe some large construction (like the pyramids, the walls of Crete, &c.) to magic or the gods or some such. —Joel Salomon
