This is only sort of related but I was talking to someone about the Medieval ‘dark ages’ and it led to us wondering what the ancient greek ‘dark age’ (proceeding plato et al) was like because it seems odd that civilization with such complex ideas about ethics and metaphysics and geometry sprang out of a dark age.

After digging in it turns out historians no longer really refer to it as a dark age (rather, they split this period into the ‘postpalatial bronze age’ and the ‘prehistoric iron age.’). The reason we considered it a ‘dark age’ in the past is because they didn’t really have writing, but historians realized this was because there was a strong oral tradition in that region at the time where ideas were passed through song/poetry etc. so the presumption that it was a dark age by historians in the past was mainly because historians had a bias towards literacy/writing. The oral tradition obviously doesn’t leave a written archeological record so it makes sense that historians privilege societies that had writing just because we can know more about their ideas, but it’s doesn’t paint an accurate picture of the past if we pretend complexity only comes with literacy.