It seems strange that suddenly throughout history things just seem to ‘stop’ for a period of time. If it was due to war or some other catastrophe, surely other civilisations would have records of the events that happened
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It was civilizations collapsing and civil wars breaking out. The issue is that either other civilizations who are unaffected and could report about it didn’t exist or were too far away. We do have records sometimes, dark age simply means there is a lot less than before.
The causes vary. The most famous example of the dark age around the 5th to 6th century AD were triggered by disease, famine due to climate change, and a cascade of roaming hordes being displaced and searching their luck in a new home.
And of course some people still wrote about those times, but more stuff simply got lost in the chaos. Hard to keep a record of your city being burnt down when the neighbouring city where your script is stored gets sacked and burned down the year after (remember that copying books was a work of years at that time, and noone really cared to pay for that when starvation or plundering was looming, being a writer isn’t really a usefull skill in such situations either)
That dark age I mentioned is actually somewhat well reconstructed, we can track at least the later paths of the different germanic tribes took through the roman empire and how everything collapsed on itself. The further back something is the sparser the records are though, the collapse of old mesopotamia for example didn’t leave any higher civilization to write about them as eye witnesses (and if some knowledge survived it was lost in a later era)
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