EAllusion wrote:Milesius wrote:
Hi EA,
Please provide a citation for your claim that Christians systematically purged pagan texts (as opposed to, say, favoring other texts to their neglect) as well as the identity of the "late middle ages writer" who is supposed to have coined the term.
Petrarch is generally credited with coining the term 'the dark ages" along with the concept of a loss of antiquity knowledge.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dark_Ages
I'm not sure what you are looking for with the latter. It's widely understood that there was a systematic purging of pagan sources starting in late antiquity where Emperor Theodosius's suppression of pagans can act as a convenient bright line. But by purge, I did also mean to include intentional, systematic neglect. So I'm not sure we even disagree on the substance of this point so much as how to understand it.
I think this depends on how you look at it. While it's undeniable that many ancient texts were lost in the middle ages, what's really remarkable is that so many were preserved by copying.
The early middle ages/dark ages were experiencing two things which favored the disappearance of texts. First, you had widespread economic decline. Second, you had linguistic shifts in both the Romanized West and the Greek East. The bottom line is that both of those circumstances heavily favor losing texts.
For example, the only reason we posess the literature of the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, and Sumerians was not because their descendants preserved their texts, but because they happened to have written on baked clay which is nearly indestructible provided they are not smashed. The only reason we have ancient Egyptian literature is because they happened to live in a desert which preserves papyrii very nicely. There was no purposeful preservation, only accidental.
When those accidental things do not hold, you tend to lose everything. Take for instance the existence of any literature of Mycenean Greece. If there was any, we don't have any. The post Mycenean age experienced an economic decline and a linguistic shift (the Greek "Dark Ages"), which resulted in no preservation of literature. There is a possible exception of the oral preservation of Homer, but I think it more likely that the Homeric world reflects life post Mycenea.
While it is tragic that we have lost so much, it's remarkable that we have anything at all, given the above history. I think estimates are that we would have 80% less Latin literature if it were not for Carolingian monks making copies of manuscripts.