Reliability of reporting on Chinese History - you can't believe all the claims you read about China

[JeanDukeofAlecon]

Not at all. They almost completely forgot the classic heritage.We are talking about Europe and the cultural/civilizational cataclysm that occurred there after the fall of Rome. In doubt, ask Petrarch, and read the European history of pre-Renaissance.
Its seems to me a good idea to mix short posts with long ones. Tomorrow,I will try to show you how intensively post Roman Europe forgot the classic heritage, before and after the so-called Carolingian Renaissance.

Except there was no post Roman Europe in the medieval period. There was a post Roman western Europe, but it doesn't make sense in this context to separate it from the actual Roman empire. Constantinople was the cultural and intellectual capital of the Christian Mediterranean for 900 years, and there the classical tradition was kept fully alive. Throughout the so called "dark ages", many high class Romans, alongside diverse students from abroad, received secular Greek educations, provided by both private and state tutors, based on grammar, rhetoric, law, history, and study of the classics. There were also academies and workshops in the imperial city dedicated to architecture, engineering, and mathematics, which is what allowed the Romans to keep building organs, flamethrowers, automata, water clocks, hydraulic telegraphs, cylinder pumps, hypocausts, bathhouses, and aqueducts when the technology had fallen into disuse everywhere else in Christendom. The classical literary tradition too was maintained, and experienced a marked explosion of output in the Macedonian and especially Komnenian periods, which saw increased production of histories, poems, military manuals (dozens of them...), and legal works, as well as the revival of imperial panegyrics (orations), erotic literature, the classical novel, and the encyclopedia. Even classical philosophy stayed alive, if on life support for a period, with neo-platonic philosophers like Michael Psellos, Theodore Metochites, and Gemistos Plethon making major innovations in the field. Medieval Rome was still essentially a classical, and later even humanist, society, a classical humanism which bled heavily into Italy during the high and late medieval period, and, along with fleeing Byzantine scholars themselves (including Plethon), played no small part in the advent of the renaissance.

You could separate the Roman culturo-intellectual tradition from the rest of Europe, but i think such a separation is mostly arbitrary, especially before the 12th century. For obvious reasons, the Romans had always been closely connected to Italy; Italian customs remained very similar to those of the Romans in the east, especially in the early-high medieval period, Italian art and architecture was essentially Byzantine until the 13th century, and many Italians traveled to Constantinople to be educated, among them the 11th c. Consul of the Philosophers John Italos. The Republic of Venice, and later Kingdom of Sicily, also served as additional centers for the dissemination of Roman culture throughout the western Mediterranean, further increasing the connection between New Rome and the Italian peninsula. There were also a few Byzantine popes, though they didn't last long.

[Ludicus]

I ddon't recall ever calling Keay a liar or dishonest,

Not really:

what Keay either through ignorance or dishonestly ... Note, Keahy provides not sources, not evidence to back up his claims, just bold assertions, much like Menzie

...and that's because you haven't read the book. Reference numbers: 42 pages. And again, try to avoid faulty generalizations. And you can not compare Keya with Menzie. John Keay vs Amazon.com: Gavin Menzies: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks
Gavin Menzies is a sensationalist pseudo-historian. Keay made an incomprehensible mistake, but he writes splendid books.Until now nobody called him another Gavin Menzies' clone

but errors like Keahy do raise questions about his competency as a historian,

Following your reasoning, there are no competent historians. Under close scrutiny, any historian can accidentally fail.

Fairbanks is exactly the historians I warn about...it shows that Fairbanks ignorance and that he doesn't know what he is talking about

I think it is a little bit too much. This kind of statements are becoming increasingly paranoid.Fairbanks is towering figure in the field of Chinese studies, and left an indelible mark on scholarship.The author of the Cambridge history of China even warns that Albert Feuerwerker is an economist historian disciplined against hyperbole, and yet he tell us "that from 1000 to 1500 AD " no comparison of agricultural productivity, industrial skill, commercial complexity urban wealth, or standard of living (not to mention bureaucratic sophistication and cultural achievement) would place Europe a par with the Chinese Empire".

I know, that's hard to swallow for the politically biased Chinese haters/ Eurocentric fanatics. So, in your opinion, which is the best book for History of China? You have already dismissed the author of the Cambridge History of China (an ignorant man,he doesn't know what he's talking about), Needham, Morris and others.

But you see, like it or not, it is not difficult to recognize that many of our inventions are just iterative improvements of non-western inventions. Chapter Going Global , page 395, Why the West Rules- For Now,

The second Old World exchange spun a real web, which people moving across it to make the centuries after 1100 the first true age of technological transfer. This worked almost entirely to the advantage of the backward West. Something so seemingly obvious as the wheelbarrow, invented in China around the first century CE, made it to Europe only around 1250, and horse collars, used in China since the fifth century CE, arrived there about the same time.
By far the most important technological transfer, though, was cheap cast-iron tools. These appeared in China in the sixth century BCE and were common by the first...but the European not only 1380.
I can vouch that the Second Old Exchange revolutionized West energy capture.
So, to, its information technology. Chinese artisans first made paper from mulberry bark in 105 ce, and wood-pulp paper was common by 700. The Arabs learned the paper around 750 (reputedly by capturing Chinese papermakers in central) Asia, but Italians only started buying it from them after 1150 and making their own in 1276.
By then Chinese publishers had been using engraved woodblocks to print paper books for five centuries and using movable type for two centuries; Europeans only borrowed woodblocks around 1375 and movable type around 1430.
Chinese innovations in rigging and steering also moved west, passing through Arab hands into the Mediterranean in the late twelfth century"
Along with ancient technologies such as the wheelbarrow, Westerners also picked up the newest advances. The magnetic compass, first mentioned in a Chinese text in 1119, had reached Arabs and Europeans by 1180, and guns moved even faster... Most likely western Europeans learned about guns directly from the Mongols on the steppes and then thought Spanish Muslims. It took another generation, until 1360, for these loud new weapons to work their way back to Egypt.

Please feel free to repeat you favorite statement:"..X...is exactly the historians I warn about...it shows ignorance and that he doesn't know what he is talking about"

-----------------

There was a post Roman western Europe, but it doesn't make sense in this context to separate it from the actual Roman empire

A very interesting discussion. I know its a controversial subject (1), but...let's keep Byzantium/ the eastern empire out of the equation.
Even with rose-colored glasses, it is difficult to deny that the whole standard of Europe was lowered to the levels of its fundamentals, it was a age of survival, to obtain basic needs. From the literary point of view,history become no more than a simple chronicle,letters almost ceased; there was not direct passage or intellectual transition from Rome to the high middle ages.

A major effect of the barbarian invasions was the complete disruption of trade merchants, their businesses collapsed, european cities were abandoned as economic and political centers. Nobles and other city dwellers retread to rural areas, to obtain food.Add to that the breakdown of infrastructure/roads, drainage systems, and even the loss of the knowledge of bricklaying; the basic tolls were spades, rakes, picks, and people entered in the feudal system for protection.
Europe emerged from the Dark ages about the year 1000. Ward Perkins and Peter Heather (The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization/ Empires and Barbarians) agree on many things.

Briefly, according to Ward Perkins there has been a very strong tendency, politically motivated, to play down the negative effects of the Fall of Rome in Europe.
Nowadays,it's almost prevalent the notion that there was a "transformation" of the Roman world, an "accommodation"of the barbarians ("barbarians" is nowadays a politically incorrect term),there is a tendency to say that there was no decline, or crisis, and even the term dark age almost disappeared from the academic papers: what happened, they say, was a transformation of the Roman World.
(1) For any medievalist the brilliant book The Inheritance of Rome- A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 is a must read. Chris Wickham made an extraordinary effort to show us how durable were the effects of the so called Carolingian Renaissance. Really impressive, it's an amazing book. Read the fine book.

But Ward-Perkins makes a very strong point. Perkins is an archaeologist and historian of the west. After the fall of Rome there was an extraordinary fall of "material culture" (an archeologist term) and the fall of material culture shows a very clear and dramatic decline in western standards of living that affected everyone, kings and peasants. The coinage disappeared in many places. In Britain, for example, the post-Roman recession lasted for 600-700 years. There was also a dramatic collapse in the Aegean world.
He states,
"

...A Return to Prehistory? The economic change that I have outlined was an extraordinary one. In the early fifth century all this disappeared, and, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Britain reverted to a level of economic simplicity similar to that of the Bronze Age, with no coinage, and only hand-shaped pots and wooden buildings.
The enormity of the economic disintegration that occurred at the end of the empire..The post-Roman world reverted to levels of economic simplicity, lower even than those of immediately pre-Roman times, with little movement of goods, poor housing, and only the most basic manufactured items...a recent, massive European research project on the 4th to 9th centuries A.D. was entitled “The Transformation of the Roman World,” as if Rome never really came to an end, but just changed into something different but entirely equal.
The argument runs that the Romans got tired of fighting the barbarians, and decided to let many of them into the empire, in order to use them to defend it against further invaders. The former poachers became the gamekeepers.

This is an area where historians seem to be decidedly myopic. In looking closely at their texts, they have failed to notice that in every single area of the empire (except perhaps the Levantine provinces conquered by the Arabs) there was an extraordinary fall in what archaeologists term “material culture.” The scale and quality of buildings, even of churches, shrank dramatically—so that, for instance, tiled roofs, which were common in Roman times even in a peasant context, became a great rarity and luxury.

In the 6th and 7th-century West the vast majority of people lived in tiny houses with beaten earth floors, drafty wooden walls, and insect-infested thatch roofs; whereas, in Roman times, people from the same level of society might well have enjoyed the comfort of solid brick or stone floors, mortared walls, and tiled roofs. This was a change that affected not only the aristocracy, but also huge numbers of people in the middling and lower levels of society who in Roman times had had ready access to high-quality goods. It was probably time that gloomy views of the end of Rome were tested; and now, perhaps, it is time to return to them.

Furthermore, some Europeans seem to have found the idea of the Germanic peoples being “accommodated” into the Roman world attractive—it provides a happier vision of Europe’s troubled past.

Finally, I suspect that my own very materialistic and economic focus went out of fashion toward the end of the 20th century, in part because of the demise of communism, and with it Marxist theory. In the 1960s economic history enjoyed a central position in historical study because it was so central to Marxist thinking. But, unfortunately, this meant it went down with the ship of communism. In my opinion, for the reasons I have given above, I think it is high time for economic history once again to be a central topic of historical debate and of university curricula.

In fact,during the Dark ages, many of the technical advancements of Greco-Roman world had been entirely lost because the increasingly ignorance of them though disuse. The History of Medicine in the dark age (and even later) clearly shows how many of the technical advancements of Greco-Roman world had been entirely lost (*) because the increasingly ignorance of them though disuse, and Faith surpassed reason. Great advances were made in the Islamic world; the Islamic world leaped ahead in mathematics and the sciences, building on a foundation of Greek and other ancient texts translated into Arabic. It's also true that the high Middle Ages made true modern science possible, and the Renaissance man was a different beast. Copernicus was a physician, magician and astronomer.

(*) I can quote extensively from my books of the History of Medicine. Next post, who knows.

[JeanDukeofAlecon]

A very interesting discussion. I know its a controversial subject (1), but...let's keep Byzantium/ the eastern empire out of the equation.

But where's the justification for doing so? It's the equivalent of cutting Baghdad out of the equation when discussing Islamic science. As I've already mentioned, Constantinople was the center of the european cultural and intellectual sphere for almost a millennium; it was only arbitrarily cordoned off from the rest of medieval Europe in more modern times. We see Roman art, philosophy, and technology being taught and applied by Romans in western Europe, Italy most especially, throughout the middle ages. Aqueducts, for example, start reappearing in southern Italy once the area comes back under heavier Roman influence in the 9th century, and organs had been reintroduced to western Europe via a gift to the Franks in the 8th. Separating the culture of something like Cordoba from "Europe" would be understandable, since they largely kept to themselves and other Muslims, being oriented more towards the Maghreb and middle east, but the Romans were European in every sense of the word; in fact, to paraphrase Anthony Kaldellis, they could (still) be considered the "quintessential 'western' culture".

With that in mind, feel free to restrict yourself to western Europe (however you want to define that), or, say, France (or Britain, or wherever), but if you're going to comment on the state of culture and technology in "Europe" in the medieval period, there's no reason not to take the leading medieval European civilization into account.

The aqueduct of Salerno (9th c., probably designed by a Roman architect):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

An 11th c. ivory horn from southern Italy depicting the hippodrome games:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Common Soldier]

Not really:

So you were wrong. I did not say Keay was a liar as you claimed, I merely mentioned his dishonesty is a possibly, which is true, but is not what you said. But since I didn't say what you claimed. .

As Keay's mistakes were not a simple mistake, a slip of the pen type mistake. So as I said, either Keay mistakes were through ignorance, which given on little research it would take to prove them false makes him rather unqualified, or he was deliberately saying what he knew to be false to bolster Chinese achievements. You chose which. I guess it could be that Keay was too trusting in his sources, which have been in error, but he still didn't properly vet his sources, so the criticism of him remains.

...and that's because you haven't read the book. Reference numbers: 42 pages. And again, try to avoid faulty generalizations. And you can not compare Keya with Menzie. John Keay vs Amazon.com: Gavin Menzies: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks
Gavin Menzies is a sensationalist pseudo-historian. Keay made an incomprehensible mistake, but he writes splendid books.Until now nobody called him another Gavin Menzies' clone

Keay made false, easily verifiably false claims for the Chinese, same as Menzie. Ok, Keay is a legitimate historian, if wrong, but that just makes his mistakes worse. Menzie makes claims that are so far out no informed reasonable person would believe them, while Keay makes claims that even many informed persons might believe, which is worse.

That is the problem, that many legitimate, decent historians say a lot of wrong things about China, claims in their way are as false Menzies. That they are legitimate scholars only makes the matter worse, because they are more likely to lead people astray.

Given in just a simple paragraph the mistakes and misleading statements I found in Keay'a work, I can't agree that he writes splendid books, unless "splendid book" means "anything that promotes the greatest of China". I prefer honesty and accuracy in what I read.

I think it is a little bit too much. This kind of statements are becoming increasingly paranoid.Fairbanks is towering figure in the field of Chinese studies, and left an indelible mark on scholarship.The author of the Cambridge history of China even warns that Albert Feuerwerker is an economist historian disciplined against hyperbole, and yet he tell us "that from 1000 to 1500 AD " no comparison of agricultural productivity, industrial skill, commercial complexity urban wealth, or standard of living (not to mention bureaucratic sophistication and cultural achievement) would place Europe a par with the Chinese Empire".

It is not paranoid to point out flaws or disagreements with the opinions of scholars. There are other scholars, equally qualified, who disagree with what Fairbanks, and his lumping the broad period of time, where Europe underwent radical changes, pretty much disqualifies his views.

Broadberry and others diaagree with what Fairbanks wrote.

A new study by Stephen Broadberry of Oxford University, Hanhui Guan of Peking University and David Daokui Li of Tsinghua University in Beijing argues that China has indeed lagged behind Europe for centuries. It compares levels of GDP per person in China, England, Holland, Italy and Japan since around the year 1000. It finds the only period when China was richer than the others was during the 11th century. By that time China had invented gunpowder, the compass, movable type, paper money and the blast furnace.

But according to Mr Broadberry and his co-authors, Italy had caught up with China before 1300, and Holland and England by 1400. Around 1800 Japan overtook China as the richest Asian country. Chinese GDP per person fell relentlessly during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). In 1620, it was roughly the same as it had been in 980. By 1840, it had fallen by almost a third (see chart). https://www.economist.com/news/china...e-longer-party

Moreover, there is indirect evidence that supports Broadberry over Fairbanks. Urbanization has long been a sign of wealth and advancement - societies that are more urbanized are almost always wealthier (per capita) and more advanced. You saw this in the past, you see it today. The first world countries of Europe, US, Japan all are much more urbanized than the poorer countries of Africa and South America, and as China's wealth has rapidly increased, so has China's urbanization, from a mere 20% I believe in 1980, to more than 50% and rapidly rising today. Despite what is claimed, the urbanization rate for Europe in the later medieval period seems significantly higher than China.

By 1300, Europe had 210 cities with a populations of over 10,000 (table 2 in link below), and an urbanization rate of 5.3 (table 3), and in 1500 it has 206 cities over 10,000 and an urbanization rate of 5.7 of cities over 10,000.
http://www.paolomalanima.it/default_...Y1300-1600.pdf


But in 1120 China only had 91 cities over 10,000 and an urbanization rate of 3.1% in cites > 10,000 and 112 cites and 3.8% in 1506 Ming China, significantly less than Europe. These values would seem to imply a higher degree of urbanization and hence wealth and advance in Europe even in the 1300, confirming what Broadberry says. https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/sites/jrcsh...ratives-xu.pdf

Broadberry conclusions is also supported by others. Table 8-3 shows Western Europe per capita in virtual dead heat with China (593 vs 600), ahead by 1400 (676 vs 600), and way ahead by 1500 (771 vs 600), "Development Centre Studies The World Economy Historical Statistics", Angus Maddison.


I know, the Chinese have to overcompensate for being so far behind the rest of the world for a long time, for about a century of total humiliation. It is quite a blow to the pride, to go from being among the world's leader to one of the most backward countries in the world, but rewriting history isn't going to change that. Based on per capita income and urbanization rates, China could no longer said to be the world leader, and certainly by the 1300 couldn't said to be far ahead of Europe, if at all.

Like it or not, the fact is that many of the claims of China are greatly overrated, and for at least the last 500 years, China has been behind, catching up only in the last couple decades. By the 19th century, China, was not only behind, but way, way, behind. Urbanization of China in the early 20th century was lower than urbanizatin of Europe in the 16th century, as was literacy. To claim that China was way ahead for the period of 1000 - 1500 just is not true. That China might have been way ahead in 1000 - 1200, yes, that is very possible, but not after that ,and by 1500 China was actually behind as variety of information shows.

When you look at per capita income, the degree of urbanization, the number of inventions, they all tell the same story, that China was definitely not the world leader by 1500, and even several centuries earlier had been matched by western Europe.

Note, Maddison, and others all respected scholars in the field. That Feurwerker and others can make such bold, in light of all the evidence, just supports what I have said all along, that much of what is claimed about China is just BS. A brief objective look at the evidence doesn't come close to supporting his claim.


You have only to look at the homes of the wealthy in Europe for further confirmation. You can find a number of wealthy homes in Britain dating from Tudor times, and the homes, if you can find any still around, of contemporary comparably wealthy Chinese are crude by comparison, for less ornate in either architecture or decoration. The Forbidden city, which represents the entire government headquarters, must be contrasted with not just Versailles, but dozens of other princes palaces. Outside of those of the Chinese emperor, nothing compares the dozens of European palaces or ducal estates to be found in Europe, either for size, or richness of decoration. The St. Peter's in Rome is far larger, grander in all the decorative arts than any public building in premodern building in China.

A building like the medieval Norte Dame Cathedral is as impressive as any contemporary Chinese building or temple, and medieval castles like Conway were more sophisticated in design.

A very interesting discussion. I know its a controversial subject (1), but...let's keep Byzantium/ the eastern empire out of the equation.
Even with rose-colored glasses, it is difficult to deny that the whole standard of Europe was lowered to the levels of its fundamentals, it was a age of survival, to obtain basic needs. From the literary point of view,history become no more than a simple chronicle,letters almost ceased; there was not direct passage or intellectual transition from Rome to the high middle ages.

But you can't. Western Europe had active contacts with Byzantium, and was involved in its affairs. The first Crusades was in part a response to a Byzantine request. Holy Roman Emperor was married to a Byzantine princess.

Yes, the decline can't be denied, any more than the 600 year stagnation of the Ming and Qing dynasty can't be denied, that a time where others were advancing the living standard in China was declining. The key point is that the Europeans did retain much of their heritage, much of it through their own efforts, and recovered largely through their own efforts too.

PS - It is absurd to claim as you do there was not direct passage of

A major effect of the barbarian invasions was the complete disruption of trade merchants, their businesses collapsed, european cities were abandoned as economic and political centers. Nobles and other city dwellers retread to rural areas, to obtain food.Add to that the breakdown of infrastructure/roads, drainage systems, and even the loss of the knowledge of bricklaying; the basic tolls were spades, rakes, picks, and people entered in the feudal system for protection.
Europe emerged from the Dark ages about the year 1000. Ward Perkins and Peter Heather (The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization/ Empires and Barbarians) agree on many things.

Italy retained its brick laying skills and used them throughout the middle ages. Italy is part of Europe, culturally, and geographically. And while all cities underwent a drastic reduction, Rome even during the worst of the middle ages still had maybe several ten thousands citizens, still a respectful size, if only a tiny shadow of what it was. But what you said is essentially true.

However, areas, such as Germany, and Ireland, which were previously outside the sphere of the Romans became included in the new Europe, expanding to Eastern Europe as well, to places like Poland, and Scandinavia eventually, and on the periphery, Russia. It declined, but also expanded into new areas at the same time.

Briefly, according to Ward Perkins there has been a very strong tendency, politically motivated, to play down the negative effects of the Fall of Rome in Europe.

Parkins is flat wrong. There had been a tendency to overemphasize the loss and discontinuity, especially in the technical areas. It is only in recent years that there is an understanding that the split wasn't as great as previous thought.

Nowadays,it's almost prevalent the notion that there was a "transformation" of the Roman world, an "accommodation"of the barbarians ("barbarians" is nowadays a politically incorrect term),there is a tendency to say that there was no decline, or crisis, and even the term dark age almost disappeared from the academic papers: what happened, they say, was a transformation of the Roman World.
(1) For any medievalist the brilliant book The Inheritance of Rome- A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 is a must read. Chris Wickham made an extraordinary effort to show us how durable were the effects of the so called Carolingian Renaissance. Really impressive, it's an amazing book. Read the fine book.

But Ward-Perkins makes a very strong point. Perkins is an archaeologist and historian of the west. After the fall of Rome there was an extraordinary fall of "material culture" (an archeologist term) and the fall of material culture shows a very clear and dramatic decline in western standards of living that affected everyone, kings and peasants. The coinage disappeared in many places. In Britain, for example, the post-Roman recession lasted for 600-700 years. There was also a dramatic collapse in the Aegean world

If you look at medieval pictures, the peasants are dressed just like the Roman peasants, very similar. The cities that re-emerged are the same cities, with the same name and layout.

True, it took Britain 600 years to recover, but the post Song stagnation of China lasted equally as long, for 600 years the technology of China was stagnate and actually regressed in a number of areas, despite the rapidly advancing technology outside of China. Unlike Europe, China never really got out the period of stagnation on its own, it was due to outside forces and outside knowledge that finally caused China to finally emerge from its 600 years of technical stagnation. Even necessary outside inventions China was slow to adopt, like the flintlock over the matchlock. The technological stagnation of China made it easy for the British to crush it during the Opium Wars, and Japan to deliver a similar humiliating defeat in the Sino-Japan war.



I believe that the Dark Age collapse were a necessary event to allow the creation of the modern world. Sometimes the old order must be swept away, before a new, stronger order can emerge. China didn't really emerging as a world economic superpower, when the Great Leap Forward crushed traditional Chinese society, and allowed a new, much more dynamic society to emerge. Like burning field to allow new crops to be planted. Certainly when Europe recovered, it created a society more dynamic, more advanced, than any in the past, and dragged the rest of the world with it. .

In fact,during the Dark ages, many of the technical advancements of Greco-Roman world had been entirely lost because the increasingly ignorance of them though disuse.

As new research has come to light, it is realized that more of Greco-Roman technology remained, than previously thought. Roman watermills continued to be built throughout the middle ages, we find the first evidence of the a tidal waterwheel from around the 8th century, right in the middle of the "Dark Ages". Greco-Roman clock making tradition was not completely lost, and there are references to clockmaking through the medieval period. Medieval treadmill lifting cranes appear virtually identical to their ancient Roman counterparts, and the crank and crankshaft, which at one time were thought to be medieval inventions, are now known to have been used by the Romans. Having researched the evidence, the horseshoe, once thought to have been introduced from outside of Europe, appears to have been an European Celtic invention (although not much used by the Romans, it seems to have been continued to have been used in the conquered Celtic areas of Europe. Future discoveries may yet shown a Roman technology believed to have been lost actually have continued through to the medieval period.

Many of the technologies that seemed to have been lost were those they required large organization, or a fairly wealthy, stable society to support, such as the large scale public building, or required a literature urban elite to support. The post Roman society could not longer afford such luxuries until Europe achieved better stabilization, and greater degree of military security. Once that happened, you started to see a resumption of large scale building, and re-appearance of hte technology. For example, as noted, we see treadmill lifting cranes almost identical to Roman ones. We don't see any evidence the Arabs using such cranes, so the reappearance likely means the technology wasn't lost, but the need for had disappeared for awhile, which is why it seemed to disappear. When the need came back, the technology re-appeared.

It must be pointed there are a number of cases of technologies being lost in China, without any social collapse, and from post Song highs, we see a long period of technological regression through the Ming, and Qing dynasty. While it is easy to understand why European technology was lost, there is far less of an excuse for the decline in Chinese technology that we see, there was no massive social collapse of anywhere near the same order, yet we saw a period of stagnation, and even some decline for 600 years, at the same time people they were in regular contact with were advancing. One explanation is, one that Needham did everything he could to deny, was that perhaps China wasn't as advance as we think, which
so there wasn't any real divergence that needed to be explained away.

The History of Medicine in the dark age (and even later) clearly shows how many of the technical advancements of Greco-Roman world had been entirely lost (*) because the increasingly ignorance of them though disuse, and Faith surpassed reason. Great advances were made in the Islamic world; the Islamic world leaped ahead in mathematics and the sciences, building on a foundation of Greek and other ancient texts translated into Arabic. It's also true that the high Middle Ages made true modern science possible, and the Renaissance man was a different beast. Copernicus was a physician, magician and astronomer.

(*) I can quote extensively from my books of the History of Medicine. Next post, who knows.

Much of the more advance medicine of the Greco-Roman world really wasn't available for the common masses, and frankly, some of the Greco-Roman medicine would have been better off it had been completely lost, like bleeding, which probably killed George Washington.

From medieval burials, like Visby, and Trowton, we see evidence that of soldiers having survived some pretty brutal injuries, which might indicate that medieval European medicine was not quite as it was made out.

Faith had little to do with the economic decline of early medieval Europe, or loss of knowledge, if anything the rise in F;atih was the response to the declining fortunes of the world caused people to concsentrate on the next. But the stranglehold of Confucis scholars did play a primary role in the intellectual stagnation of China in the Ming and Qing dynnasty. It was the scholars, steeped in Confucis values, that put a hault to Zheng He voyages, and not only that, tried to supress knowledge of them. It is not coincidience it wasn't until the stranglehold of Confucis scholars was broken that China began to advance again. Confucis scholars dontrol of the bureaucracy gavd them great control over China.


IN ANY CASE, your are really hijacking this thread and verifying off course, what happened in the middle ages is not the topic of the thread and all this discussion as nothing to do with it.

EIGHT is a lucky number in China. How fortunate it was, then, that a team of more than 100 scientists was able, after three years of research, to declare that ancient Chinese had achieved no fewer than 88 scientific breakthroughs and engineering feats of global significance. Their catalogue of more than 200 pages, released in June, was hailed as a major publishing achievement.

All Chinese schoolchildren can name their country’s “four great inventions”: paper, printing, the compass and gunpowder. Now it appears they have a lot more homework to do. The study purports to prove that China was first with many other marvels, including the decimal system, rockets, pinhole imaging, rice and wheat cultivation, the crossbow and the stirrup.


It is no coincidence that the project, led by the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences, got under way a few months after Xi Jinping took over as China’s leader in 2012. Mr Xi has been trying to focus public attention on the glories of China’s past as a way to instil patriotism and provide a suitable historical backdrop for his campaign to fulfil “the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. ...


....In 2006 official media shocked the Scots with an assertion that China invented golf a millennium ago, hundreds of years before the game took off in Scotland.
As a lover of football, Mr Xi likes drawing attention to China’s pioneering of that sport, too. On a visit to Britain in 2015 he stopped at one of the country’s most famous football clubs, Manchester City. There he was presented with a copy of the first rules for the modern game (drawn up by an Englishman in 1863). In return, he handed over a copper representation of a figure playing cuju, a sport similar to football invented by China 2,000 years ago (see picture, from a football museum in Shandong province). It was apparently popular both among urban youths and as a form of military fitness training. Mr Xi would like a great rejuvenation of this, too. In 2014 he announced plans to put football on the national curriculum. The aim is to make China a “first-class power” in football by 2050 (it has a long way to go). ,,,,,,,,,

Envy of the West’s rapid gains in technology since the 19th century has been a catalyst of Chinese nationalism for over 100 years. It fuels a cultural competitiveness in China that turns ancient history into a battleground. https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comme...have_invented/

It is this kind of blatantly, invalid type of claims being made that I object to, It is a type of theft, the kind dishonest, stealing that is a daily practice in China today. The Chinese did not invent golt, nor soccer (despite what FIFA officials say, who are known to be corrupt and no doubt easily bought off by government officials bent on boasting national pride.


The Chinese just are satisfied with taking credit for what they actually invented.

China famously likes to boast of its "Four Great Inventions." Namely: the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing. But now, the Middle Kingdom has its "Four Great New Inventions" to brag about. The only problem is that none of them were actually invented in China.

Recently, state media has been publishing and republishing an article about China's brilliant feats of technological innovation. Based on a survey in which foreign students at the Beijing Foreign Studies University were asked which of China's "inventions" they would like to bring back to their home country, the article from China's official Xinhua news agency trumpets China's so-called "four great new inventions in modern times," which are: high-speed trains, e-commerce, mobile payments and dockless shared bicycles.......

While China is unquestionably at the forefront of each of these movements, it does seem like a bit of a stretch to say that high-speed rail was "invented" in China when the first modern high-speed trains were zipping through Japan in the 1960s. Similarly, mobile payment systems were being developed in the United States in the 1990s and, obviously, online shopping was around long before Alibaba set up shop.
The only one of these four inventions where China may have a case is with shared bicycles. Of course, European cities have been operating bike-sharing schemes for decades,....

"To me, it looks that Chinese state media is showing the rest of the world the government's ignorance of intellectual property rights," SCMP ...
http://shanghaiist.com/2017/08/15/ch...nventions.phpv

Not only have the Chinese stolen movies, and consumer goods through their illegal copying, but now they are trying to steal credit for inventing thing they did not. The "4 Great Inventions" are not enough for Chinese ego. Unfortunately, the ignorance referred to above extends to many of scholars, like Keay, like Albert Feuerwerker.

A massive peer-review fraud has triggered a tough response from the Chinese government. Officials last week announced that more than 400 researchers listed as authors on some 100 now-retracted papers will face disciplinary action because their misconduct has seriously damaged China’s scientific reputation. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/china-cracks-down-after-investigation-finds-massive-peer-review-fraud

First it put the squeeze on ideologically impure academics. Then it tried to censor foreign publishers such as Cambridge University Press. Now President Xi Jinping’s government is intensifying its drive to rewrite Chinese history by amending the archival record itself.New research by a legal scholar reveals that Chinese authorities have been taking advantage of the digitalisation of historical documents by systematically deleting Chinese journal articles from the 1950s that challenge the orthodoxy promoted by Mr Xi. https://www.ft.com/content/4ffac53e-...4-d0c17942ba93

Those who seek to rewrite history can only succeed if others conspire with them. Censors prevail only if there are no alternative versions of history with which their sanitized accounts can be compared. A vital and active marketplace of ideas will weed out weak, incomplete and incoherent arguments. Last week, Cambridge University Press appeared to have joined the Chinese government in its efforts to limit intellectual inquiry on topics it deems too sensitive. To its credit, CUP this week reversed course and confirmed its support for academic freedom. The reversal provides an important lesson in dealing with China.

CUP acknowledged last week that 315 articles, some decades old, published in China Quarterly, a leading journal on Chinese studies, would no longer be available in China. The list of banned articles is a Rosetta stone for Chinese government sensitivities, with topics ranging from Tibet, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Cultural Revolution, ethnic tensions in Xinjian and Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy. Banned authors include some of the worlds’ most notable China scholars.


CUP said that it was banning the articles at the request of the Chinese import agency — a government office — but did so to ensure that “other academic and educational material we publish remains available to researchers and educators in this market.” Reportedly, CUP received a similar request to ban over 1,000 e-books.


The Chinese request was not surprising. Beijing has long restricted access to ideas, arguments and news, and the effort to control the marketplace of ideas has intensified since Xi Jinping took the government’s helm five years ago. Beijing has systematically closed the space for public debate, restricting access to information it does not control by cutting off significant portions of the internet and going so far as literally to cut out — with scissors — pages of newspapers that offend government sensibilities. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion.../#.WoTZ7a6nHIU

That Cambridge caved in at all, even only temporarily, is rather troubling. While eventually Cambridge did relent, one can not help but wonder what pressure even non Chinese scholars are under the put positive articles to support Chinese government proclamation of Chinese origins of golf, high speed trains, perhaps even air planes and the computer. The Chinese can bring enormous economic pressure, and isn't afraid to use it. Plus, if the Chinese are controlling all the information to scholars like Keay, can we be surprised if they come up with wrong conclusions?

Which is why you can't trust everything that is claimed for ancient and medieval China. Everything needs to be treated with skepticism when it comes to China, fraud is too great.

[Common Soldier]

...
there was not direct passage or intellectual transition from Rome to the high middle ages.

This is a ridiculously false statement. The majoirty of text from classical Rome used in rhe high middle ages were from copies made by Europeans tnemselves during what you call the dark ages, making your statement about no direct passage a lie.

Further, Rome was continously inhabited throughout the middle ages, and not completely abandoned as your claim would require. There was a direct continuity of Roman cities and later medieval and modern cities. These cities have the same name, location, and streetw often follow same layout, with the Roman buildings still sometimes being used, which just not often the case for Chinese cities. Beijing, for example, has neither the same name, nor do irs streets follow the same layout as previous settlements near it, and is actually less old than London, and especially Rome. London was a thriving city of respective size while Beijin was mostly empty fields.

Also, as works of Gregory of Tours and Bede show, literature did continue through what you call the Dark Ages, and Bede in particular demonstrates the continuity with classical learning. His knowlede of a spherical earth shows Dark Age Europe was superior and more advance than Song China in this particular area.

This demonstrates that not only can't you trust what sinocentrics like you say about China, you can't trust what they say about Europe either.




But[/I] Ward-Perkins makes a very strong point. Perkins is an archaeologist and historian of the west. After the fall of Rome there was an extraordinary fall of "material culture" (an archeologist term) and the fall of material culture shows a very clear and dramatic decline in western standards of living that affected everyone, kings and peasants. The coinage disappeared in many places. In Britain, for example, the post-Roman recession lasted for 600-700 years. 

If Ward-Perkin says coinage disappeared in England for 600 years, he doesn't know what he is talking about, since we have coinage in Britain during what you call the Dark Ages, we have found coins in Sutton Hu grave, for example.

But decline does not equal disconuity as you asserted. You said there was "no direct passage" from the Roman to medieval time, and that is not so, nor is it what Perkin said. Greatly reduce is not the same thing as none at all, which is what you claim. Ward-Perkin does not support you assertions.

There is a strong politically motivated attempt to over emphasize the disconuity from the Roman to the medieval world, to claim as you did there was no intellectual transmission or direct passage from the Roman to the high middle ages.

Note, Europe even at its worst still was more advance in a few areas like the shape of the earth than China at its peak, which never did figure out the world was spherical. Nor is that the only thing, There is evidence that the Vikings made wire by the modern method of using draw dies, and we know that was the method used in medieval Europe, while there is no evidence until the Qing Dynasty that the Chinese made metal wire using the modern method of draw plates. (That Europe made wire using the modern method of draw plate, and China did not, might explain why chain mail armor was much more common in Europe than China).

I

[sumskilz]

The coinage disappeared in many places.

Where?

Certainly not in England: History of the English penny (c. 600 – 1066)

[Ludicus]

Separating the culture of something like Cordoba from "Europe" would be understandable, since they largely kept to themselves (1) and other Muslims,

.... feel free to restrict yourself to western Europe.., but if you're going to comment on the state of culture and technology in "Europe" in the medieval period, there's no reason not to take the leading medieval European civilization into account.

I think this deserves its own thread


Western or eastern Islam was not caught in this dark age; (1) on the contrary, during the Middle Ages Christian scholars came to Spain to absorb its learning, helping trigger a revival of learning in Europe. And this was the single most important legacy of Moorish Spain to Europe.In my opinion, who laid the foundations for the Renaissance and the birth of Western science was, in some sense, ibn Rushed, not Aquinas; Aquinas cited him no less than 503 times in his works.Also,in my opinion, who truly reconciled Reason with Faith was Erasmus, not Aquinas.

That said, Dark Age is mainly about West Europe only. After the fall of Rome, the dark Ages would descend upon the West, while the Byzantine Empire managed to survive.
Even some medievalists don't have too much of a problem with using "Dark Ages" for the period 500-1000 AD. Until Renaissance (13th century in Italy, later elsewhere), that entire period is called Medieval.

Generally speaking, medievalists are ambivalent; some medievalists don't have too much of a problem with using "Dark Ages" for the period 500-1000 AD, but they don't enjoy the term, so they prefer to use the term "the Early Medieval Period"; at the same time, they recognize the Early Medieval Period could be said to be "a dark age", both in terms of the paucity of sources and in terms of a decline in many aspects of culture, trade and intellectual life.







And the true is, during the Dark ages, many of the technical advancements of Greco-Roman world had been entirely lost because the increasingly ignorance of them though disuse.
In Medicine, for example, the Christian belief in the meditation of the Holy God was considered the only possible cure, and led to the abandonment of all save the simplest surgical procedures -bloodletting, amputation, and tooth extraction. As a consequence only a limited knowledge of anatomy was needed, and even the grossly distorted translators' versions of Galenic porcine anatomy provided sufficient guide.

After the dark ages, Monastic Medicine slowly/gradually declined, and in the 12th and 13th centuries the first hospitals in Europe,The Hotel Dieu in Paris, Santo Spirito in Italy, and St Thomas's and St Bartholomew's in England, are in the hands of the municipalities; but the people had little contact with physicians.

The "doctor" in the Middle Ages (the term was restricted to those with high level rank and academic connections) spent more time thinking about disease in philosophical terms than in proving care. The doctor would compose a consilium but was rarely called upon to carry out his advice (The now defunct TWC Concilium de Civitate was much more effective ). In part it derives from the fact that the work with one's hand was considered inferior to that of intellect.

Mysticism became more prevalent during the Middle Age, medieval faith prevailed. In Medicine, symbolic procedures were used - chants in the presence of the of the patient - and - it's also common knowledge- with increasingly frequency during the late middle ages possession by devils was related to the specific disease. The remedy was the exorcism by a priest. Amulets were commonly used to ward off spirits. Surgery was limited to wounds and some basic orthopedic procedures. Cut it off or out. Suturing was rare.

Roger Bacon provided scientific proof that small letters could be magnified with lenses that were ground in a specific fashion, and gradually, the use of spectacles become more prevalent, quite true, but there were no advancements in eye/cataract surgery, and the millenary ancient "couching" technique ( Egypt -India-Greece-China, brought to the West by Greek travelers from India and the Middle East- the first references to cataract and its treatment in the West are found in 29 B.C. in De Medicinae,Celsus), continued to be used throughout the Middle Ages.

To sum up, the treatment in the Middle Ages was a bizarre combination of mysticism and science, derived from the classical conception of humors. Faith in God and bloodletting was the treatment for almost everything.
Btw, in Islam,the general health care outshone the west in the hospital system...

----

If Ward-Perkin says coinage disappeared in England for 600 years, he doesn't know what he is talking about

Please, learn to read properly, you quoted...:"In Britain, for example, the post-Roman recession lasted for 600-700 years".

It's getting repetitive..."Fairbanks does not know what he is talking about"; "Ward-Perkins doesn't know what he is talking about", etc.

Jacques Garnet, book, A History of Chinese Civilization,

The West, which has borrowed from China right now to our day without realizing it, is far from recognizing its sizable debt to her,but for which we ourselves would not be what we are.
Although a third of humanity lives in this part of the world, and although in the shrunken globe of today these are our neighbors, our culture remains resolutely "Western".
It requires considerable effort of imagination to adopt a view from which Europe appears as an simply appendage of the Eurasian continent and its history as a particular aspect of the history of Eurasia.

Common Soldier, insert "Jacques Garnet" here: .....X..... exactly the historians I warn about...he doesn't know what he is talking about
--------

Where?...Certainly not in England: History of the English penny (c. 600 – 1066)

According to Ward-Perkins, for about 300 years, from around AD 420, Britain’s economy functioned without coin.
He says,

...the year 410. In this year Rome was sacked, and the empire gave up trying to defend Britain. While this marks the glorious beginnings of “English history”, as Anglo-Saxon barbarians began their inexorable conquest of lowland Britain, it was also the start of a recession that puts all recent crises in the shade.The economic indicators for fifth-century Britain are scanty, and derive exclusively from archaeology, but they are consistent and extremely bleak.

Under the Roman empire, the province had benefited from the use of a sophisticated coinage in three metals – gold, silver and copper – lubricating the economy with a guaranteed and abundant medium of exchange. In the first decade of the fifth century new coins ceased to reach Britain from the imperial mints on the continent, and while some attempts were made to produce local substitutes, these efforts were soon abandoned.

For about 300 years, from around AD 420, Britain’s economy functioned without coin.

Core manufacturing declined in a similar way. There was some continuity of production of the high-class metalwork needed by a warrior aristocracy to mark its wealth and status; but at the level of purely functional products there was startling change, all of it for the worse. Roman Britain had enjoyed an abundance of simple iron goods, documented by the many hob-nail boots and coffin-nails found in Roman cemeteries. These, like the coinage, disappeared early in the fifth century, as too did the industries that had produced abundant attractive and functional wheel-turned pottery. From the early fifth century, and for about 250 years, the potter’s wheel – that most basic tool, which enables thin-walled and smoothly finished vessels to be made in bulk – disappeared altogether from Britain.

The only pots remaining were shaped by hand, and fired, not in kilns as in Roman times, but in open ‘clamps’ (a smart word for a pile of pots in a bonfire).We do not know for certain what all this meant for population numbers in the countryside, because from the fifth to the eighth century people had so few goods that they are remarkably difficult to find in the archaeological record; but we do know its effect on urban populations. Roman Britain had a dense network of towns, ranging from larger settlements, like London and Cirencester, which also served an administrative function, to small commercial centres that had grown up along the roads and waterways.

By 450 all of these had disappeared, or were well on the way to extinction. Canterbury, the only town in Britain that has established a good claim to continuous settlement from Roman times to the present, impresses us much more for the ephemeral nature of its fifth to seventh-century huts than for their truly urban character. Again it was only in the eighth century, with the (re)emergence of trading towns such as London and Saxon Southampton, that urban life returned to Britain.

For two or three hundred years, beginning at the start of the fifth century, the economy of Britain reverted to levels not experienced since well before the Roman invasion of AD 43. The most startling features of the fifth-century crash are its suddenness and its scale. We might not be surprised if, on leaving the empire, Britain had reverted to an economy similar to that which it had enjoyed in the immediately pre-Roman Iron Age. But southern Britain just before the Roman invasion was a considerably more sophisticated place economically than Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries: it had a native silver coinage; pottery industries that produced wheel-turned vessels and sold them widely; and even the beginnings of settlements recognisable as towns. Nothing of the kind existed in the fifth and sixth centuries; and it was only really in the eighth century that the British economy crawled back to the levels it had already reached before Emperor Claudius’s invasion.

It is impossible to say with any confidence when Britain finally returned to levels of economic complexity comparable to those of the highest point of Roman times, but it might be as late as around the year 1000 or 1100. If so, the post-Roman recession lasted for 600-700 years.We can take some cheer from this sad story – so far our own problems pale into insignificance. But Schadenfreude is never a very satisfying emotion, and in this case it would be decidedly misplaced.

The reason the Romano-British economy collapsed so dramatically should give us pause for thought. Almost certainly the suddenness and the catastrophic scale of the crash were caused by the levels of sophistication and specialisation reached by the economy in Roman times. The Romano-British population had grown used to buying their pottery, nails, and other basic goods from specialist producers, based often many miles away, and these producers in their turn relied on widespread markets to sustain their specialised production. When insecurity came in the fifth century, this impressive house of cards collapsed, leaving a population without the goods they wanted and without the skills and infrastructure needed to produce them locally. It took centuries to reconstruct networks of specialisation and exchange comparable to those of the Roman period.

In fact, Ward Perkins makes a convincing case that the Dark Ages were in fact a miserable time to be alive, in almost complete absence of pottery/ roof tiles/ coinage/ and the lack of literacy.

[sumskilz]

According to Ward-Perkins, for about 300 years, from around AD 420, Britain’s economy functioned without coin.

Okay, this is a bit different than saying coinage disappeared. Several hundred Roman coins have been found in Fifth Century Anglo-Saxon contexts at just over a hundred different sites, but because something like 60% of them had a hole or two punched in them, it's been assumed that they were used as jewelry rather than currency in this period. Then in the Sixth Century coins from the continent start showing up as southern sites, so the thought is they may have been use in long distance trade at that point, but not part of the local economy. Then in the 620s or 630s, coins start being minted in England again, which doesn't necessary mean they started being used in everyday transactions again right away.

So anyway, carry on...

[Common Soldier]

I think this deserves its own thread


Western or eastern Islam was not caught in this dark age; (1) on the contrary, during the Middle Ages Christian scholars came to Spain to absorb its learning, helping trigger a revival of learning in Europe. And this was the single most important legacy of Moorish Spain to Europe.In my opinion, who laid the foundations for the Renaissance and the birth of Western science was, in some sense, ibn Rushed, not Aquinas; Aquinas cited him no less than 503 times in his works.Also,in my opinion, who truly reconciled Reason with Faith was Erasmus, not Aquinas.

There is a mostly French School of thought that it was Islam that caused the Dark Ages of Europe. The Muslim conquest isolated Western Europe.

According to Pirenne^[6] the real break in Roman history occurred in the 8th century as a result of Arab expansion. Islamic conquest of the area of today's south-eastern Turkey, Syria, Palestine, North Africa, Spain and Portugal ruptured economic ties to western Europe, cutting the region off from trade and turning it into a stagnant backwater, with wealth flowing out in the form of raw resources and nothing coming back. This began a steady decline and impoverishment so that, by the time of Charlemagne, western Europe had become almost entirely agrarian at a subsistence level, with no long-distance trade.In a summary, Pirenne stated that "Without Islam, the Frankish Empire would probably never have existed, and Charlemagne, without Muhammad, would be inconceivable."^[7] That is, he rejected the notion that barbarian invasions in the 4th and 5th centuries caused the collapse of the Roman Empire. Instead, the Muslim conquest of north Africa made the Mediterranean a barrier, cutting western Europe off from the east, enabling the Carolingians, especially Charlemagne, to create a new, distinctly western form of government. Pirenne used statistical data regarding money in support of his thesis. Much of his argument builds upon the disappearance from western Europe of items that had to come from outside. For example, the minting of gold coins north of the Alpsstopped after the 7th century, indicating a loss of access to wealthier parts of the world. Papyrus, made only in Egypt, no longer appeared in northern Europe after the 7th century; writing reverted to using animal skins, indicating its economic isolation.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Pirenne

Although most English speaking historians seem to have rejected the idea, it has merit. Rome in the 6th century under the Germanic Goths was still one of the larger cities of the world. As Pirenne points out, it wasn't after the rise of Islam that we see the disappearance of gold coins and papyrus in western Europe, and Rome was still a significant city under barbarian rule in the first part of the 6th century AD., perhaps as much as 300,000*, still making Rome one of the world's largest cities.. So I think that Pirenne's argument has more merit than it has been given.

With the traditional trade links to the Mediterranean world cut, Europe was forced to develop a new economy, which took time. English speaking historians have been influence by the the history of British, where the break with the Roman world was greater - the Germanic settlers there came from outside the empire, and we see a change in language. . But Britain was always a province on the periphery, as witness by the fact that even before the empire collapsed the legions had been withdrawn. Continuity was greater elsewhere in Europe.

And even so, there was still a continuity, as shown by the Anglo-Saxon Franks casket, which includes scenes in Runes from Roman legend of Romulus and Remus, thus demonstrating the continuing legacy of Rome even among people who had never been under Roman rule.

Lidded rectangular box made of whale-bone, carved on the sides and top in relief with scenes from Roman, Jewish, Christian and Germanic tradition.http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=92560&partId=1 m

*

. By one estimate, thecity's population was reduced by 90% during this period (Lot, 268). This suggests that Rome still had a significant population in theperiod immediately preceding the Gothic Wars. Those wars forced Rome entirely into the arms of the Pope, who took over all ofthe city's administrative functions. The city had ended its decline by 550 AD, with a resident population of about 30,000. (Hibbert,79) THE CITY IN DECLINE:ROME IN LATE ANTIQUITYKevin Twine, MIDDLE STATES GEOGRAPHER - VOL. 25, 1992

With a 90% decline, that would imply an initial population of 300,000. This impression is confirmed by the numerous waterwheels used to grind grain, where the Byzantine general was forced to invent ship based waterwheels for the grain when the Goths cut off the aqueduct water supplies to Rome.
.

Generally speaking, medievalists are ambivalent; some medievalists don't have too much of a problem with using "Dark Ages" for the period 500-1000 AD, but they don't enjoy the term, so they prefer to use the term "the Early Medieval Period"; at the same time, they recognize the Early Medieval Period could be said to be “a dark age”, both in terms of the paucity of sources and in terms of a decline in many aspects of culture, trade and intellectual life.

Historians don't like the term because it was created as a pejorative, and historians these days prefer more neutral terms. Plus the term "Dark Ages" implies things that are not necessarily true. With Bede, Gregory of Tours, and works like the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, we are not entirely in the dark about the period before 1000, which includes kings like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.


Moreover, the period of 500 -1000 AD also saw the expansion of civilization to areas where it had not been before, lime Ireland. The oldest example of a tidal mill occurs not in China, but in "Dark Age" Europe.

The Nendrum Monastery mill was a tide mill on an island in Strangford Lough now in Northern Ireland. It is the earliest excavated tide mill, dating from 787 AD. Its millstones are 830 mm in diameter and the horizontal wheel is estimated to have developed 7/8HP at its peak. Remains of an earlier mill dated at 619 AD were also found. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nendrum_Monastery_mill

Note, Ireland was outside of Roman civilization in classical times, there is no evidence of literacy of literacy in Ireland during antiquity, but during the early middle ages Ireland was one of the leading areas of scholarship in Europe, and the term "Dark Ages" dismisses achievements like the Irish. The Scottish too are being brought into the fold of civilization, literacy was also introduced to Scotland during the "Dark Ages". It is little wonder that real historians don't like term "Dark Ages", since we actually know more about Ireland and Scotland during the 500 - 1000 AD than we did during Roman times.

Ireland, then, was a country which greatly affected change. Bieler evensuggests that, amongst other things, the Irish contribution to society in the earlymedieval period made them "a harbinger of the Middle Ages. Not, to be sure,the only one, but one of the most effective. https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/v...t=constructing

Common Soldier
Please, learn to read properly, Ward Perkins says :"In Britain, for example, the post-Roman recession lasted for 600-700 years";

Jacques Garnet, book, A History of Chinese Civilization,


Common Soldier, insert "Jacques Garnet" here: .....X..... exactly the historians I warn about...he doesn't know what he is talking about [/quote]


If Perkins claim the Roman recession lasted 700 years is questionable, and simply because you praise him doesn't make him a good historian.

If you are quoting Garnet's book on CHINESE HISTORY for European history, that kind of demonstrates your bias. You really should be quoting sources on European history for you comments on European history, not a book on the history of Chinese civilization.

The decline of Britain didn't fully start until the Roman legions pulled out in the early 5th century, and by the 8th century Britain was already starting to recover. Even though cities like London didn't recover to their Roman levels until later, when you take the countryside into account, and places like Scotland and Ireland, Britain in some ways was ahead of Roman Britain by the the 8th century, so we are talking about less than the 600 years claimed. Again, you have to take into account Ireland and Scotland, which were outside of Roman civilization, but had acquired literacy. The first cities in Scotland and Ireland were created in this 600 year period you talk about.


As I said you just can't trust what Sinocentrics say, either about China or Europe.

Take for example the following from NOVA

[quote] With unrivaled nautical technology and countless other inventions to their credit, the Chinese were now poised to expand their influence beyond India and Africa. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/ancient-chinese-explorers.html [/quote}


This is the kind of nonsense you see spouted about China. In the cause of navigation nautical technology, the Chinese might very well have been inferior. Their magnetic compasses were not as advanced in Europe, and there is no evidence that the Chinese had anything as advance as an astrolabe or cross staff for measuring latitude.

Further, water tight buikheads, as already pointed out, are greatly over rated as the every existence of the Lorcha, ship built in China with an European hull design and Chinese rigging shows.

sumskilz
According to Ward-Perkins, for about 300 years, from around AD 420, Britain’s economy functioned without coin.
He says,



In fact, Ward Perkins makes a convincing case that the Dark Ages were in fact a miserable time to be alive, in almost complete absence of pottery/ roof tiles/ coinage/ and the lack of literacy.

If Ward Perkins is saying that, he is wrong. Even before the minting of coins in England itself began, old Roman coins and Frankish coins were available and could be used. And it was in the 600's that England started misting coins, not 8th century as Ward claims. Obviously, if coins were being minted, they were being used. Coins were cleearly being used before the 720 CE date Ward Perkins give.

For the first century of the Saxon era, commercial needs were satisfied by imported Frankish coinage, not until the early 600s were the first gold Thrymsa and minted in England. These early coins were modeled after either Frankish coins or the earlier Roman coins that were still in use. The gold Thrymsa would eventually evolve into a silver coin called Styca or Sceat with uniquely Saxon designs. In the south a new denomination was introduced in about 765 based on the French Denier, these Pennies were to remain as virtually the only denomination used in England for six hundred years. In the north Styca continued to be minted until the mid ninth century, eventually being debased to a crude bronze coin with crosses and blundered legends. During the Saxon period a wide variety of penny types, many surprisingly well executed, were issued. http://www.wnccoins.com/0024.htm

Although gold coins from continental Europe were traded into Anglo-Saxon England, they were initially used for decorative purposes, only beginning to be used as money in the latter part of the 6th century.[2]

It was around this time that the first Anglo-Saxon coins were produced, although sustained production would not appear until the 630s. These were small, gold coins, called scillingas (shillings) in surviving Anglo-Saxon law codes, although they have since been referred to as thrymsas by numismatists. .........

In about 675 the gold shilling was superseded by the silver pening, or penny, amongst the Anglo-Saxons, and this would remain the principal English monetary denomination until the mid-14th century, during the Late Medieval period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinag...-Saxon_England

The presence of coins in Anglo-Saxon burials also testifies to the presence ans use of coins in England. Perkins 300 year claim is not supported by the data, although there was a period, shorter than what Perkin claims, where coinage stopped being used, more like 150 to 200 years, and it is possible that coins were being used, just foreign Frankish ones, during that period.

And so what if for a space of 200 years coins were not being used? Chinese society never really monetarize even in the Tang dynasty, for larger purchases silver was weighed out just as it had been by the Sumerians 3000 years before instead of coins being used, and that continued right up until the 19th century, except for the periods of time when paper money was being used, but that had completely stopped by the early Ming dynasty . Certainly by the 11th century, Britain could said to be more monetarized than China at the beginning of the 19th century.

[JeanDukeofAlecon]

Western or eastern Islam was not caught in this dark age; (1) on the contrary, during the Middle Ages Christian scholars came to Spain to absorb its learning, helping trigger a revival of learning in Europe.

As they went to Constantinople, but in the period being discussed (IE approx. 500-1000) we see far, far more contact, cultural exchange, and mutual influence in general happening between the Romans and other Christian Europeans than between the latter and the Andalusians; essentially, Rome and the rest of Europe belonged to the same "world", whereas the Cordoban caliphate was solidly within that of Islam. Oddly enough though, Roman culture, especially art/design, was actually quite influential in Islamic Spain, despite the distance between the two cultural spheres. Ivories produced in 10th c. Cordoba, for example, contain many clearly Roman themes and designs, and the famous Andalusian-type hilt (bottom) may actually have its origins in the empire (from an early-mid 10th c. ivory), though the direction of influence in that case is less certain.

In my opinion, who laid the foundations for the Renaissance and the birth of Western science was, in some sense, ibn Rushed, not Aquinas

Interestingly, many of Ibn Rushed's conclusions, such as God having a non-interventionist attitude towards the modern world and phenomena, natural and otherwise, being explainable through the laws of nature instead of divine will, were "anticipated" by Psellos around 100 years earlier, although the latter was a neo-platonist instead of a follower of primarily Aristotle. Both were also polymaths who wrote on and taught mathematics, poetry, geography, teaching, medicine, astronomy, physics, political theory, and law. For various reasons, Psellos's philosophy didn't make it to the west until the renaissance, even while his humanistic innovations indirectly helped spark that movement, so he ended up being less influential in many areas than his Andalusian counterpart, but it is interesting to note the similarities.
_________________________________________

Regarding that second infographic, it ignores the cultural and urban revivals experienced by much of even western Europe during the 10th century; in fact, I would say it's only really accurate for France and its periphery (Asurias/Leon, Barcelona, the Benelux, etc.) England was experiencing a golden age, both culturally and politically, under the house of Wessex, as was Germany under the Ottonians, who served as great patrons of the arts, literature, and architecture. Italy, while not exactly stable, also experienced a great revival in culture and urban life brought about thanks, in no small part, to the rise of merchant cities such as Venice and Amalfi, which were some of the largest in Europe by the end of the century, and whose citizens could be seen trading from Paris to Cairo. Other Italian cities, such as Naples, Salerno, Milan, Verona, and Bari also grew substantially, developing into rich centers of trade and artisanal production, all of which foreshadowed the economic and cultural preeminence of the peninsula in future centuries. As Common soldier already noted, Ireland also saw political chaos but cultural and economic development throughout the "dark ages", as did Scandinavia, much to the chagrin of everyone else in Europe.

I don't know enough about the period in the west to comment broadly on it's intellectual development, but I'd mention that there were still figures such as Luitprand of Cremona around who learned Greek and had a somewhat classical education.

To sum up, the treatment in the Middle Ages was a bizarre combination of mysticism and science, derived from the classical conception of humors.

It's pretty far out of my knowledge range, but was this not also basically the case in China? Didn't (doesn't?) its medicinal theory also focus on abstract pseudo-scientific concepts like internal balance and lifeforce while incorporating many "mystical" elements, leading to a grab bag of treatments that kind of worked, didn't work (sometimes actively harming the patient), or only produced a placebo effect?

[Roma_Victrix]

The point is that Chinese characters have been antiquated from the minute the Semitic letters were invented, and the Chinese for some reason neglected to adapt (unlike the Koreans, so it probably has little to do with race or geographical distance, and more with a stuck-up cultural attitude or similar reasons).
The Latin alphabet is vastly superior in utility in almost all categories.

When the 15th-century Koreans under Joseon King Sejong the Great invented the Hangul alphabet, they did so to create a simpler, more convenient rendering of the Korean language than with the enormous body of Chinese written characters, which they had used exclusively for centuries by that point. In fact, some Koreans to this day still use traditional Chinese characters for fancy calligraphy purposes. The Chinese, however, don't really have the luxury of doing that with their own language. Yes, we have the Pinyin system now that can render Chinese spoken words into the Latin alphabet. That doesn't solve the huge problems with their tonal language that's more suited to having written characters to understand what is being said, because without context Chinese is a very difficult spoken language to understand. For instance, look at how many concepts and characters are associated with the spoken word "hàn" alone (or han4, the one with the down tone), which can range from meaning everything from "漢" as in their main ethnic group and historical Han dynasty, or "旱" meaning drought, dry land, or aridity.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hàn#Mandarin

Yeah, have fun making an alphabet for that language. It also explains why woodblock printing, invented in the 7th century during the Tang period, remained the predominant means of printing long after the Song-era Chinese invented movable type in the 11th century, all the way until the Western-style printing press was adopted in Qing China during the 19th century (thanks to the European spheres of influence). Gutenberg's printing press was more efficient anyway, utilizing the Greco-Roman screw press that had existed in the Western world since Antiquity. Meanwhile, the Chinese actually didn't utilize screws at all in their architecture or civic engineering, even though they had chain pumps for lifting materials and water uphill as far back as the 1st century AD (achieving more or less what the ancient Greek Archimedes Screw was capable of doing). The screw wasn't even used in any significant fashion in China until Europeans began trading and living in China in the 17th century (or perhaps it was even earlier when the Mongol Empire ruled over China with the Yuan dynasty, since tens of thousands of Europeans, mostly Italians, lived in China during the 13th century).

1. Shape of the Earth

An example is the Chinese belief in a flat earth. Despite what is often claimed, it was the medieval Europeans and others who believed in a spherical earth, and the Chinese until the early modern age who believed in flat earth. This can be clearly seen in the Ming/Qing scholar Yang Guangxian , who criticized the Jesuits for their belief in a spherical earth:

It is clear that the Chinese scholar Yang Guiangxian believed in a flat earth, and Yang was at one time head of the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy, so he was no fringe scholar. There are other evidence that the Chinese believed in a flat earth, such as when they attempted to calculate the distance of the sun, they had specifically used an assumption that the earth was flat between the points they were measuring the sun from. Since their premise was wrong, the resulting distance they calculated to the sun was totally off. Yet despite all this, Needham in Science and Civilization tried to argue that Zhang Heng might have been referring to a spherical earth, and there are those who still try to argue that the Chinese had believed in a spherical earth before the arrival of the Jesuits:




There is nothing ambiguous about the clear statement of Ming scholar Yang's belief in a flat earth, and to argue the Chinese or least some of them somehow believed in a spherical earth on the basis of creative interpretation of what some Chinese scholars said against the clear statements of noted Chinese scholars to the contrary is disingenuous.

Needham never shares any information on Yang's belief in his Science and Civilization, which was clearly very pertinent on the subject of the Chinese view of the shape of the earth, and given his extensive knowledge of Chinese history. it is impossible for him not to have known of Yang's views. His failure to include such information that was clearly so relevant is dishonest. The argument that some Chinese held the view of a spherical earth and some did not is disproved by the lack of discussion and argument on the topic, similar to the discussion the Jesuits had with Chinese scholars like Yang on the subject. Such kind of half truths happens not infrequently when it comes to inventions and discoveries with regard to China.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journ...D4F8A60131B55F

I don't have it on hand, but I heavily doubt Needham made no reference to Yang Guangxian. Needham, although dated, is more often than not a reliable source and for that matter was a Cambridge scholar. In either case, the 1st-2nd-century Chinese official Zhang Heng is noteworthy, as are other authors of the Eastern Han period, for observing the spherical shape of the moon, planets, and stars, and describing the nature of lunar and solar eclipses. The Chinese at least got that right. As for the Earth, yes, you are basically correct, most Chinese including learned ones believed the earth was flat and square, with corners. The belief in the earth being this shape became tied to mythological and cosmological concepts as well.

Interestingly enough, Zhang's contemporary Wang Chong (27-100 AD) accurately and vividly described the water cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation, yet these ideas were rejected by his contemporaries. Yet it's hard to say the Chinese are responsible for this and that when you have individuals being correct and an entire society being wrong on certain issues like this. In the reverse, it's kinda like saying the British, including soccer hooligans, should be held responsible and should be awarded for the achievements in groundbreaking laws of astrophysics established by Isaac Newton.

2. Wheelbarrow

Another example of half truths with regard to Chinese inventions is the claim that the Chinese invented the wheelbarrow. Though often made, this is really a half truth, since the Chinese "wheelbarrow" isn't a wheelbarrow at all in the western sense. It serves a different purpose and has a difference than a western wheelbarrow, and while superior as a cart for transporting objects for distances, it is inferior and isn't used for the purpose the western wheelbarrow was create, namely as a labor saving device around construction sites, to allow person to carry what previously took 2 people.

While the Chinese have been said to invented the "wheelbarrow", what they really invented was a one wheel cart, and there is nothing that the Chinese "wheelbarrow" can't do that a 2 wheel cart couldn't. The 2 wheel cart would be more stable, but slightly less maneuverable. The European wheelbarrow allows one man to carry and maneuver loads that previously required 2 men. It is the ability to reduce labor that made the wheelbarrow an important invention.

This seems like a minor begrudging point, but yes, basically correct.

3. Engraving Printing

You often find the definition of words changed, to give different meaning and make it seem that the Chinese were the first to invent something when they did not. An example is the use of copper plate printing.

Up until the mid-19th century, engraving (also called copper-plate engraving or line engraving) achieved widespread popularity as a method of replicating fine art images on paper, as well as illustrations for books and magazines [/FONT]http://www.chinavista.com/experience/engrave/engrave.html[/FONT]

Yet you will find it claimed that the Chinese the Chinese invented engraving



Note, the above is incorrect. What they Chinese called "engraving" is a form of carving, and it is not the intaglio printmaking process that is meant when we say a print is an engraving, or what is meant by "copper plate" printing - "copper plate printing " is not just printing using a copper plate, as the Chinese article would have you think. The Chinese "engraving" entailed carving away all the surface except where the ink was to be applied, the exact opposite what is meant by "copper plate engraving", where the ink goes into the etched lines, and the surface not carved has no ink.

I've never once heard of this claim, but okay. You're right, they didn't invent engraving.

4. The transition from scrolls to codex (modern book format).

The discussion of the transition of the scroll writing format to the modern book format, the codex, is another topic where there is silence by Needham and other Chinese sources discussing the history of Chinese technology and invention. The codex allowed greatly improved storage of writing of information over the older scroll. The 27 books of the bible used to be 27 different scrolls, and the book of Kings had to be split up into 2 separate books, 1 & 2 Kings, because it was too long to be in one scroll. Plus the codex allowed for random access to any page to quickly access information, while it could be tedious to have to unwrap a lengthy scroll to find a text in the middle of the scroll.

This is a significant transition, which is virtually ignored in discussion with China. Again, in Needham in Science and Civilization virtually ignores the topic, and is difficult to find any information on the topic, although some alleged it was during the Song dynasty. However none of the Dunhuang manuscripts were a codex., The famous Diamond Sutra, the first printed work, was actually in the scroll format, which had been obsolete in the west for about 400 years, a fact seldom mentioned.

Based on what I could find, codex style format did not come into use until the Yuan dynasty. The butterfly backing referred to in the Song dynasty is a type of scroll, quite unlike the codex.

Now I'm almost certain you haven't read Needham's books, or incorrectly remembered this, or are blatantly being dishonest here, because Needham gives a good amount of space to this very topic in Volume 5, Part 1 ("Paper and Printing"), pp. 227-229 for instance. It's true that the codex was invented in the ancient Greco-Roman world long before it existed in China, but that hardly accounts for the native Chinese development of bookbinding. In fact, as Needham elucidates, pamphlets in the form of folded leaf bindings started to appear in China during the 9th century, at the tail end of the Tang Dynasty. During the subsequent Song Dynasty, the "butterfly" style binding was invented by the Chinese, while the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty Chinese had wrapped back bindings with two edges of the leaves attached to the spine. This was secured by a paper cover at the back. Books with thread-stitched bindings finally appeared during the Ming Dynasty. In fact, Western-style bookbinding didn't replace traditional Chinese thread-stitched bookbinding until the early 20th century. This went hand-in-hand with the replacement of Chinese traditional printing methods with Western-style printing presses.

Instead of slandering Needham, you should probably do your homework first, because more often than not you'll find yourself to be contradicted. The guy really did cover his bases, even though some of his findings have been overturned in recent decades due to new findings.

5. Invention of the mechanical clocks

It is often claimed that the Chinese invented the mechanical clock, as in the example below

The above is incorrect. These Chinese clocks time regulating mechanism that functioned as an escapement required a fluid to function, an could not be mechanized. The Chinese clocks had gears, but so did Islamic clocks at the same time, and the Chinese were no more mechanized than those. The Chinese clocks also required a fluid to power them. They were not even close to being all mechanical. The All mechanical clock, that required no fluid, water, sand, etc., to operate were invented in Europe.

Yes, this is very true, but it's still quite an achievement by Su Song in the 11th century to have made an astronomical clock tower with an escapement mechanism, even if it was powered by a waterwheel. That being said, the late medieval European clocks were the first true fully mechanical clocks. And power to the European horologists and clock-smiths, since they also made the first portable timepieces and watches.

[Common Soldier]

Yes, we have the Pinyin system now that can render Chinese spoken words into the Latin alphabet. That doesn't solve the huge problems with their tonal language that's more suited to having written characters to understand what is being said, because without context Chinese is a very difficult spoken language to understand.

Yeah, have fun making an alphabet for that language. It also explains why woodblock printing, invented in the 7th century during the Tang period, remained the predominant means of printing long after the Song-era Chinese invented movable type in the 11th century, all the way until the Western-style printing press was adopted in Qing China during the 19th century (thanks to the European spheres of influence). 

Vietnamese is a tonal language, yet switched to an alphabet, and English manages a lot of words that sound alike yet have different meaning, using different spelling or context to tell the difference. While I would not advocating changing the Chinese script, the problems with using an alphabet are not as big as people make out.

And despite all the issues with movable type, the Chinese government did use metal type for printing, so the problems were manageable. The problem may have partly due to the type of movable type the Chinese used - bronze, due to a much higher melting temperaature, and shrinks while hardening, is much harder to cast to make type than Gutenberg type metal alloy.



Gutenberg's printing press was more efficient anyway, utilizing the Greco-Roman screw press that had existed in the Western world since Antiquity. Meanwhile, the Chinese actually didn't utilize screws at all in their architecture or civic engineering, even though they had chain pumps for lifting materials and water uphill as far back as the 1st century AD (achieving more or less what the ancient Greek Archimedes Screw was capable of doing). The screw wasn't even used in any significant fashion in China until Europeans began trading and living in China in the 17th century (or perhaps it was even earlier when the Mongol Empire ruled over China with the Yuan dynasty, since tens of thousands of Europeans, mostly Italians, lived in China during the 13th century). 

Although useful, Chinese paper did not require a press for printing, Chinese paper being more absorbent. Gutenberg printing was for a much stiffer parchment and European paper, and a press was probably needed for the force required to press the type onto tne page. But lack of presses may be a factor as to why the Chinese never developed intaglio printing like engraving or etching, you need a more force to push the ink out of the groves onto the paper.

PS - The ancient Greeks also had chain pumps as well





I don't have it on hand, but I heavily doubt Needham made no reference to Yang Guangxian. Needham, although dated, is more often than not a reliable source and for that matter was a Cambridge scholar. In either case, the 1st-2nd-century Chinese official Zhang Heng is noteworthy, as are other authors of the Eastern Han period, for observing the spherical shape of the moon, planets, and stars, and describing the nature of lunar and solar eclipses. The Chinese at least got that right. As for the Earth, yes, you are basically correct, most Chinese including learned ones believed the earth was flat and square, with corners. The belief in the earth being this shape became tied to mythological and cosmological concepts as well.

Interestingly enough, Zhang's contemporary Wang Chong (27-100 AD) accurately and vividly described the water cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation, yet these ideas were rejected by his contemporaries. Yet it's hard to say the Chinese are responsible for this and that when you have individuals being correct and an entire society being wrong on certain issues like this. In the reverse, it's kinda like saying the British, including soccer hooligans, should be held responsible and should be awarded for the achievements in groundbreaking laws of astrophysics established by Isaac Newton. 

Let me know when you find such a reference to Yang Guqngxian by Needham in Science and Civilization. I couldn't, nor apparently could others in the wikipedia article on the flat earth theory when thdy discussec Needham's position.

Yang was a major scholar, and if the spherical earth had been a traditional view, he would not have been ridiculing and making fun of the Jesuits' belief in a spherical earth as he did. Yang wasn't a fringe scholar, so his views had to represent commonly held Chinese views, if not completely universal. Besides I recall Mateso Ricci said that thse Chinese views of a flat earth were one of several wrong theories the Chinese held.





I've never once heard of this claim, but okay. You're right, they didn't invent engraving. 

An example was given in my original posting. I have come across it several times. Wnat the Chinese who say this don't realize is that when we use copper plate engraving in English, it means an intaglio printing method where lines are etched into a plate of copper to hold the ink. The Chinese are talking about a plate of copper that is carved, I think because people sometimes use engraved and carved somewat intechangeably. The Chinese did use carved copper plate for printing, but they did not cut grooves/channels to hold the ink, rather they cut away all the surface that did not have ink applied. the opposite of engraving.




Now I'm almost certain you haven't read Needham's books, or incorrectly remembered this, or are blatantly being dishonest here, because Needham gives a good amount of space to this very topic in Volume 5, Part 1 ("Paper and Printing"), pp. 227-229 for instance. It's true that the codex was invented in the ancient Greco-Roman world long before it existed in China, but that hardly accounts for the native Chinese development of bookbinding. In fact, as Needham elucidates, pamphlets in the form of folded leaf bindings started to appear in China during the 9th century, at the tail end of the Tang Dynasty. During the subsequent Song Dynasty, the "butterfly" style binding was invented by the Chinese, while the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty Chinese had wrapped back bindings with two edges of the leaves attached to the spine. This was secured by a paper cover at the back. Books with thread-stitched bindings finally appeared during the Ming Dynasty. In fact, Western-style bookbinding didn't replace traditional Chinese thread-stitched bookbinding until the early 20th century. This went hand-in-hand with the replacement of Chinese traditional printing methods with Western-style printing presses.

Instead of slandering Needham, you should probably do your homework first, because more often than not you'll find yourself to be contradicted. The guy really did cover his bases, even though some of his findings have been overturned in recent decades due to new findings.

I must have missed what Needham wrote on the switch format, so I was mistaken. In my own defense, there are 7 volumes of Science and Civilization, and I don't own my own copy yet. .

Tell me this - Needham is quick to speculate on a number of inventions (printing, clock making,, compass) that Chinese gave the Europeans who were half a world away the idea for these inventions.

Did Needham speculate all, if just to dismiss possibilty, of the idea of a codex format being inspired by all the foreigners who were living in China, and all their trading partners who had been using the codex for centuries? Even if the implementation was different, the concept of the codex, of sheets between 2 covers, would have been apparent just looking at any codex book that the foreigners in their midst was using. Unless you watch the actual printing process, looking at the finished product will give you no idea how it was made, but just looking at a codex book, you can see the advantages of the format right off the back.

Yet I bet you my months salary, Needham, who is always grasping at every possibility for the Chinese to somewho be responsible for any invention, never even discussed the possibility that foreign contacts, living in China, didn't inspire ths Chinese ro come up with their formats that replaced the scroll. Needham dismisses the possibility that Korean bronze type printing had any influence on tne creation of Chinese bronze type printing with a single sentence "there is no evidencefor it", even though Korea sits right next door to China, and had been practicing bronze type printing for centuries before the Chinese. He provides no evidence, spends zero effort justifying his claim. Did he show that Chinese bronze type ink was different composition than Korea? No. Did he show that the Chinese used a different type of bronze alloy than the Korean type bronze? No. Did Needham show the Chinese bronze movable type was made in a different way from the Korean type? No. So where does Needham get off on talking about how Gutenberg, who used different metal, process to make the type, and ink than the Chinese, still might be influenced than the Chinese?

Needham did do excellent scholarship, but his excessively biased pro Chinese stance ruins his scholarship in many cases in my view. (Neednam bought into the Communist propaganda about the US being guilty of germ warfare during the Korean war, which we know from released Russian documents the Soviets had helped the Chinese fabricate,which caused him to be banned from the US for years, yet he maintained those false charges to his death, never admitting he was wrong,.)

DELEETED- FOUND OUT I WAS WRONG IN MANY AREAS. COMMON SOLDIER

After going through Needham again, I found out I was flat wrong, he did cover the areas. My memory is a lot poorer than I thought.



Yes, this is very true, but it's still quite an achievement by Su Song in the 11th century to have made an astronomical clock tower with an escapement mechanism, even if it was powered by a waterwheel. That being said, the late medieval European clocks were the first true fully mechanical clocks. And power to the European horologists and clock-smiths, since they also made the first portable timepieces and watches.

For all we know, ancient Greek clocks might have had "escapements" as good as Su Song. We do know they used gears, Vitruvius appaently mentions that fact, and we don't know enough of the ancient Greek and Roman clocks to rule out the possibility, and the unexpected complexity of the Antikythera mechanism should give us pause before putting limits on what the Greeks could do.

Centruries before Su Song, the Greeks built a monumental clock called the Tower of the Winds. The building in which the clock still stands, altnough the guts havd long sinced vanished. So Su Song isn't the first monumental clock either. Su Song clock may have been impressive, but not the milestones it is made out to be.

The Su Song clocks were a technological dead end, that had no effedt on future clock development. Like the pterosaurs, the first flying vertabrates, they were an interesting evolutionary dead end, with no future descendants.

The "escapement" of the Su Song clock actually doesn't meet the exact definition of an escapement, more of a time regulator device that does the same thing as an escapement. Su's "escapement" could not be mechanized, works on a different principle, and could never be made portable. All modern time pieces, from the atomic clock to the pendulum work on a principle same as the first mechanical European clocks, quite different from Su Song's clock.

[Ludicus]

Islam that caused the Dark Ages of Europe. The Muslim conquest isolated Western Europe.

Muslims and a comet. Trump's white supremacist school, I presume. Oh dear, I was expecting something like that. Chinese, Muslims...pfff.

How convenient to blame Muslims, not the Fall of Rome, the little ice age, famine, the black plague, and the lack of roads. Since the Fall of Rome, there was nobody there to maintain the roads, nobody to protect travelers; I wish I could have time to play Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Iberia is located in Western Europe. Arab science passed on to Western Europe via Muslim Civilization, the basis for birth of of modern science in Europe during Enlightenment. Islamic science spread to Western Europe and survived. By the 1100's, translations of Arabic texts were making their way from Muslim Spain into European universities. These Arab texts stimulated the growth of Western science; our Western science today rests squarely on the accomplishments of Muslim science, which, as a result, is still very much alive.

A Short History of China: From Ancient Dynasties to Economic Powerhouse, Gordon Kerr.

For many centuries, the sophistication of the culture, science and technology left the West lagging behind, the inventions simply staggering and well in advance of similar innovations in the West. To the Chinese can be attributed the invention of the compass, gunpowder- and several centuries before Guttenberg - both woodblock and movable print in printing.
Paper-making was first developed in China, leading to the first government issued paper- money during the Song dynasty. ( 960-1279). In the fifth century BC, the Chinese were using advanced metallurgical technology, including the blast furnace and the cupola furnace.
They invented the escape mechanism in water-powered clocks in the eighth century and the endless power-transmitting chain drive in the eleventh century.
The list is endless with advances in music, mathematics and astronomy thrown for a good measure.
As the new China emerges as a global superpower, it is an appropriate moment to discover the fascinating history that has brought it to this point, and to bear in mind the prescient words of Napoleon: Let China sleep, for when she awakes she will shake the word

Insert another name here: " ...X...exactly the historians I warn about...he doesn't know what he is talking about"

My next quote (next post) comes from the first historian since H.G. Wells to write a History of the World.
----
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I believe that the Dark Age collapse were a necessary event to allow the creation of the modern world.

Doesn't make any sense.
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Back to the fall of Rome,
The Fall of Rome - an author dialogue - OUPblog - Oxford University ... Part one

Both agree that the fall of Rome was a cataclysmic affair. Both seem to oppose the old argument that the Western Empire was transformed by accommodating new barbarian populations within the Empire’s political and economic structure.

Part two, read the dialogue
The Fall of Rome - an author dialogue - OUPblog - Oxford University ...

My book, and this is its major novelty, concentrates on the impact of the fall of the West on daily life, as revealed by a mass of new archaeological research over the last few decades (which I hope is presented in a readable and approachable manner).

I argue what is currently an unfashionable view (though, in my opinion, it is blindingly obvious) – that the Roman world brought remarkable levels of sophistication and comfort, and spread them widely in society (and not just to a tiny elite); and that the fall of Rome saw the dismantling of this complexity, and a return to what can reasonably be termed ‘prehistoric’ levels of material comfort.

Furthermore, I believe that this change was not just at the level of pots and pans, important though these are, but also affected sophisticated skills like reading and writing. Pompeii, with its ubiquitous inscriptions, painted signs, and graffiti, was a city that revolved around writing – after the fall of the empire, the same cannot be said for any settlement in the West for many centuries to come.

I recommend caution in praising ‘Civilizations’ (whether Roman, or our own), and I do emphasize that ‘civilizations’ have their downsides. But, equally, I think the current fashion for treating all cultures as essentially the same – and all dramatic changes (like the end of the Roman world) as mere ‘transformations’ from one system, to another equally valid one – is not only wrong, but also dangerous. It evens out the dramatic ups and downs of human history, into a smooth trajectory.

This risks blinding us to the fact that things have often gone terribly wrong in the past, and to the near certainty that, in time, our own ‘civilization’, and the comforts we enjoy from it, will also collapse.

Rome didn't fall in a day - Telegraph
an interview with bryan ward-perkins on the fall of rome

Or read Peter Heather, Empire and Barbarians, chapter A New Europe, page 336/342 (from my bookshelf)

The idea, in the light of such observations that the transition from unitary Europe to multiple successor states was a largely peaceful process, for one thing, will stand not stand comparison with the evidence...there is no reason to think that the unprecedented pulses of barbarian intrusion had anything to do with a Roman invitation, explicit or implicit. The outsiders moved on to Roman soils in acts of violent self-assertion...
Attempts to make the end of the western into a largely peaceful process, carries forward by the withdrawal of the local elite, from continued participation in central states structures, are unconvincingly.

Sometimes the old order must be swept away, before a new, stronger order can emerge.

Sure, globalism is the new dark age and Trump is our saviour.

[Common Soldier]

Muslims and a comet. Trump's white supremacist school, I presume. Oh dear, I was expecting something like that. Chinese, Muslims...pfff. 

How convenient to blame Muslims, not the Fall of Rome, the little ice age, famine, the black plague, and the lack of roads. Since the Fall of Rome, there was nobody there to maintain the roads, nobody to protect travelers; I wish I could have time to play Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Trust you to go off topic and engage in personal character attacks.. I didn't come up with the idea, nor did I say it was entirely true, but it has more merit than many will give it credit. The Arab conquest of most of the Mediterranean world did isolate Western Europe from the traditional centers of classical civilization. Of the 5 centers of Christianity in classical times, all but one eventually fell under Muslim control.




Iberia is located in Western Europe. Arab science passed on to Western Europe via Muslim Civilization, the basis for birth of of modern science in Europe during Enlightenment. Islamic science spread to Western Europe and survived. By the 1100's, translations of Arabic texts were making their way from Muslim Spain into European universities. These Arab texts stimulated the growth of Western science; our Western science today rests squarely on the accomplishments of Muslim science, which, as a result, is still very much alive. 

In your biased fashion, you as usual underrated the Europeans own contributions. The horizontql axis windnmill was developed not in the Arab world, but Europe. And while trhe Arab work was very important, European growth in science was happening even before the Arab text. The oldest universoty, Bologna, was for the study of law, of which Arab text had nothing to do with.

This is not to discount the Arab contributions, but if Europeans hadn't already been starting to recovery their lost knowledge, they translated Arab text wouldn't have been of any use. Just they had been recovery lost land, the Europeans were at the same time recovering lost knowledge, and had renewed interest in science, which was never entirely lost. Bede's use of the spherical earth to explain the changing daylight of the seasons was more advance than the Chinese at their peak, and Bede's explanation of the tides was as good as any in premodern times.

And Arab science itself was heavily indebted to the Greeks, even if it did go beyond the what the Greeks did, just as the Europeans went beyond the Arabs. If the Europeans had. But trust you to ignore that fact.

Note, Iberia, which was part of the Arab world, and did not undergo the same collapse as the rest of western Europe, which lend credence to Pirenne's theory. The parts of Europe that recovered first, the Italian cities like Venice, also had the most trade with the Mediterranean world. All this supports the theory that the Arab conquest played a factor in creating the Dark Ages. Not to say it was the only factor, but the decline might not have been as steep, nor the recovery as long without the Arab conquests. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, because the cultural that did re-emerge reached new heights and transformed the entire world in a way no previous civilization had.



Both agree that the fall of Rome was a cataclysmic affair. Both seem to oppose the old argument that the Western Empire was transformed by accommodating new barbarian populations within the Empire’s political and economic structure.

So what? That collapse of Roman civilization was cataclysmic is not being disputed. What is being disputed is your claim that there was no "direct passage" from ancient Roman to the later middle ages, and that is a false and bigoted claim. The sources you cite don't support that claim, your sources don't insist, as you do, that there was no continuity at all from ancient Rome. You said it, so don't lie and pretend you didn't.

The fact is, that despite your claims otherwise, medieval and modern European and eventually world civilization was built on a foundation of Greco-Roman civilization. We might argue about exactly how much lost and recovered, and how much was continously retained, the fact remains the basics were always retained - literacy and writing, key classical text, the language, and some technology. Despite what you might be implying, the Arabs were not responsible all the recovered text, and key pieces of classical scientific knowledge, such as the spherical earth (superior to Chinese knowledge at its peak) were reained without Arab help.




Sure, globalism is the new dark age and Trump is our saviour.

And China is known for its honesty and decency, just ask the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama

Trust you to bring up irrelevant and untrue topics that have nothing to do with the thread, except to providd further proof that you can't trust what sinocentrics such as yourself say. Not only in true sinocentric faahion you divert the topic of the thread, but what you say isn't even true, and your evidence, in true sinocentric fashion, doesn't support your claims.

Globalism is not the new dark ages, and Trump is not our saviour as you just said, nor did I ever say tha either, proving that you cannot trust what a sinocentric like says.

Your sinocentric claim there was no "direct passage" (your words) from Rome to the high middle ages is also not supported by all the people you quote in your previous post. None of they said there waw no continuity at all between the Roman civilization and medieval civilization as you flatly asserted. All they have said is that there was a great deal lost with the collapse of Roman civilization, which no one disputes. It is merely the degree of lost and recovery, and the amount of direct continuity that is under discussion, not that there was none at all as you claimed. And in true sinocentric fashion, your engage in personal attacks on those who challenge the idea that China was the greatest (except for a few years in recent time.

(Even sinocentric had a hard time insisting in Chinese superiority when others could send messages at near the speed of light and Chinese only at the speed of a horse, that others could travel the same distance in a day by train that the Chinese took a week to by horseback, and where the Chinese were thoroughly trounced by opponents who had steam ships and more advance guns, while all the Chinese had were mere human powered ships, and guns that their opponents had made obsolete a century earlier. But acknowledging what any rational person could not deny hardly demonstrates the objectivity and open mindness of the sinocentrics.)

[JeanDukeofAlecon]

About the Islamic conquests, I don't think I would say that they caused the "dark ages", since that concept really can't be applied unilaterally to the greater European world (England and northern France, for example, went into a "dark age" 2 centuries before the rise of Islam), but they certainly brought an end to the classical order in Anatolia, Tunisia, and the western Mediterranean islands (most notably Sicily). Depending on how you define the "classical order", that could also be extended to the Levant and Egypt, though the change there was less abrupt, and much less catastrophic. Despite the economic downturn, immediately before the conquests, and even during their initial phases, we still see local notables clad in togas sponsoring the construction and maintenance of public facilities, but this was a breed that would die out entirely by the 8th century in the wake of the instability and destruction brought by the Arabs (alongside the Bulgars).

Anatolia had most of its major cities thoroughly sacked at least once, many multiple times, and was continuously raided for centuries, leading to a massive depopulation of the region, and the militarization and impoverishment of those who remained; the area's population declined from around 7-8 million in 620 to 5 million or so in 750, and the use of coinage declined significantly, almost disappearing entirely in the eastern themes. In the west, the exarchate of Africa, at the beginning of the century one of the most prosperous regions in the empire, was also presumably hugely depopulated over the decades of war and raiding it suffered (by the time our sources again comment on the area it's a bit of a backwater colonized by nomads and almost devoid of any Latin or Punic speakers), and Carthage itself, under Constans II a candidate for imperial capital, was razed to the ground. Additionally, Sicily and the isles, formerly blissfully untouched by war, were, like Anatolia, forced to militarize as Arab and Berber raiders began to set out from the newly conquered African territories in the 8th century, before being slowly and painfully conquered in the 9th (with the exception of Sardinia).

All this depopulation, militarization, and omnipresent raiding amalgamated to cause, in Christian Europe, a unilateral and devastating decline in trade, patronage, urban life, and general wealth, which in turn led to a massive decline in the amount of literature being produced, buildings being erected, and complex technologies being applied. Of course, the Muslims were only one of many groups that conquered, pillaged, and disrupted in this period, but they played that role in the territories previously outlined, namely Anatolia, Africa, and Sicily, and in doing so brought them into their own localized "dark ages" where before they had been clinging to classical society. Some would argue that without the Islamic conquests Christendom, or at least parts of it, could have recovered within centuries instead of millennia, and thus they perpetuated the dark ages (I'll stay out of that particular debate), but what is certain is that they weren't by any means blameless.

The Eparch of Thessalonica (right), wearing a toga contabulata (the last known of its kind), is thanked by Saint Demetrios for rebuilding his church in one of the last mosaics of late antiquity (mid 7th c.):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Ludicus]

I didn't come up with the idea...

It was a divine inspiration.

but it has more merit than many will give it credit.,, Note, Iberia, which was part of the Arab world, and did not undergo the same collapse as the rest of western Europe, which lend credence to Pirenne's theory.

The discoveries of archaeology (see Ward-Perkins) have undermined the Islamophobic picture. I know where you are coming from, white supremacists websites adore Pirenne's theory: Henri Pirenne and why the 'Dark Ages' - Western Civilisation Defend Western Civilisation

The Arab irruption caused mankind to enter a dark age. Western Civilisation was and is superior to anything Islam has developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam.

Raising the alarm about the fascism called Submission since 2000. The reality is that the Arabs and Muslims created and still create destruction, death and anti-civilizational practices and attitudes.

This is why Pirenne is condemned by the modern historian-community. He was right. They are wrong. And the little academic minds will unite to crucify those who dare to speak the truth.

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medieval and modern European...was built on a foundation of Greco-Roman civilization.

With a little help from the dirty Muslims

just as the Europeans went beyond the Arabs. If the Europeans had. But trust you to ignore that fact.

I don't ignore the fact.Europe (or the USA?) is the new Middle Kingdom of the World.For now.

It's common knowledge that there were three main cultures the Arabs assimilated and fused into what we call Muslim civilization - Indian, Persian, and Greek.
That said, Arab civilization would pass many of its ideas to Europe, where they would be instrumental in the flowering of culture known as the Italian Renaissance.

world civilization was built on a foundation of Greco-Roman civilization.

Really,don't say.
It came to my mind the words of Charles Trevelyan,a Victorian colonial administrator in India,
he wrote,

the instances in which nations have worked their way to a high degree of civilisation from domestic resources only are extremely rare. Imposition from without is necessary because the instances in which nations have worked their way to a high degree of civilisation from domestic resources only are extremely rare.the Indians will … soon stand in the same position toward us in which we once stood towards the Romans … from being obstinate enemies, the Britons soon became attached and confiding friends.

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I hope I'm not annoying the western white supremacists: back to the topic, the China of wonders and marvels

A contemporary of our beloved Camões in the East, who travelled mainly in China and Japan, and Siam* ( and other places) was Fernão Mendes Pinto. Btw, he features one of the first accounts of firearms introduction in Japan.
The China of wonder and marvels of Fernão Mendes Pinto | Macao ...
This wonderful book was written by our Sindbad of the Orient- a soldier, a merchant, a diplomat, a slave, a pirate, and a missionary during 20 years in the Orient- and the work is an extraordinary combination of fact and fiction, in which Mendes Pinto calls himself a "poor me" and admiringly describes China (1) and Japan, using this nations and cultures as critical mirror of the Portuguese/European societies and cultures.

The preface to the description of Peking (chapter 107) is worth recalling:

This city of Peking of which I promised to provide more information than I have got so far, is so grand that I almost regret the promise I made. I do not really know where to start, because it is not like Rome, Constantinople, Venice, Paris, London, Seville, Lisbon or any other European city. Nor does it look like any other city that I know of in the world. Perhaps I dare say that no other city can be compared to this huge Peking, with its grandeur and sumptuousness featured in its buildings, wealth, abundance, (...) people, customs, vessels, justice, government and peaceful Court

Some significant chapters

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

97. Business and Trade Practices in China
98. The Floating Cities of China
99. More about the Wonders of China
100. Arrival in Peking
101. A Favorable Ruling
102. Of Judges and Influence
103. Sentenced to Hard Labor
104. The Kindly Captain of Quansy
105. The Splendors of Peking
106. Chinese Banqueting Houses
107. Sightseeing in Peking
108. Prison of the Outcasts
109. Treasure House of the Dead
110. The Shrine of the Queen of Heaven
111. The Shrine of the 113 Kings
112. Social Welfare in China
113. Provisions against Famine
114. Farewell to Peking

* the siam of mendes pinto's travels - Siamese Heritage Trust
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[JeanDukeofAlecon]

Trump's white supremacist school, I presume.

I know where you are coming from, white supremacists websites adore Pirenne's theory

With a little help from the dirty Muslims

Neither of you has remained that civil, but not so subtly implying Common Soldier is a racist, or even white supremacist, just because he disagrees with you about the historical influence of one civilization or another is extremely rude, helpful to absolutely nobody, and dilutes the weight of those labels. If anyone who thinks there's something special about western civilization is a "white supremacist" the term loses all meaning, and actual white supremacists benefit. I personally wouldn't agree with that position until the late renaissance or thereabouts, and don't think it applies to the modern world, but that doesn't mean someone who does is a racist, unless they think westerners were special because of their, you know, race. Could they be wrong? Yep. Could they be ignorant? Sure. Could they even be bigoted? It's certainly a possibility. But does this, in itself, make them racist? Absolutely not, and it's both insulting and ignorant, not to mention counterproductive, to assume that it does.

Basically, if you don't want to contribute to the meme of "damn leftists" calling everything they don't like racist which currently enables so much actual racism down in the US (and even up here in Canada to an extent), save accusations of racism for people who discriminate or make assumptions based on race, and accusations of white supremacy for people who think being white makes you supreme. Being accused of racism can be a self fulfilling prophecy, as others accused, including actual racists, become "us", and the ones doing the accusing become "them". The wider the definition of racist gets the more radicalization we'll see.

[Roma_Victrix]

Vietnamese is a tonal language, yet switched to an alphabet, and English manages a lot of words that sound alike yet have different meaning, using different spelling or context to tell the difference. While I would not advocating changing the Chinese script, the problems with using an alphabet are not as big as people make out.

LOL. No. It's okay if you don't know the nature of the Chinese language; that's not a sin and I wouldn't hold it against you. But you're off by a country mile, so to speak, in thinking that any dialect of Chinese can operate the same way as Vietnamese, or that English (!!!) has any comparable amount of similar-sounding words that can be differentiated with spelling or context. I studied Mandarin Chinese in college. One of the first things you learn is the tonal nature of the language along with the horrific reality that it has a very limited amount of sounds and vowels, and many mono-syllabic sounds are attached to literally dozens of different concepts, characters, and definitions. It's a nightmare.

Vietnamese, while having something like half of all its vocabulary and lexicon stemming from Classical Chinese, is still a radically different language, with a radically different phonology, and doesn't even belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family (it belongs instead to the Viet-Muong branch of the Austroasiatic language family). While the Vietnamese and other peoples who previously used Chinese characters, like the Koreans, have been able to use alphabets for their own languages, that doesn't mean the Chinese can readily do so, or that they are simply being stubborn as you seem to think. Although the mainland Chinese are very partisan about it (and hate that Taiwan and overseas Chinese still uses Traditional Chinese characters), the commies under Mao did at least try to simplify the enormous existing corpus of written characters, so that it would be slightly easier for commoners to master.

PS - The ancient Greeks also had chain pumps as well

I know, I just didn't feel like it was necessary to list all the civilizations who also had it (including the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, etc.), since that wasn't the point of my argument. The point of my argument was that the Chinese, when lacking some technology other civilizations had, usually found a way to bypass these problems by inventing other machines to do a similar job. Or the good ole fashioned Chinese way of using a crap ton of corvee-drafted peasants to perform manual labor.

Let me know when you find such a reference to Yang Guqngxian by Needham in Science and Civilization. I couldn't, nor apparently could others in the wikipedia article on the flat earth theory when thdy discussec Needham's position.

Yang was a major scholar, and if the spherical earth had been a traditional view, he would not have been ridiculing and making fun of the Jesuits' belief in a spherical earth as he did. Yang wasn't a fringe scholar, so his views had to represent commonly held Chinese views, if not completely universal. Besides I recall Mateso Ricci said that thse Chinese views of a flat earth were one of several wrong theories the Chinese held.

Well, you seem to be largely right about Yang Guangxian; Needham only mentions him on p. 449 of Science and Civilization in China, Volume III: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth (1959, reprinted 1995, Cambridge University Press), in regards to his written rebukes and rivalry with the Jesuit Johann Adam Schall von Bell about calendar science and astronomy. Yang lost the argument even in his own day, though, since the late Ming Chinese had even accepted the fact that the Earth was spherical, thanks to European influence. For instance, Chinese geographers beginning in the early 17th century began showing a spherical Earth that could be circumnavigated by sailing around the globe.

However, you are wrong about Needham otherwise. Needham clearly states on pp. 498-499 of Volume III that the mainstream Chinese view was that the Heavens were round (i.e. the Celestial Sphere) while the Earth was flat and square. He is keen to stress, though (on those pages and on p. 220), that there were notable Chinese scholars who deviated from this view that prevailed into the 17th century (before it was finally squashed by the European science of the Jesuits). These Chinese figures include the 4th-century Jin-dynasty scholar Yu Xi (虞喜), who somewhat tepidly argued that the earth could be either square or round, but that it had to conform to the shape of the heavens (by that time the Chinese accepted the model of the celestial sphere for the universe with their armillary sphere tools, and that celestial bodies like stars, planets, and moons were spherical, shaped like a ball or, as their figure of speech went, like a round crossbow bullet). Yu Xi was followed by the 13th-century Yuan-dynasty scholar and mathematician Li Ye (李治), who firmly stated that the Earth was spherical, the same shape as the Heavens. He argued that there was no way it could be flat or square, since that would hinder the movement of the Heavens and celestial bodies.

Unfortunately Needham doesn't seem to explore the idea that Li Ye's ideas about a spherical Earth could have been influenced by Muslim astronomy that had become popular in the Mongol-ruled Yuan court at Khanbaliq (Beijing). However, Li Ye could just have easily been following the school of thought expounded by Yu Xi, whose ideas were grounded in native Chinese science.

An example was given in my original posting. I have come across it several times. Wnat the Chinese who say this don't realize is that when we use copper plate engraving in English, it means an intaglio printing method where lines are etched into a plate of copper to hold the ink. The Chinese are talking about a plate of copper that is carved, I think because people sometimes use engraved and carved somewat intechangeably. The Chinese did use carved copper plate for printing, but they did not cut grooves/channels to hold the ink, rather they cut away all the surface that did not have ink applied. the opposite of engraving.

Okay, very interesting.

I must have missed what Needham wrote on the switch format, so I was mistaken. In my own defense, there are 7 volumes of Science and Civilization, and I don't own my own copy yet. .

Tell me this - Needham is quick to speculate on a number of inventions (printing, clock making,, compass) that Chinese gave the Europeans who were half a world away the idea for these inventions.

Needham is not quick to speculate anything. It's actually kinda boring to read Needham because his work is so...exhaustive. He yammers on and on and on before getting to the point, but by the time he does he's basically explained the entire backstory for whatever subject he's on, and he never fails to mention similar technologies in other parts of the world and other time periods (such as ancient Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, etc.). His suggestions that any given Chinese technology spread elsewhere or specifically to the West is usually very cautious and backed by a ton of evidence. He doesn't just speculate on a whim. I sometimes think people reviewing his work, in order to produce juicier headlines, advertise his ideas as such, but if you actually read his works, that's not how he does it.

Did Needham speculate all, if just to dismiss possibilty, of the idea of a codex format being inspired by all the foreigners who were living in China, and all their trading partners who had been using the codex for centuries? Even if the implementation was different, the concept of the codex, of sheets between 2 covers, would have been apparent just looking at any codex book that the foreigners in their midst was using. Unless you watch the actual printing process, looking at the finished product will give you no idea how it was made, but just looking at a codex book, you can see the advantages of the format right off the back.

Yet I bet you my months salary, Needham, who is always grasping at every possibility for the Chinese to somewho be responsible for any invention, never even discussed the possibility that foreign contacts, living in China, didn't inspire ths Chinese ro come up with their formats that replaced the scroll. Needham dismisses the possibility that Korean bronze type printing had any influence on tne creation of Chinese bronze type printing with a single sentence "there is no evidencefor it", even though Korea sits right next door to China, and had been practicing bronze type printing for centuries before the Chinese. He provides no evidence, spends zero effort justifying his claim. Did he show that Chinese bronze type ink was different composition than Korea? No. Did he show that the Chinese used a different type of bronze alloy than the Korean type bronze? No. Did Needham show the Chinese bronze movable type was made in a different way from the Korean type? No. So where does Needham get off on talking about how Gutenberg, who used different metal, process to make the type, and ink than the Chinese, still might be influenced than the Chinese?

I don't feel like scouring the volume about paper and printing right now, but I will get back to you on if Needham mentions potential Western or better yet Middle Eastern influence on the development of medieval Chinese bookbinding starting in the 9th century during the Tang dynasty. Just to be clear, though, he's usually very thorough about this, as evidenced by his carefulness to note that it was European Jesuits in China who finally overturned the long-held Chinese ideas about the flatness of the Earth.

Needham did do excellent scholarship, but his excessively biased pro Chinese stance ruins his scholarship in many cases in my view. (Neednam bought into the Communist propaganda about the US being guilty of germ warfare during the Korean war, which we know from released Russian documents the Soviets had helped the Chinese fabricate,which caused him to be banned from the US for years, yet he maintained those false charges to his death, never admitting he was wrong,.)

Okay, he was an obnoxious tool for thinking that, but that doesn't really say much about his larger body of work, or the seriousness of him and his Cambridge research team, including Wang Ling. Needham wasn't some caped superman who wrote all of this on his own. He was actually being checked and peer-reviewed every step of the way.

I guess Needham was something like Columbus, refusing to acknowledge the continent of the Americas wasn't Asia, even until his death.

After going through Needham again, I found out I was flat wrong, he did cover the areas. My memory is a lot poorer than I thought.

That's fine.

For all we know, ancient Greek clocks might have had "escapements" as good as Su Song. We do know they used gears, Vitruvius appaently mentions that fact, and we don't know enough of the ancient Greek and Roman clocks to rule out the possibility, and the unexpected complexity of the Antikythera mechanism should give us pause before putting limits on what the Greeks could do.

Centruries before Su Song, the Greeks built a monumental clock called the Tower of the Winds. The building in which the clock still stands, altnough the guts havd long sinced vanished. So Su Song isn't the first monumental clock either. Su Song clock may have been impressive, but not the milestones it is made out to be.

The Su Song clocks were a technological dead end, that had no effedt on future clock development. Like the pterosaurs, the first flying vertabrates, they were an interesting evolutionary dead end, with no future descendants.

The "escapement" of the Su Song clock actually doesn't meet the exact definition of an escapement, more of a time regulator device that does the same thing as an escapement. Su's "escapement" could not be mechanized, works on a different principle, and could never be made portable. All modern time pieces, from the atomic clock to the pendulum work on a principle same as the first mechanical European clocks, quite different from Su Song's clock.

The Greeks did have amazing mechanical tools and even a primitive analog computer with the Antikythera mechanism. That doesn't mean we can go about speculating that they used an escapement in their clockworks, which were hydraulic-powered clocks much like that of the Chinese. They also had sundials, so there's that. Funnily enough, the ancient Greeks used an escapement mechanism with a washstand device, but not necessarily with clocks (although Philo of Byzantium, writing in the 3rd century BC, seems to make a connection between the two, but there is still no strong evidence for its use in clocks).

Su Song isn't known for building the first astronomical clock tower. That is not his claim to fame as you seem to suggest. His claim to fame was incorporating the escapement mechanism, similar to the armillary sphere designed by the Tang astronomer Yi Xing in the 8th century, only Su Song improved this by adding an endless power-transmitting chain drive. That's still massively impressive, even if his clock tower ultimately relied on a waterwheel to power it and serve as a giant cog in the escapement. Also, no one has argued that his escapement mechanism could be miniaturized or made portable like later medieval European clocks. Obviously there are giant limitations to needing a waterwheel. Duh!

About the Islamic conquests, I don't think I would say that they caused the "dark ages", since that concept really can't be applied unilaterally to the greater European world (England and northern France, for example, went into a "dark age" 2 centuries before the rise of Islam), but they certainly brought an end to the classical order in Anatolia, Tunisia, and the western Mediterranean islands (most notably Sicily). Depending on how you define the "classical order", that could also be extended to the Levant and Egypt, though the change there was less abrupt, and much less catastrophic. Despite the economic downturn, immediately before the conquests, and even during their initial phases, we still see local notables clad in togas sponsoring the construction and maintenance of public facilities, but this was a breed that would die out entirely by the 8th century in the wake of the instability and destruction brought by the Arabs (alongside the Bulgars).

Exactly. Various European universities throughout the ages certainly benefited from Islamic translations of Greco-Roman works, Islamic commentaries on those works, and totally new scientific ideas advanced by Avicenna (Abu Ali Sina) or Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham). That shouldn't obscure the fact that the early Islamic invasions and raids of the Mediterranean world were a disaster for the Eastern Roman Empire and for regions like Italy and France. The Caliphate of Cordoba stemming from the Umayyad expansionism into Iberia did build glittering metropolises after the initial destruction of the Visigothic realm. Yet their frequent raids also contributed to the breakdown of trade and stability that were the hallmarks of the Roman era, even if the Germanic tribes had caused the vast majority of devastation in Late Antiquity (surpassing only the Huns in that regard).

Muslims and a comet. Trump's white supremacist school, I presume. Oh dear, I was expecting something like that. Chinese, Muslims...pfff.

Sure, globalism is the new dark age and Trump is our saviour.

Leader of the free world or not, Trump is a porn-star-banging political clown in my view, but he's not exactly relevant to the conversation. In fact, he's not exactly relevant to any intellectual discussion, historiography, the history of science and technology, or China. He does, however, have an amusing way of pronouncing China ("JAI-NUH") and how he does business with them all the time, and how they're ripping us off because they're smarter than us!

[Common Soldier]

LOL. No. It's okay if you don't know the nature of the Chinese language; that's not a sin and I wouldn't hold it against you. But you're off by a country mile, so to speak, in thinking that any dialect of Chinese can operate the same way as Vietnamese, or that English (!!!) has any comparable amount of similar-sounding words that can be differentiated with spelling or context. I studied Mandarin Chinese in college. One of the first things you learn is the tonal nature of the language along with the horrific reality that it has a very limited amount of sounds and vowels, and many mono-syllabic sounds are attached to literally dozens of different concepts, characters, and definitions. It's a nightmare.

Vietnamese, while having something like half of all its vocabulary and lexicon stemming from Classical Chinese, is still a radically different language, with a radically different phonology, and doesn't even belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family (it belongs instead to the Viet-Muong branch of the Austroasiatic language family). While the Vietnamese and other peoples who previously used Chinese characters, like the Koreans, have been able to use alphabets for their own languages, that doesn't mean the Chinese can readily do so, or that they are simply being stubborn as you seem to think. Although the mainland Chinese are very partisan about it (and hate that Taiwan and overseas Chinese still uses Traditional Chinese characters), the commies under Mao did at least try to simplify the enormous existing corpus of written characters, so that it would be slightly easier for commoners to master.

The fact remains that Vietnamese is a tonal language, and there is away to designate tones. Hae you actually studied Vietnamese? If not, you are really not justified in making the assertions you do. Sure Chinese has a lot of words to sound the same, but there are easy work arounds by simply spell thd word differently for the different meanings. You could spell a lot English in different way if we needed to, as we do night and knight, you could do the same for Chinese on a more consistent basis. There are work arounds that would work if the Chinese really wanted an to use an alphabet, it simply not as impossible as you assert.

As for the Communist simplification, the Chinese script is even with tne simplification is still incredibly complex, and even the simplified script is extremely hard to learn. Going from really, really hard to merely just really hard is an improvement, but not that big of one. It is a moot discussion, wince tne Chinese are no more going to change their writing to an alphabet than we are goingto fix English spelling.




I know, I just didn't feel like it was necessary to list all the civilizations who also had it (including the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, etc.), since that wasn't the point of my argument. The point of my argument was that the Chinese, when lacking some technology other civilizations had, usually found a way to bypass these problems by inventing other machines to do a similar job. Or the good ole fashioned Chinese way of using a crap ton of corvee-drafted peasants to perform manual labor. 

But the Chinese did not always come with an invention, or discovery, as their failire come come up with the idea of the spherical earth shows,

Nor did the premodern Chinese come with the modern method of making wires by using draw plates. The earliest evidence Needham could find for the Chinese using draw plates was the Qing dynasty, after the Jesuits had arrived.

The using of multiple pulleys with mechanical advantage seems unknown in China until after the Jesuits had arrived, as was the treadmill lifiting crane - I can find no evidence for either in premodern China.

And the Chinese did not use their wheelbarrows at construction sites to reduce labor..



Well, you seem to be largely right about Yang Guangxian; Needham only mentions him on p. 449 of Science and Civilization in China, Volume III: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth (1959, reprinted 1995, Cambridge University Press), in regards to his written rebukes and rivalry with the Jesuit Johann Adam Schall von Bell about calendar science and astronomy. Yang lost the argument even in his own day, though, since the late Ming Chinese had even accepted the fact that the Earth was spherical, thanks to European influence. For instance, Chinese geographers beginning in the early 17th century began showing a spherical Earth that could be circumnavigated by sailing around the globe. 


However, you are wrong about Needham otherwise. Needham clearly states on pp. 498-499 of Volume III that the mainstream Chinese view was that the Heavens were round (i.e. the Celestial Sphere) while the Earth was flat and square. He is keen to stress, though (on those pages and on p. 220), that there were notable Chinese scholars who deviated from this view that prevailed into the 17th century (before it was finally squashed by the European science of the Jesuits). These Chinese figures include the 4th-century Jin-dynasty scholar Yu Xi (虞喜), who somewhat tepidly argued that the earth could be either square or round, but that it had to conform to the shape of the heavens (by that time the Chinese accepted the model of the celestial sphere for the universe with their armillary sphere tools, and that celestial bodies like stars, planets, and moons were spherical, shaped like a ball or, as their figure of speech went, like a round crossbow bullet). Yu Xi was followed by the 13th-century Yuan-dynasty scholar and mathematician Li Ye (李治), who firmly stated that the Earth was spherical, the same shape as the Heavens. He argued that there was no way it could be flat or square, since that would hinder the movement of the Heavens and celestial bodies. 

Yu Xi was not arguing the world was a sphere, he was arguing it couldn't be a flat square, whicn was a common Chinese view. There is no reason a dome shaped earth would hinder the movements of heaven more than a sphere, Yu Xi arguments would make zero sense if he was really arguing for spherical earth, and there are much better arguments for a spherical earth. You have fallen for Needham's typical dishonest spin doctoring argument..

Other scholars havd criticized assertion that some Chinese scholars accepted a spherical earth, rightly claiming Needham misinterpreted what they said. Yang Guangxian could not have ridiculed the Jesuits as he did if some traditional Chinese had accepted the view of a spherical earth. Needham, by failing to mention Yang, gave the celiberately false impression that there was disagreement among tne premodern Chinese scholars as to whether the earth was spherical. Clearly Yang believed no pre-Jesuit Chinese scholar believed in a shperical earth.

As for a 17th Chinese map showing a spherical earth, the only one I know of Mateo Ricci's one.

[quotec]
Unfortunately Needham doesn't seem to explore the idea that Li Ye's ideas about a spherical Earth could have been influenced by Muslim astronomy that had become popular in the Mongol-ruled Yuan court at Khanbaliq (Beijing). However, Li Ye could just have easily been following the school of thought expounded by Yu Xi, whose ideas were grounded in native Chinese science.[/quote]

Needham almost never explores the idea that the Chinese could have gotten an idea or invention from someone else if he can avoid it, that is standard practice.

During the Yuan dynasty, the Mongols ruled over a lot of the civilized Muslim world, where belief in a spherical earth was pretty mucn universal, so it isn't surprising that some of their astronomers believed in a spherical earth, but such an idea was not native Chinese science..



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Needham is not quick to speculate anything. It's actually kinda boring to read Needham because his work is so...exhaustive. He yammers on and on and on before getting to the point, but by the time he does he's basically explained the entire backstory for whatever subject he's on, and he never fails to mention similar technologies in other parts of the world and other time periods (such as ancient Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, etc.). His suggestions that any given Chinese technology spread elsewhere or specifically to the West is usually very cautious and backed by a ton of evidence. He doesn't just speculate on a whim. I sometimes think people reviewing his work, in order to produce juicier headlines, advertise his ideas as such, but if you actually read his works, that's not how he does it. 

I disagree. He talks a lot, but he almost always suggest a Chinese origin for anything the Chinese invented firtst, and he stretches a lot. For example, Gutenberg press is considerably different every specifics from Chinese printing, but that doesn't prevent Needham from speculating about the possibility. There certainlh isn't a ton of evidence in tnat case.

Nor is there a ton of evidence to show any transmission of the magnetic compass from China to Europe. Since the Muslims didn't use the compass until after Europe, Needham instead speculates a totally hypothetical land rout transmission of the compass to Europe, even though there is a lick of evidence to support that evidence.

When discussing the change from tne scroll to something more like the codex, he never once mentions any possible outside influence, even though the peoples China had been dealing with had been using the codex for centuries. As usually, he proclaims the superiority of the Chinese book format over the European one, being too much of a biased sinocentric that he his to acknowledge that the European codex design might have some advantages of its own. Indeed, he doesn't bother to explain why the Chinese ever adopted the European book design as they did, if the Chinese one was so superior.


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I don't feel like scouring the volume about paper and printing right now, but I will get back to you on if Needham mentions potential Western or better yet Middle Eastern influence on the development of medieval Chinese bookbinding starting in the 9th century during the Tang dynasty. Just to be clear, though, he's usually very thorough about this, as evidenced by his carefulness to note that it was European Jesuits in China who finally overturned the long-held Chinese ideas about the flatness of the Earth.
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Again, I disagree. Needham practically buried the fact tnat it was the Jesuits who overturned the Chinese view of a flat earth, with a lot of other discussion, and he did his best to try to claim that a spherical earth was also a traditional Chinese view, if not the mainstream. The impression i got from Needham was trying to obscure as much as possible what he could not flat out deny.

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Okay, he was an obnoxious tool for thinking that, but that doesn't really say much about his larger body of work, or the seriousness of him and his Cambridge research team, including Wang Ling. Needham wasn't some caped superman who wrote all of this on his own. He was actually being checked and peer-reviewed every step of the way. 

Yes it does, because it demostrates his strongly pro Chinese bias. As for peer review, many of his sources were made available by the Communist government, and might not have been as readily available to his peer reviewers to check on, so they would need to take his word. Chinese is a hard language to read, and any Chinese scholar peer reviewer who was too critical mignt find their access to Chinesd sources restricted, which would be a blow to their career if they no longer had access to Chinese text and material.

I think Needham isn't challenged more often because it is extremely difficult to do so. The manuscripts, and even the objects he uses for his work are not readily available, especially outside of China. The Chinese government is curren tly promoting all the inventions the Chinese made, do you think they are going to provide a visa and allow access to the text to disprove Needhams and the Chinese government's own claims? I think not.

A lot of what I read in Needham raises flag for me. For example, Needham's evidence for toothed gears in Han China was a couple of toothed metal gears found in a grave. The details of the grave excavation are not provided, nor any speculations as to what kind of m achinery the gears were for, and a host of other questions to mind which are ignored. Since Chinese tombs are often looted, and opened, possibly of contamination exist, but we are not told anything of the state of the tomb upon evacuation, just that a pair of gears were found in an ovscure Han tomb. We are at Needhams mercy for the accuracy of his claims.

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I guess Needham was something like Columbus, refusing to acknowledge the continent of the Americas wasn't Asia, even until his death. 

Columbus had promised to the King and Queen find a route to Asia. If he admitted the Americas weren't Asia, it meant he failed to deliver on his promise to the monarchs, which meant they might take back everything they granted him. Also, it could still have been some unknown part of Asia, the land at least for Columbus own voyages wasn't so thoroughly explored to rule out all possibility it wasn't Asia. Needham didn't have that excuse, it was just his pro Chinese bias, and his ego at stake.



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The Greeks did have amazing mechanical tools and even a primitive analog computer with the Antikythera mechanism. That doesn't mean we can go about speculating that they used an escapement in their clockworks, which were hydraulic-powered clocks much like that of the Chinese. They also had sundials, so there's that. Funnily enough, the ancient Greeks used an escapement mechanism with a washstand device, but not necessarily with clocks (although Philo of Byzantium, writing in the 3rd century BC, seems to make a connection between the two, but there is still no strong evidence for its use in clocks).

Su Song isn't known for building the first astronomical clock tower. That is not his claim to fame as you seem to suggest. His claim to fame was incorporating the escapement mechanism, similar to the armillary sphere designed by the Tang astronomer Yi Xing in the 8th century, only Su Song improved this by adding an endless power-transmitting chain drive. That's still massively impressive, even if his clock tower ultimately relied on a waterwheel to power it and serve as a giant cog in the escapement. Also, no one has argued that his escapement mechanism could be miniaturized or made portable like later medieval European clocks. Obviously there are giant limitations to needing a waterwheel. Duh!
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We don't know the details of the Greek clocks well enough to rule out the possibility they did have escapements, and Su Song clock is a thousand years newer, less likely record would have been lost as with the Greeks. Anyone interested in making clocks, as the Greeks were, would be interested in an escapement like device. If the Greeks knew of an escapee tyoe device for other applications, then we should assume they had them for clocks first, since anyone building clocks would want something like.

So it boils down to that Su Song is the first that we have definnite records of having an escapement like device, bu that it was very likely that the Greeks had similar ddvices centuries earlier. Su Song was a nmaor achievement, but not as big a deal as many think.

It was a divine inspiration.



The discoveries of archaeology (see Ward-Perkins) have undermined the Islamophobic picture. I know where you are coming from, white supremacists websites adore Pirenne's theory: Henri Pirenne and why the 'Dark Ages' - Western Civilisation Defend Western Civilisation 

Because some groups you don't like happen to likd Pirenne, doesn't make his necessarily wrong.

And destruction of the World Trade center and the steam and invasion of Muslims refugeess to Europe due to tne mess the Muslims seems to lend support the views in those website, however poorly expressed, doesn't it? It is the Muslims themselves responsible for the violence causing the Muslims to flee their own land, and the fact their destination Europe and not some other Muslim is as damning an indictment as there could be onw their own culture, Truth can harsh at time, but I am not surprised you don't like it. You would not expect a member of the world's most dishonest nation to like the truth, now would you?

I would also like to point out as a matter of record that the areas tne Arabs conquered were among the most advanced areas of the world at the time of conquest. Those same areas are no longer among the world's most advanced areas, make of it what you will.


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With a little help from the dirty Muslims 

Operative word is "little". And Muslims are no dirtier than anyone else, I think they are quite clean actually, it is very bigoted of you to call them dirty. But I guess you can't help being a bigot.

There is no question that the Muslims played an essential role, but still the bulk of the modern world is ultimatelh based of Greco-Roman heritage. The calendar that the world uses is based on the Roman calendar, not Chinese or Muslim. The script mostly commonly used in the world is of Roman origin, not Chinese or Arabic. No matter how it wounds your galaxy size ego, it was the Europeans who established the modern world, being the first to establish a truly global network to tie all the conitninet together, not just some of the continents. Other civilizations made essential contributions, yes, but it is nothing but a factual statement to say the Roman civilization was the single biggest contributor. Scientific naming of living organizations used all scientist is Latin based, not Chinese or Arabic.

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I hope I'm not annoying the western white supremacists: [/quote]

No, anymore than I hope I am not annoying Chinese nationalist that the US was putting men on the moon while China was just killing unarmed Tibetans, and millions of Chinese own citize s in the Great Leap Forward, and even if China landed people on the mood today ot would be like inventing the primitive Wright Brother's plane when others have supersonice jets, that is how big a time gap

[Ludicus]

And destruction of the World Trade center and the steam and invasion of Muslims refugeess to Europe due to tne mess the Muslims seems to lend support the views in those website.

Because some groups you don't like happen to likd Pirenne, doesn't make his necessarily wrong.

In fact, I don't like white supremacists, and almost nobody likes white nazistoides.As I said/suspected,the title of the thread is politically motivated, since its very beginning.
Singular Values: Islam caused the Dark Ages

"Now Moslems are threatening to overrun Europe again. Europe seems to lack the will to defend itself.

From the Stormfront website,

The “Dark Ages” is one of my pet peeves…brought up constantly by anti-Whites to bash our race

The Moorish Presence In Pre-Renaissance Europe - Stormfront

Did it ever occur to you that invasions played a strong role in the decline of europe during the "DARK AGES?"

No, it never occurred to me.The dark age is recognized as the consequence of the collapse of the centralized power of the West Roman Empire.
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Arabic culture was at its height in the East in the 9th and 10th centuries and in Iberia in the 11th and12th. Its great triumphs were scientific and mathematical. The translation of from Arabic to Latin was books was of huge importance to the Christendom. By the end of the 12th century most of Aristotle was available in Latin., many of works having come by this route.
The reputation of Arab scholars/writers among Christians was recognition of its importance.
The works of Al-Kindi survived in Latin. Food for thought, read the Divine Comedy: Dante paid Ibn-Sina ( Avicenna) and Averroes the compliment of placing them in limbo, together with Saladin, and they were the only men of the Christian era whom he treated thus. *
Arabic medical studies remained for centuries standard texts of western training.
European languages are still marked by Arabic words as "zero", almanac", "algebra", "alchemy". The survival of a technical vocabulary- tariff, douane, magazine- is a reminder of the superiority of Arab commercial techniques. The Arab merchants taught Christians how to keep the accounts.
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Even a English king coined his gold coins this way. Whoever the engraver was, it seems they had no understanding of the Arabic:" There is no Deity but Allah, The One, Without Equal, and Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah".




As we can see, this cultural traffic was entirely one way. Al-Andalus was a door to the rest of Europe, a door to the learning and science of the East, and through it the Christians received knowledge agricutural and irrigation techniques. In Iberia, the Arab legacy is still there around every corner, in language, culture, art.

Source (adapted) , book the History of the World. JM Roberts.

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Dante's Inferno - Circle 1 - Canto 4
Dante's Limbo includes virtuous non-Christian adults. We thus find here many of the great heroes, thinkers, and creative minds of ancient Greece and Rome as well as such medieval non-Christians as Saladin, Sultan of Egypt in the late twelfth century, and the great Islamic philosophers Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroës (Ibn Rushd). For Dante, Limbo was also the home of major figures from the Hebrew Bible, who--according to Christian theology--were "liberated" by Jesus following his crucifixion