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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

> This is the first time in my life where a western outlet doesn't try and obfuscate the fact

I do not know what you have been reading, but most western outlets go out of their way to acknowledge this. If anything people tend to idealise the "Islamic golden age" in the same way they do ancient Greece and Rome.

> Typically, when you study the history of science in the west, it starts at ancient greece (who have no contemporaries) then there's a massive blackout of 800 years and poof

They ignore the significant advances made in medieval Europe, and the Byzantine Empire.

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And China... almost everything, including probably the paper it came on and the printing used to produce it.

And India ... from which we derive our concept of mathematical zero which underpins everything.

You would have to be pretty badly informed not to know those two examples though.

Maybe a lot of people are, but they really do have to not want to learn.

I don't pretend to understand the world and especially other people but this quote seems apt when trying.

To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant. - Amos Bronson Alcott, 1871

I'd agree with the gp. An amazing example for such an attitude was some french edition like "History of the World in Ten Chapters and a Half" which said in the introduction that it will talk about greek and roman history and then the modern times because the Byzantine empire just kept the torch burning. I stopped reading right there. Maybe it is different in the more academic literature, but the pop culture narrative is that the eastern roman empire, the islam world, the chinese, and the mongols were some autocratic religious barberians who worshiped things that they do not understand. If western Europe wasn't leading the way, some people reason, then everyone else shouldn't be allowed to stand above. Politics has the habit of using history to justify its own ends and it is true everywhere and in every century.

What book are you referring to exactly? "History of the world in 10 1/2 chapters" is a fiction, by Julian Barnes.

Is this the book you base your argument on?

I don't remember the exact book name, but it is not the argument, it is an example. The argument is multiple instances of pop culture statements and opinions where people believe that the world was on a pause between 476 and 1452 and even if someone else has created something, it was given meaning only when the europeans discovered and improved it. Don't feel obliged to believe me, I know what I've witnessed and shared a data point.

> it was given meaning only when the europeans discovered and improved it.

They also ignored what Europeans discovered in that period.

At the pop culture level a lot of people believe Medieval Europe was in a barbaric dark age and achieved nothing.

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