Who Really Killed the Pax Romana?

Gates Of Vienna | Sunday, August 12, 2012 | Barron Boddissy

[ckilmer]

Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy by Emmet Scott New English Review Press · 2012 · 270 pages $19.95 · Kindle version $9.95

Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited by Emmet ScottThroughout the coastal areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, archaeologists have uncovered a layer of subsoil that was deposited over a period of three hundred years beginning in the middle of the seventh century AD.

This stratum, named the “Younger Fill” by the geologist Claudio Vita-Finzi, covers the ruins of all the major cities and settlements that were established along the Mediterranean littoral during classical antiquity. It stands as a coda to Graeco-Roman civilization. For three centuries after the year 650 the archaeology of the region is all but barren. Wastelands or severely diminished primitive settlements have replaced the formerly great cities of the Roman Empire and the Near East.

One might surmise that the Younger Fill is the result of some yet unidentified climatic trauma that afflicted the entire Mediterranean basin. However, the same phenomenon has been observed in an entirely different watershed: Mesopotamia, the land drained by the Tigris and Euphrates in what is now Iraq, and also including the coastal regions adjoining the Persian Gulf.

During the same period — from the middle of the seventh century until the middle of the tenth — archaeology in the entirety of Europe and the Middle East virtually disappears. This civilizational interruption might be thought a result of the Dark Ages in Europe, except for the fact that it includes areas of the Middle East which were never part of the Roman Empire, and where advanced cultures independent of Rome and Greece had flourished.

What all these areas have in common, of course, is that they were conquered by the Arabs during the initial period of Islamic expansion, when the Near East, North Africa, and Iberia were subjugated within the space of less than a century.

Islam came to the Mediterranean and left as its principal legacy the Younger Fill.

[ckilmer]

From Gates of vienna

[Servant of the Cross]

If of interest, some really good comments on this same subject from a thread yesterday.

[Red Badger]

Who killed the Pax Romana?

The Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Huns and Franks............

[TXnMA]

GGG heads-up!

[House Atreides]

“Who killed the Pax Romana?

The Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Huns and Franks............”
*******************************************************************
Perhaps you should read more than just the thread “headline” and go to the linked site to do some reading. And after that do some thinking. What you’re summarizing is the “politically correct” version of Mediterranean history. After reading the linked article, I just ordered the book ‘Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy’ to do some more reading on this subject.

It appears that European experience with “Yutes” is not a new thing.

[The_Reader_David]

You assume that the retirement of the last Western Augustus to a villa near Naples in 476 actually meant something. The Roman Empire actually fell in 1453 after dwindling to a city-state.

The facts that the capital has been moved to “New Rome” (Constantinople) in 324, that the barbarians you cite largely embraced the Imperial religion — Christianity (well not the Huns, but their influence passed as quickly as it arrived, and the Vandals went down fighting for the Arian heresy against Belisarius’s Imperial legions) — that their kings kept issuing coinage with the Emperor’s portrait and often bore the title “Patrician of the Romans” given them by the Emperor, and that Charlemagne did not regard himself as setting up a new Empire, but as reviving the office of Western Augustus (at least until neither the Emperor Irene, yes, the correct Englishing of the title she bore is Emperor, nor her successor Nicephoros I, would recognize his claim, when he started calling his own domain “the Holy Roman Empire” and the Roman Empire, the “Empire of the Hellenes” — an insult since at that time “hellene” meant “Greek pagan”), all suggest a reappraisal of the position you take is in order, even without the interesting archaeological data cited in the article posted.

[expat1000]

bump to me

[Red Badger]

Any time an ‘empire’ falls there exists a power vacuum that is quickly filled by despots and tyrants of minor groups, trying to revive the glory of the last empire for themselves.
This state of affairs remains in place until someone gets the upper hand..............

[Red Badger]

Muslims, and Arab Muslims in particular, are just barbarians from a different direction.......

[Old Sarge]

Who Really Killed the Pax Romana?

Bush's Fault©...

[SunkenCiv]

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Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy by Emmet Scott Kindle Edition Unknown Binding

The Epilogue -- The termination of the papyrus supply to Europe, as a cultural event, cannot be overestimated. Indeed, it has hitherto been radically underestimated. Papyrus, a relatively cheap writing material, had a thousand uses in an urban and mercantile culture. And, as we saw in Chapter 15, it was the material upon which was preserved the vast majority of the learning and thinking of the ancients. The loss of papyrus led inexorably to the loss of the bulk of classical literature -- irrespective of the efforts of churchmen to preserve it on parchment.

---

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Red Badger and TXnMA. No ping, because, alas, already posted: Who Really Killed the Pax Romana? To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[muawiyah]

535AD is the big year for the end of the world. That's when St. Gildas, on his way back from visiting Rome, saw a scene of devastation in France that was almost unbelievable.

Stone buildings were pulled apart with the pillars and roofs flying up into the sky.

When it was over, just about everybody was dead. A great fiery object flew onward into the Western Sea where it was extinguished.

The Welsh annals of the kings of Britain said that afterward everything died, it got very dry, king Ad's knights rode around looking for the Holy Grail to save them.

So, who is St. Gildas? Well, there are actually two guys with that name, or maybe the stories are about two guys with other names, but fur shur, there are two people and they personally knew King Ad.

We have a series of sermons and speeches by St. Gildas (his name means Cheerful Servant in Sanskrit ~ he lived like a sky-clad Jain missionary). They all preach a doctrine called AHEMSA, or total pacifism in all cases.

It is recorded that King Ad murdered one of Gildas' 20 brothers whereupon Gildas forgave King Ad, embraced him, and lived peacefully with him later on.

Well, neither here nor there about his lifestyle, the guy reported on what seemed to be the End of the World ~ that report has been interpreted as an Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain ~ except it took place on his way home to Brittany from Rome.

So, let's accept the idea that a large body came near enough to Earth to actually affect local gravity ~ now that's a big body ~ and thank goodness it's not come around again, although maybe it does.

An earlier visit was recorded in Sumer and then rendered into a story about Inkydoo and Gilgamesh (the Moon), and a daughter of Ishtar (Venus). They even left behind a good enough record of their celestial observations that we can match it up to a moonlet that sometimes travels in Earth orbit and other times travels in Venus orbit.

If it came between the Earth and the Moon it might seem almost as large as the Moon. It might disrupt things on Earth's surface with tidal forces ~ maybe plough up the Bosporus and let the Mediterranean flow into the Black Sea (which happened about the same time).

This object probably has a small swarm of moonlets and when it charges past Earth every 6 thousand years or so, some of them probably come free and hit us causing no end of mayhem.

It's interesting there's a layer of silt from 650 ~ a mere 115 years after the first period of devastation.

Bet that was a bummer when Spring and Summer disappeared ~ kind of depopulate everything I'd think ~ people eating animals, burning libraries for heat, tearing down public monuments to build little forts to protect themselves from the hungry wolves, etc.

Could have been a really dark time.

Afterwards you'd had the Arabs on a trip from Petra to Damascus coming back home and telling folks "Hey, bad news, they're gone ~ "

[muawiyah]

535AD is the big year for the end of the world. That's when St. Gildas, on his way back from visiting Rome, saw a scene of devastation in France that was almost unbelievable.

Stone buildings were pulled apart with the pillars and roofs flying up into the sky.

When it was over, just about everybody was dead. A great fiery object flew onward into the Western Sea where it was extinguished.

The Welsh annals of the kings of Britain said that afterward everything died, it got very dry, king Ad's knights rode around looking for the Holy Grail to save them.

So, who is St. Gildas? Well, there are actually two guys with that name, or maybe the stories are about two guys with other names, but fur shur, there are two people and they personally knew King Ad.

We have a series of sermons and speeches by St. Gildas (his name means Cheerful Servant in Sanskrit ~ he lived like a sky-clad Jain missionary). They all preach a doctrine called AHEMSA, or total pacifism in all cases.

It is recorded that King Ad murdered one of Gildas' 20 brothers whereupon Gildas forgave King Ad, embraced him, and lived peacefully with him later on.

Well, neither here nor there about his lifestyle, the guy reported on what seemed to be the End of the World ~ that report has been interpreted as an Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain ~ except it took place on his way home to Brittany from Rome.

So, let's accept the idea that a large body came near enough to Earth to actually affect local gravity ~ now that's a big body ~ and thank goodness it's not come around again, although maybe it does.

An earlier visit was recorded in Sumer and then rendered into a story about Inkydoo and Gilgamesh (the Moon), and a daughter of Ishtar (Venus). They even left behind a good enough record of their celestial observations that we can match it up to a moonlet that sometimes travels in Earth orbit and other times travels in Venus orbit.

If it came between the Earth and the Moon it might seem almost as large as the Moon. It might disrupt things on Earth's surface with tidal forces ~ maybe plough up the Bosporus and let the Mediterranean flow into the Black Sea (which happened about the same time).

This object probably has a small swarm of moonlets and when it charges past Earth every 6 thousand years or so, some of them probably come free and hit us causing no end of mayhem.

It's interesting there's a layer of silt from 650 ~ a mere 115 years after the first period of devastation.

Bet that was a bummer when Spring and Summer disappeared ~ kind of depopulate everything I'd think ~ people eating animals, burning libraries for heat, tearing down public monuments to build little forts to protect themselves from the hungry wolves, etc.

Could have been a really dark time.

Afterwards you'd had the Arabs on a trip from Petra to Damascus coming back home and telling folks "Hey, bad news, they're gone ~ "

[The_Reader_David]

That’s true, but the notion that the Western Augustus being retired to a villa at the behest of the Eastern Augustus, who felt that Imperial affairs in Italy could be handled by the King of the Ostrogoths and Patrician of the Romans, Odovacer, on behalf of the Empire constituted the “fall” of an Empire is an absurdity inflicted on the world by Gibbon, who wanted to dispossess the Christian Roman Empire of its Romanity.

No one noticed the “fall of Rome” at the time (they noticed the sack of Rome decades earlier by the Vandals, they noticed the sack of the monastic communities of Scetis by the Maziques (Berbers), but the “fall of Rome” — a non-event).

It is as absurd to say the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century as it would be to say “America fell” in the 21st if some event in the next two decades detached the East coast from control of the United States (maybe the “red states” decide to boot out the “blue”), but our federal republic continued with its capital moved to, say Wichita, until 3115.

[Red Badger]

Rarely can a single historical event be pinpointed as ‘the cause’ of something, be it the so-called Fall of Rome, the Renaissance, The American Civil War or World War I. It’s usually a combination of things, places, people and plain old bad luck..............

[pa_dweller]

An alternative hypothesis, which should concern all of us. Contains an interesting vignette on Easter Island.

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations