The pattern of civilization, destruction, new civilization is a repeating motif in history. Yes the Mongols caused a lot of destruction, but they also facilitated the East-West exchange of ideas and goods on a hithero unknown scale.
This is a very misleading distortion of history. The limestone casing on the Great Pyramid was destroyed in an earthquake in 1308 CE. The limestone rubble was pulled from the base of the pyramid and repurposed for building though much of it was also burned in kilns for lime like the marble of many ancient buildings and temples from the ancient world all around the Mediterranean by people of many and various religions and nationalities.
>When the Arab armies conquered North Africa, it was one of the richest and most developed areas in the Mediterranean. After the Arab conquest, it became a backwater and never achieved the prominence it had before.
You really ought to read up on the Islamic Golden Age.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda#Decline_and_destructio...
Edit - As I can't reply to stuff like this (it deserved to die) but in case I get anything more like it:
> Find me an "empire" that wasn't destructive. You're disingenuous, and likely racist as all hell. Fuck off.
I'm making that exact point, all empires are destructive, hence the it's not exceptional in either sense. Thanks to all those who can read and all those who don't go around calling others racists for no good reason.
There was definitely a period when western Europe was very backwards whereas a lot of meaningful and important progress was made in Muslim countries. There have been Islamic empires that were relatively tolerant about differences, and certainly didn't destroy everything they deemed heretic.
We have a strong tendency to generalise: everything that's a bit distant from us has to be either one thing of the other thing. We're terrible at nuance, yet it's vital in order to understand history.
1. I'm not singling out anything but the subject. If you want a different response to compare it with, pick a different subject.
2. It's not venomous, and even if it were, it's irrelevant to everything here (quite the feat). You're supposed to show prejudice, venom with reason and/or evidence is not prejudice.
3. Since a) my point was not about a race and b) the subject is not a race, then it's not a racist argument. Far from it.
4. Hence, I'm not a racist. Or maybe I am but you certainly can't ascertain it from your fatuous logic nor anything I've written here.
5. Also hence, and however, you are an apologist.
You need to up your game.
These cities were conquered. Some were sacked and destroyed. There was major loss of life, economic destruction, and loss of property, including written works. The conquerors, at the time, did not much appreciate the value of what they were destroying.
The fact that the region later somewhat recovered does not take away from the fact that, if we’re talking about setbacks for human progress, the early Muslim conquests were one. Yes, there was a great reawakening where the conquerors began to appreciate the legacy that remained, and began translating and building on the works that escaped their destruction. That doesn’t make the intervening period better. And certainly the poster is correct that cities like Alexandria and Carthage never again achieved their old prominence.
> These cities were conquered. Some were sacked and destroyed. There was major loss of life, economic destruction, and loss of property, including written works. The conquerors, at the time, did not much appreciate the value of what they were destroying.
It's just life. North Africa was just a bunch of tribes/cities. It is easier for an invader to tackle them one city at a time than taking a full united civilization.
At the time of the expansion of Islam, there was no longer even a Western Roman Empire.
Later in one of the most dashing military campaigns, the Eastern Roman Empire(Byzantines) forces under Belisarius captured most of the territory of the former Western Roman Empire, including the African provinces after defeating Vandals. The African provinces were then organized into the Exarchate, which is what Muslim armies eventually overcame in the 690s AD.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Muslim_conquests
As for your claims about Alexandria:
> Following the Arab conquest of Egypt in AD 641, the city was plundered and lost its significance before re-emerging in the modern era
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria
Once can also hardly read accounts of the conquest of Alexandria and think “my, what an improvement.” A lot of people died. Parts of the city burned. You are also wrong that the schools were closed prior. That was certainly not the case. Alexandria was a major center of learning up until the conquest.
Carthage was sacked and deliberately destroyed to prevent it from being retaken.
Look, yes, there’s a group of people out there that understates they Islamic Golden Age. But that doesn’t take away from the reality that the early Muslim conquests were absolutely ruinous. People were still writing those “important classical texts” you mention when they were killed and their texts burned. I doubt they would have much appreciated that the conquerors much later translated what survived the flames.
What your classics academia instruction seems to have short changed you is in the entire period of history where arab conquest reduced most mesopotamian and north african development to rubble, mostly in the name of religion.
Happily since I was a philosophy undergrad, I am easily able to spot a straw man. The claim was that the Arab Conquest transformed N Africa from a wealthy region to a backwater. This is was really what I was more responding to. During the Arab Golden Age N. Africa was far more prosperous than during the collapse of late Western Rome. If you learned about the history of the region you could discover how inaccurate the premise is as well as the conclusion. Anyway, this conversation ended yesterday so research if you'd like to learn, but I'm out.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/878061.Moorish_Spain
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/336859.The_Golden_Trade_...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4398835-the-berbers-and-...
That’s an interesting way of saying they were pirates and slavers who raided Europe and abducted slaves for centuries.
Now 200 years later the US Navy is a pretty powerful fighting force.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza#Casing_s...
A lot of which came through Indian traders, first evidences of human surgeries are found in Indian subcontinent, Indus valley civilization had pretty advance irrigation system for the time and mathematics: quadratic equations, notion of zero, notion of limits and inifinty were here in philosophical sense even if no one every applied it in mathematics.
In the field of war strategy and material, like steel for sword - India was wayy ahead at its time. They knew about the steel temperament long before Europeans even started using steel for swords.
"During the 6th Century BCE, an Indian physician named Sushruta – widely regarded in India as the 'father of surgery' – wrote one of the world's earliest works on medicine and surgery"
2. Chemical warfare was used before the Romans, for instance, like that condiment, the greeks had it before them. (Though I don't believe the greeks invented it first either). For example, see this wikipedia article (which is really in need of some improvement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_chemical_warfare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation#Clim...
A more important factor in their quick spread was the violent conquest of a huge swathe of the Middle East, North Africa, and part of Western Europe.
Also, blaming Mongols as if they were the sole destroyers is absolutely incorrect.
But unfortunately, more than just knowledge was exchanged.
Imagine universities existing for hundreds of years, but promptly destroyed by invaders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda
This pattern repeated throughout India for hundreds of years.
Modern Bagdad https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y2BD66C-W58
I dont find any descriptions of specific surgeries here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_in_the_medieval_Isl...
I hope that was a joke. It's very sad to see people take credit for achievements of others just on the grounds that they happen to share the same nationality/race/religion/birth place.
Sure, someone of your tribe achieved X in the past, very well done, but how did YOU contribute to that? Winning the lottery of birth is not an achievement.
Edit: Anyway I'm starting to believe that this whole submission/thread should be flagged. It certainly discusses many things besides the theft of the tablet.
Found Augustus Caesar's hn account.
(Though, obviously the Romans were far from the first to do this; evidence of some sort of sewerage apparatus goes back at least 6000 years, and the Minoans had an urban system long before Rome existed)
I am confused... are you an ancient Roman?
I'm actually more of a cisalpine gaul than a roman myself, but the beauty of the empire was that it was multi cultural and multi racial.
Said that, Italians absolutely look like romans, this is a small example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdUPYm06gVc
Our language is also the closest to the type of Latin romans spoke during the empire (which itself evolved).
I do not understand why it's even controversial, you're making a dumb point.
Wrong. Modern Galician is the closest extant language to Latin, the next closest being Spanish.
Romans fought wars against Italians for centuries, who after being conquered were regarded as allies, then as citizens, but never as Romans. The French and Germans have just as much Roman in their blood as the Italians.
https://languagevolcano.wordpress.com/2016/07/08/which-langu...
I don't speak Galego well but Spanish FOR SURE is not as close as Italian because it contains so many Arabic influences.
Also, you're referring to "cives romani" and obviously a person that didn't live in the city of Rome wasn't a roman.
Regarding the having "roman blood" for French and Germans, you're just wrong. I'm not even going to bother finding you resources because it's not my job to educate you, but I suggest you inform yourself before you start spewing incorrect notions like they are somehow facts.
Funny how even though I'm fluent in Latin and can understand a third of spoken Spanish (having never studied Spanish), I can barely understand 10% of Italian regardless of the accent I'm listening to or which city the speaker is from. It's also funny that several other fluent Latin speakers (and some professors) I've talked to agree about this.
>Also, you're referring to "cives romani" and obviously a person that didn't live in the city of Rome wasn't a roman.
No, not obviously. Romans thought of themselves as a separate ethnicity with a distinct language, culture, and religion from Italians. They are descended from a distinct tribe that settled the city. A Roman family who had lived in Gaul for generations would still be called Roman. An Italian family who had lived in Roma would still be called Italians and cives Romani. Romans settled throughout their conquered territory, which included Italy, Hispania, Britannia, and Gaul. Like it or not, those regions have as much demonstrable Roman blood as modern day Italians whom are mostly descended from Italic tribes, not from Romans.
>it's not my job to educate you
Thank heavens my education of the Latin language and Roman history doesn't depend on you.
Because the region had been extremely wealthy and advanced for centuries, with plenty of intra-Empire cultural exchange, itdid eventually recover. Most (not all) of the “advances” were translations of and commentaries on Greek/Roman and Persian works, and notably, most of them were from the pre-existing conquered strata population in pre-existing centers of learning. Of course, as time went on, people did build up higher, but the conquests were a major setback.
So let’s not hype it up too much - where would the world be, if, as Gibbon wrote, Mohammed had died in the cradle, and all those people hadn’t been killed, books burned, and cities sacked?
There’s no way to know - it might have been worse off in both cases.
I wonder, why did they get stuck into the past still being ruled either by a monarch or some religious leader?
That said, here's a famous quote:
O would that my mother had never borne me, that I had died before and that I were forgotten [so] tremendous disaster such as had never happened before, and which struck all the world, though the Muslims above all . . . Dadjdjal [Muslim Anti-Christ] will at least spare those who adhere to him, and will only destroy his adversaries. These [Mongols], however, spared none. They killed women, men, children, ripped open the bodies of the pregnant and slaughtered the unborn. - Ibn al-Athir (1233–1160)
Mud huts? Rome was composed of mud hut? The tallest building in the world for almost the entire 2nd millenia was in england. Not exactly "mud huts".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_St_Paul%27s_Cathedral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Cathedral
https://www.businessinsider.com/here-are-the-tallest-buildin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_world%27s_talle...
I think you are overselling the muslim world and underselling europe a bit.
> the Muslim world had plumbing, water filtration, surgery, advanced mathematics, and many more amazing scientific advances which quickly spread throughout Muslim countries due to the cultural exchange at Mecca.
Much of it brought to the muslim world by the roman empire and the greeks. Or from the indians/chinese/etc in the east. Of course there were muslim contributions but lets not get too carried away here.
> I wonder what the world could have been like if the Mongols had never destroyed so much civilization and progress.
The world would be exactly the way it was in the 1200s without the mongols. The muslim world had stagnated by the time the mongols came around. After all the arabic islamic golden age started in the 700s. The mongols destroy arabic islamic civilization but they helped create the turkic islamic civilization of the ottoman empire not to mention the persian centered khanates which went on to create mughal india. Without the mongols, we don't have the italian renaissance and modern europe and without modern europe we don't have modern civilization. The empire created by the mongols is why marco polo went east. It's also why christopher columbus set sail. Without the mongols, we don't have the new world.
No doubt, the arab world suffered and lost out, but the world advanced immensely due to the mongols. The mongol empire was the first truly "global" empire. It helped europe bypass the muslim world and trade directly with india, china, etc.
I'll take whig historiography for $500, Alex.
Religious and racial flamewar is particularly unwelcome here.
The OP was talking about advanced muslim civilisations when he obviously meant Persia, who were Zoroastrians. I use the word Persia to mean Iran / Iraq / Syria / Turkey and parts of central asia who were fairly advanced in the past and some are still advanced to this day.
Muslims did not invent and make anything. Even the so called islamic golden age was a direct result of brain drain from Persia. Arab muslims and Persian muslims are wildly different. Iran has long maintained their pre-islamic language and culture. It was because of Iran's resistance to becoming Arab that any golden age was at all possible. This rivalry persists to this day in the islamic world as Saudi Arabia vs Iran vs Turkey.
Again with the absolutes, and again, no sources. You must be a great debater!
I am not going to waste my time here ;)