Post Classical Era

7 Key excerpts on "Post Classical Era"

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  A History of Science

  From Agriculture to Artificial Intelligence

  • Mary Cruse(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Arcturus

    (Publisher)

  PART TWO

  THE POST-CLASSICAL ERA

  5TH–15TH CENTURIES

  THE POST-CLASSICAL ERA – which roughly corresponds to the Middle Ages – is often thought of as a dark time in human history, a time when science gave way to ignorance and superstition. There is some truth in this; after the decline of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, scientific progress slowed and much knowledge was lost. But this period also saw genuine scientific innovation and advancement. This was particularly true in the Islamic world – here, classical scientific knowledge from Greece and Rome was preserved and eventually transported to Western Europe through booming trade networks and war. In Song dynasty China, a spike in industry coincided with a spate of groundbreaking engineering projects and inventions, including moveable type printing, gunpowder and paper money.

  Scientific endeavour in Eurasia was set back by the outbreak of the Black Death in the 14th century – a fearsome pandemic which killed millions of people and decimated the populations of Europe and the Middle East. But the end of the post-classical period saw an upsurge in cultural activity, culminating in the European Renaissance from the 15th century. To dismiss the post-classical era as a quiet, backwards period between two eras of enlightenment is to overlook the many scientific and technological advancements made during this portion of human history. Far from its characterisation as a ‘dark age’, the post-classical era saw thinkers and innovators continue the pursuit of scientific truth and enlightenment.

  Passage contains an image

  CHAPTER 4 GEOGRAPHY

  ‘Geography is an earthly subject, but a heavenly science.’ – EDMUND BURKE, IRISH POLITICIAN AND PHILOSOPHER

  Geography – which translates from the Greek for ‘earth description’ – is the study of places, their physical features and the interactions between people and the environment. Although the word originates in Ancient Greece, people have been practising geography in some form all over the world for centuries. Geography flourished in Ancient Greece, but it became its own profession in Ancient Rome. In the post-classical era, the study of geography made great strides in the Islamic world, supported by Middle Eastern scholars’ profound knowledge of mathematics, eventually returning to Europe during the Renaissance. These events set the stage for the great explosion in geographic study that took place in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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  Education in World History

  • Mark S. Johnson, Peter N. Stearns(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part II The Postclassical Centuries

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315817354-6

  The postclassical centuries, following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and the Han dynasty in China, were defined by a complex combination of continuity and change. Key features of the Roman Empire and classical Mediterranean civilization were carried forward in the Byzantine Empire, while the imperial and Confucian tradition revived strongly in China. Hinduism consolidated its hold in much of India. But major missionary religions expanded their territories and gained a greater role in several societies – and this included the new religion of Islam, founded shortly after 600 CE. Trade expanded, with new commercial links among key parts of Asia, Europe and Africa. And new civilization centers emerged in Northern Europe, West Africa, Japan and the Americas.

  Educational developments in the centuries after the fall of the great classical empires, from about 500 CE to about 1450 CE, reflect a similar combination of established features and major innovations. As some societies recovered from the collapse of the empires, leaders often sought to restore school systems that had worked well in the past: this was most obviously true in China, but it also applied to the Byzantine Empire and to India. Restoration often extended some of the classical achievements in new ways, as in the more formal implementation of examinations in China, but they built on a solid base.

  But the postclassical centuries also introduced the three significant changes that greatly altered the framework of the classical era and directly affected education. In the first place, the role of organized religion in schooling surged forward once again (though in India and also in Judaism this built on established traditions). The new religion of Islam, rising and rapidly expanding after 600 CE, particularly contributed to educational development, but Christian schools gained additional importance as well. The expansion of Buddhism affected education too, particularly in East Asia. In several regions, religion furthered a striking surge in advanced educational institutions. Schooling and religion had been linked before of course, in the need to train religious officials (as with Hinduism). Now, however, religious motivations expanded, to fill growing ranks of priests and imams but also to satisfy the needs of many students to expand their understanding.

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  Punishment in World History

  • Peter N. Stearns(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part II The Classical and Postclassical Periods

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003427261-5

  From about 800 BCE onward, in major regions such as China, India, and the Mediterranean and Middle East, the early civilizations began to be supplanted by larger civilizations, with more extensive internal trade routes, cultural systems, and political empires. The formation and operation of these larger civilizations form the central features of the Classical period in world history, that ran from approximately this point until about 500 BCE.

  The classical civilizations did not embrace the whole world, but they involved the most populous regions and the most sophisticated economies and states. They also had some spillover effect on neighboring regions, such as parts of Southeast Asia and northeastern Africa south of Egypt. Their focus was on the expansion of their regional governments and cultures and the greater integration of the territories involved, and the result was a series of traditions or precedents that continue to influence East Asia, South Asia, and to a lesser extent, the Mediterranean, even today.

  The classical civilizations did not introduce massive changes into their systems of punishment. They clearly retained many of the innovations already generated by the early governments that had operated in their regions. But they did modify, and the results, as well as the motivations for change, are worth attention. At the same time, the classical period also featured a variety of philosophers who began to ponder the nature and purpose of punishment; they may not have been the first to do so, but they are the first for whom records exist. The results did not necessarily alter the actual systems in effect—this was an interesting issue in China, for example—but they could generate new debate, both at the time and subsequently.

  The major classical systems collapsed between 200 and 600 CE, victim to internal disarray and external invasion. Their collapse was not complete or necessarily permanent; both in India and China, major classical features survived or were ultimately restored. But the unity of the Mediterranean was broken, opening the way to new forces, such as the religion of Islam, and in much of Europe to a prolonged period of political disunity.

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  Premodern Travel in World History

  • Stephen Gosch, Peter Stearns(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part IIThe post-classical period

  Travel in the centuries after about 500 CE took on new dimensions, compared to its counterpart in the classical period. The most heroic individual travelers now covered longer distances, contacting even more diverse societies. The rate of travel increased. Travel also began to generate more significant consequences, particularly in supporting new trade contacts and the spread of world religions. Travel indeed became an integral part of an accelerating network of contacts among Asia, Africa, and Europe.

  Several factors account for the changing dimensions of travel. The advent of new religions, notably Islam, or growing interest in other religions such as Christianity and Buddhism was crucial. As religion became less localized, travelers could gain a sense of divine support even as they penetrated far-flung lands. They could also find fellow believers, even in very different cultural and political settings, who would help them in their journeys and provide some familiarity amid strangeness. Religion also provided a new motivation for travel, to promote conversion or to seek contact with the wellsprings of faith in distant places.

  Political change could be crucial. New or revived empires—the Arab caliphate, the reestablishment of empire in China—provided political protection for travelers across considerable geographic space. The interlocking Mongol empires, toward the end of the post-classical period, promoted security and offered explicit invitation to travelers over an unprecedented range of territory.

  Technology would enter in as well, though partly as a result of travel and trade. New ship designs, particularly by the Arabs, encouraged wider use of the Indian Ocean. New navigational devices would enter in toward the end of the period, headed by the compass. Travel and trade, particularly initially from Islamic lands, provided maps of unprecedented accuracy as well, another result of travel that could promote further travel in turn. Finally, as we will see, the increased output of travelers’ accounts provided both motivation and knowledge for other ventures, as travel began to feed on itself.

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  Global History

  A Short Overview

  • Noel Cowen(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  The belief patterns now became the dominant factor, drawing into their own ambit the surviving political processes and using for their promotion whatever advances in economic processes were available and appropriate. Outstanding among these were materials and methods to increase the reach and permanence of written records and to provide impressive structures where the approved doctrines could be expounded and approved rituals consecrated. Surviving political elites manoeuvred to participate in the content and the control of the now dominant ideological factor. As their rivalries came to be mirrored in the competing sects and schisms of the aspiring religious organizations, a mood of profound searching became endemic across the regions of fading imperial rule.

  In the centuries following the crisis of belief the religious movements reorganized and regrouped under their own authority, strengthened by their core commitments as they assumed the care of their congregations and provided guidance and intellectual resources across the abandoned territories of the classical empires.

  Passage contains an image From Classical to Modern

  This survey of the classical era has been constructed around the successive experiences of regional civilized societies, expanding political empires and would-be universalist churches. But how much justification is there for seeing the classical era as a part of global history? And what value is there in the grid of phases and factors in ordering the historical data? Part of the answer to the first question lies in the way the penetration of the global habitat set the scene for developments on a worldwide scale. Sedentism appeared independently at numerous sites, and villages became the norm of settled habitation. From this point the sequences of the settlements began to appear. In terms of the answer to the second question, the understanding of history in terms of the framework of phases and factors, it is apparent that from the beginning of the settlements the human experience centred around three basic community requirements: getting a living, working together and sharing ideas. All of these were always in play, sometimes one and sometimes another taking the lead.

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  Childhood in World History

  • Peter N Stearns(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 CHILDHOOD IN POSTCLASSICAL WORLD HISTORY The Impact of Religious Change        

  All world historians note several key changes during the centuries between 500 and 1450, after the fall of the classical empires. We do not know how, if at all, some of the key developments affected children and childhood. The decline of the classical empires themselves involved growing instability, raids by nomadic peoples, and significant increase in epidemic disease. We can assume that children suffered in many cases – they were, along with the elderly, the group most vulnerable to death and disease. But we lack details. Late in the postclassical period Mongol invaders conquered many areas, from China to Russia to part of the Middle East, but it is not clear – beyond the bloodshed associated with Mongol warfare – that there was any distinctive Mongol impact on childhood.

  Three related themes that shaped these centuries unquestionably affected childhood. The spread of missionary religions – religions that came to believe in an obligation to convert peoples across political and cultural boundaries – had the clearest effect. This chapter will focus on the changes the expanding religions introduced, focusing on Buddhism and Islam particularly but with attention also to Christianity. These were the three religions whose expansion helped shape the whole postclassical period, with Islam actually established for the first time in this period. The religions resembled faiths like Hinduism and Judaism in many ways, but they introduced important innovations (collectively, but also through separate features) as well.

  The following chapter picks up more clearly on the two other dominant themes of the postclassical period, while continuing the discussion of religious change. First, the areas organized as complex societies or civilizations expanded, which meant that new regions gained formal states, law codes, and growing cities, all of which could affect how childhood was defined and managed. Several new areas also began deliberately to imitate more established centers, as with Japanese efforts to import Chinese forms; this, too, could measurably affect childhood. Finally, trade accelerated, including interregional trade. This promoted further urban growth, in new centers but also in established regions such as China, which meant that a larger minority of children were involved with manufacturing and apprenticeship, even though agricultural activities continued to predominate for the majority. Islamic merchants reached out in trade from bases in the Middle East and North Africa, interacting with Europe, central Asia, the whole Indian Ocean basin, and several parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Mongol conquests accelerated trade contacts as well, and the end of the period saw great Chinese commercial voyages for several decades. The spread of civilization, imitation, and mounting trade contributed to a changing framework for childhood in several areas, particularly between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries.

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  Early Modern Europe 1500-1789

  • H.G. Koenigsberger(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 From Medieval to Modern Europe Periodization The humanists

  The Ancient World came to an end with the barbarian invasions. No such dramatic event, or series of events, marked the end of the Middle Ages. The question of the periodization of medieval and modern history has therefore presented historians with formidable problems and there is no complete consensus. The concept of a modern age following on a middle age, or an age in between the Ancient World and modern times, appeared first with the Italian humanist Petrarch, in the fourteenth century. To Petrarch it seemed that the Roman Empire had fallen to the barbarians and that barbarism had continued ever since. Only in his own time Petrarch saw the dawn of a new age.

  This sleep of forgetfulness will not last for ever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former [i.e. ancient Roman] pure radiance.1

  What for Petrarch was a glimmer of hope became for his humanist successors of the fifteenth century a scheme, a threefold division of history in which the middle period or Middle Ages was a barbaric and dark age, followed happily now by a brighter, more civilized modern age. This modern age recovered many of the values and achievements pf the ancients and was even adding new achievements of its own. Here was a radically different view from the traditional historical schema, favoured especially by the theologians, of a succession of empires. The theologians differed among themselves as to which these empires were and even more as to when to expect final empires of Antichrist and of Christ, with the Day of Judgment and the end of time.

  Plate 1.1   Botticelli: Annunciation, 1489–90

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