Stone Age

The Stone Age is part of the history of the world that encompasses the first widespread use of technology in human evolution and the spread of humanity from the savannas of East Africa to the rest of the world. It ends with the development of agriculture, the domestication of certain animals and the smelting of copper ore to produce metal. It is termed prehistoric, since humanity had not yet started writing -- the traditional start of history (i.e. recorded history).

The Stone Age receives its name from the fact that most human tools preserved from that area are made of stone - although undoubtedly tools of wood and animal parts such as bone and sinews were also in use, these were rarely preserved. The almost complete unavailability of metal, with the exception of gold, is an important mark of the Stone Age.

As a description of peoples living today, the term stone age is controversial. The Association of Social Anthropologists discourages this use.

Human development during the Stone Age

The Old Stone Age or Paleolithic comprises more than a million years, and during this period major climatic and other changes occurred which affected the evolution of humans. Humans themselves evolved into their current morphological form during the later period of the Stone Age.

Epipalaeolithic/Mesolithic

The period between the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago to around 6,000 years ago, was characterised by rising sea levels and a need to adapt to a changing environment and find new food sources. The development of microlith tools began in response to these changes. They were derived from the previous Palaeolithic tools, hence the term Epipalaeolithic. However, in Europe the term Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) is used, as the tools (and way of life) was imported from the Near East. There, microlith tools permitted more efficient hunting, while more complex settlements, such as Lepenski Vir developed based around fishing. Domestication of the dog as a hunting companion probably dates to this.

Neolithic

Japanese Jomon pottery is the 2nd oldest in the world. Recent pottery finds in Hunterdon county, Musconetcong River area, NW NJ have been dated to be over 12,000 years old. Main article: Neolithic

The Neolithic (New Stone Age) was characterized by the adoption of agriculture (the so-called Neolithic Revolution), the development of pottery and more complex, larger settlements such as ?atal H?y?k and Jericho. The first Neolithic cultures started around 7000 BCE in the fertile crescent. Agriculture and the culture it led to spread to the Mediterranean, the Indus valley, China, and Southeast Asia.

Due to the increased need to harvest and process plants, ground stone and polished stone artifacts became much more widespread, including tools for grinding, cutting, chopping and adzing. The first large-scale constructions were built, including settlement towers and walls (e.g., Jericho) and ceremonial sites (e.g., Stonehenge). These show that there was sufficient resources and co-operation to enable large groups to work on these projects. To what extent this was a basis for the development of elites and social hierarchies is a matter of on-going debate. The earliest evidence for established trade exists in the Neolithic with newly settled people importing exotic goods over distances of many hundreds of miles. Skara Brae located on Orkney island off Scotland is one of Europe's best examples of a Neolithic village. The community contains stone beds, shelves, and even an indoor toilet linked to a stream.

Copper Age

The Chalcolithic (Greek khalkos + lithos 'copper stone') period or Copper Age period (also known as the Eneolithic (neolithic)), is a phase in the development of human culture in which the use of early metal tools appeared alongside the use of stone tools.

The literature of European archaeology generally avoids the use of 'chalcolithic' (they prefer the term 'Copper Age'), while Middle-Eastern archaeologists regularly use it. The Copper Age began much earlier in the Middle East, while the transition from the European Copper Age to its own full-fledged Bronze Age is far more rapid.

The period is a transitional one outside of the traditional three-age system, and occurs between the Neolithic and Bronze Age. It appears that copper was not widely exploited at first and that efforts in alloying it with tin and other metals began quite soon, making distinguishing the distinct Chalcolithic cultures and periods difficult.

Because of this it is usually only applied by archaeologists in some parts of the world, mainly south-east Europe and Western and Central Asia where it appears around the 4th millennium BC. Less commonly, it is also applied to American civilizations which already used copper and copper alloys at the time of European conquest. The Old Copper Complex, located in present day Michigan and Wisconsin utilized copper for tools, weapons and other implements. Artefacts from these sites have been dated from 4000 to 1000 BC, making them some of the oldest sites in the world.

According to Parpola (2005, pp. 2, 3), ceramic similarities between the Indus Civilization, southern Turkmenistan and northern Iran during 4300–3200 BC of the Chalcolithic period (Copper Age) suggest considerable mobility and trade.

tzi the Iceman, found in the ?tztaler Alps and whose remains have been dated to about 3300 BC, carried a copper axe and flint knife. He appears to have been in a region of Europe which was in transition to this period.

Knowledge of the use of copper was far wider spread than the metal itself. The European Battle Axe culture used stone axes modelled on copper axes, with imitation "mold marks" carved in the stone.

The European Beaker people are often considered Chalcolithic as were the cultures which first adopted urbanisation in south west Asia. Many megaliths in Europe were erected during this period and it has been suggested that Proto-Indo-European linguistic unity dates to around the same time.

Sources

Bronze Age

Origins

The place and time of the invention of bronze are controversial, and it is possible that bronzing was invented independently in multiple places. The earliest known tin bronzes are from what is now Iran and Iraq and date to the late 4th millennium BC, but there are claims of an earlier appearance of tin bronze in Thailand in the 5th millennium BC. Arsenical bronzes were made in Anatolia and on both sides of the Caucasus by the early 3rd millennium BC. Some scholars date some arsenical bronze artefacts of the Maykop culture in the North Caucasus as far back as the mid 4th millennium BC, which would make them the oldest known bronzes, but others date the same Maykop artefacts to the mid 3rd millennium BC.

Ancient Near East

The Bronze Age in the Near East is divided into three main periods (the dates are very approximate):

MEBA - Early Bronze Age (c.3500-2000 BCE)

MBA - Middle Bronze Age (c.2000-1600 BCE)

LBA - Late Bronze Age (c.1600-1100 BCE)

Each main period can be divided into shorter subcategories such as EB I, EB II, MB IIa etc.

Metallurgy developed first in Anatolia, modern Turkey. The mountains in the Anatolian highland possessed rich deposits of copper and tin. Copper was also mined in Cyprus, the Negev desert, Iran and around the Persian Gulf. Copper was usually mixed with arsenic, yet the growing demand for tin resulted in the establishment of distant trade routes in and out of Anatolia. The precious copper was also imported by sea routes to the great kingdom of Mesopotamia.

The Early Bronze Age saw the rise of urbanization into organized city states and the invention of writing (the Uruk period in the fifth millennium BCE). In the Middle Bronze Age movements of people partially changed the political pattern of the Near East (Amorites, Hittites, Hurrians, Hyksos and possibly the Israelites). The Late Bronze Age is characterized by competing powerful kingdoms and their vassal states (Assyria, Babylonia, Hittites, Mitanni). Extensive contacts were made with the Aegean civilization (Ahhiyawa, Alashiya) in which the copper trade played an important role. This period ended in a widespread collapse which affected much of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East.

Iron began to be worked already in Late Bronze Age Anatolia. The transition into the Iron Age c.1200 BCE was more of a political change in the Near East rather than of new developments in metalworking.

Indian Bronze Age

The Bronze Age on the Indian subcontinent began around 3300 BCE with the beginning of the Indus Valley civilization. Inhabitants of the ancient Indus Valley, the Harappans, developed new techniques in metallurgy and produced copper, bronze, lead and tin.

East Asia

Chinese pu vessel with interlaced dragon design, Spring and Autumn Period (722 BC-481 BC)

China

Bronze artifacts have been discovered at the historic site of Majiayao culture (3100 BC to 2700 BC) of China. However, it is commonly accepted that China's Bronze Age began at around 2100 BC during the Xia dynasty.

The Erlitou culture, Shang Dynasty and Sanxingdui culture of early China used bronze vessels for rituals as well as farming implements and weapons .

Southeast Asia

In Ban Chiang, Thailand, (Southeast Asia) bronze artifacts have been discovered dating to 2100 BC .

In Nyaunggan, Burma bronze tools have been excavated along with ceramics and stone artefacts . Dating is still currently broad . ( 3500 BC - 500 BC )

Korean peninsula

The Middle Mumun pottery period culture of the southern Korean Peninsula gradually adopted bronze production (circa 700-600? BC) after a period when Liaoning-style bronze daggers and other bronze artifacts were exchanged as far as the interior part of the Southern Peninsula (circa 900-700 BC). The bronze daggers lent prestige and authority to the personages who wielded and were buried with them in high-status megalithic burials at south-coastal centres such as the Igeum-dong site . Bronze was an important element in ceremonies and as for mortuary offerings until AD 100.

Aegean

Bronze Age copper ingot found in Crete.

The Aegean Bronze Age civilizations established a far-ranging trade network. This network imported tin and charcoal to Cyprus, where copper was mined and alloyed with the tin to produce bronze. Bronze objects were then exported far and wide, and supported the trade. Isotopic analysis of the tin in some Mediterranean bronze objects indicates it came from as far away as Great Britain.

Knowledge of navigation was well developed at this time, and reached a peak of skill not exceeded until a method was discovered (or perhaps rediscovered) to determine longitude around 1750 AD, with the notable exception of the Polynesian sailors.

The Minoan civilization based from Knossos appears to have coordinated and defended its Bronze Age trade.

One crucial lack in this period was that modern methods of accounting were not available. Numerous authorities believe that ancient empires were prone to misvalue staples in favor of luxuries, and thereby perish by famines created by uneconomic trading.

Collapse

How the Bronze Age ended in this region is still being studied. There is evidence that Mycenaean administration of the regional trade empire followed the decline of Minoan primacy. Evidence also exists that supports the assumption that several Minoan client states lost large portions of their respective populations to extreme famines and/or pestilence, which in turn would indicate that the trade network may have failed at some point, preventing the trade that would have previously relieved such famines and prevented some forms of illness (by nutrition). It is also known that the breadbasket of the Minoan empire, the area north of the Black Sea, also suddenly lost significant portions of its population, and thus probably some degree of cultivation in this era.

Mycenaean sword found in Eastern Europe

Recent research has discredited the theory that exhaustion of the Cypriot forests caused the end of the bronze trade. The Cypriot forests are known to have existed into later times, and experiments have shown that charcoal production on the scale necessary for the bronze production of the late Bronze Age would have exhausted them in less than fifty years.

One theory says that as iron tools became more common, the main justification of the tin trade ended, and that trade network ceased to function as it once did. The individual colonies of the Minoan empire then suffered drought, famine, war, or some combination of these three factors, and thus they had no access to the far-flung resources of an empire by which they could easily recover.

Another family of theories looks to Knossos itself. The Thera eruption occurred at this time, 70 miles north of Crete. Some authorities speculate that a tsunami from Thera destroyed Cretan cities. Others say that perhaps a tsunami destroyed the Cretan navy in its home harbor, which then lost crucial naval battles; so that in the LMIB/LMII event (c. 1450 BC) the cities of Crete burned and the Mycenaean civilization took over Knossos. If the eruption occurred in the late 17th century BC (as most chronologists now think), then its immediate effects belong to the Middle Bronze to Late Bronze Age transition, and not to the end of the Late Bronze Age; but it could have triggered the instability which led to the collapse first of Knossos and then of Bronze Age society overall. One such theory looks to the role of Cretan expertise in administering the empire, post-Thera. If this expertise was concentrated in Crete, then the Mycenaeans may have made crucial political and commercial mistakes when administering the Cretans' empire.

More recent archaeological findings, including on the island of Thera (more commonly known today as Santorini), suggest that the center of Minoan Civilization at the time of the eruption was actually on this island rather than on Crete. Some think that this was the fabled Atlantis (a map drawn on a wall of a Minoan palace in Crete depicts an island similar to that described by Plato and similar too to the form Thera very likely had prior to its explosion). According to this theory, the catastrophic loss of the political, administrative and economic center by the eruption as well as the damage wrought by the tsunami to the coastal towns and villages of Crete precipitated the decline of the Minoans. A weakened political entity with a reduced economic and military capability and fabled riches would have then been more vulnerable to human predators. Indeed, the Santorini Eruption is usually dated to c.1630 BCE. And, the Mycenaean Greeks first enter the historical record a few decades later c.1600 BCE. Thus, the later Mycenaean assaults on Crete (c.1450 BCE) and Troy (c.1250 BCE) are revealed as but continuations of the steady encroachments of the Greeks upon the weakened Minoan world.

Each of these theories is persuasive, and aspects of all of them may have some validity in describing the end of the Bronze Age in this region.

Europe

Central Europe

Bronze Age weaponry and ornaments

In Central Europe, the early Bronze Age Unetice culture (1800–1600 BC) includes numerous smaller groups like the Straubingen, Adlerberg and Hatvan cultures. Some very rich burials, such as the one located at Leubingen with grave gifts crafted from gold, point to an increase of social stratification already present in the Unetice culture. All in all, cemeteries of this period are rare and of small size. The Unetice culture is followed by the middle Bronze Age (1600-1200 BC) Tumulus culture, which is characterised by inhumation burials in tumuli (barrows). In the eastern Hungarian K?r?s tributaries, the early Bronze Age first saw the introduction of the Mako culture, followed by the Ottomany and Gyulavarsand cultures.

The late Bronze Age urnfield culture, (1300 BC-700 BC) is characterized by cremation burials. It includes the Lusatian culture in eastern Germany and Poland (1300-500 BC) that continues into the Iron Age. The Central European Bronze Age is followed by the Iron Age Hallstatt culture (700-450 BC).

Important sites include:

Biskupin (Poland)

Nebra (Germany)

Vrble (Slovakia)

Zug-Sumpf, Zug, Switzerland

Northern Europe

In northern Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, Bronze Age inhabitants manufactured many distinctive and beautiful artifacts, such as the pairs of lurer horns discovered in Denmark. Some linguists believe that a proto-Indo-European language was probably introduced to the area around 2000 BC, which eventually became the ancestor of the Germanic languages. This would fit with the evolution of the Nordic Bronze Age into the most probably Germanic pre-Roman Iron Age.

The age is divided into the periods I-VI according to Oscar Montelius. Period Montelius V already belongs to the Iron Age in other regions.

Caucasus

Some scholars date some arsenical bronze artefacts of the Maykop culture in the North Caucasus as far back as the mid 4th millennium BC.

Great Britain

In Great Britain, the Bronze Age is considered to have been the period from around 2100 to 700 BC. Immigration brought new people to the islands from the continent. Recent tooth enamel isotope research on bodies found in early Bronze Age graves around Stonehenge indicate that at least some of the immigrants came from the area of modern Switzerland. The Beaker culture displayed different behaviours from the earlier Neolithic people and cultural change was significant. Integration is thought to have been peaceful as many of the early henge sites were seemingly adopted by the newcomers. The rich Wessex culture developed in southern Britain at this time. Additionally, the climate was deteriorating, where once the weather was warm and dry it became much wetter as the Bronze Age continued, forcing the population away from easily-defended sites in the hills and into the fertile valleys. Large livestock farms developed in the lowlands which appear to have contributed to economic growth and inspired increasing forest clearances. The Deverel-Rimbury culture began to emerge in the second half of the 'Middle Bronze Age' (c. 1400-1100 BC) to exploit these conditions. Cornwall was a major source of tin for much of western Europe and copper was extracted from sites such as the Great Orme mine in northern Wales. Social groups appear to have been tribal but with growing complexity and hierarchies becoming apparent.

Also, the burial of dead (which until this period had usually been communal) became more individual. For example, whereas in the Neolithic a large chambered cairn or long barrow was used to house the dead, the 'Early Bronze Age' saw people buried in individual barrows (also commonly known and marked on modern British Ordnance Survey maps as Tumuli), or sometimes in cists covered with cairns.

The greatest quantities of bronze objects found in England were discovered in East Cambridgeshire, where the most important finds were recovered in Isleham (more than 6500 pieces).

Bronze Age boats

Ferriby Boats

Langdon Bay hoard - see also Dover Museum

Divers unearth Bronze Age hoard off the coast of Devon

Moor Sands finds, including a remarkably well preserved and complete sword which has parallels with material from the Seine basin of northern France

Ireland

The Bronze Age in Ireland commenced in the centuries around 2000 BC when copper was alloyed with tin and used to manufacture Ballybeg type flat axes and associated metalwork. The preceding period is known as the Copper Age and is charcaterised by the production of flat axes, daggers, halberds and awls in copper. The period is divided into three phases Early Bronze Age 2000-1500 BC; Middle Bronze Age 1500-1200 BC and Late Bronze Age 1200-c.500 BC. Ireland, is also known for a relatively large number of Early Bronze Age Burials.

The Early Bronze Age: one of the characteristic artifact types of the Copper/Bronze Age in Ireland is the flat axe. There are 5 main types of flat axes, Lough Ravel c.2200 BC Ballybeg c.2000 BC, Killaha c.2000 BC, Ballyvalley c. 2000-1600 BC, Derryniggin c. 1600 BC and a number of metal ingots in the shape of axes.

Americas

Andean Bronze Age

An Andean bronze bottle made by Chim? artisans from circa AD 1300.

The Bronze Age in the Andes region of South America is thought to have begun at about 900 BC when Chavin artisans discovered how to alloy copper with tin. The first objects produced were mostly utilitarian in nature, such as axes, knives, and agricultural implements. Decorative work in gold, silver and copper was already a highly developed tradition, and as the Chavin became more experienced in bronze-working technology they produced many ornate and highly decorative objects for administrative, religious, and other ceremonial purposes.

Iron Age

Dates

An Iron Age thatched roof, Butser Farm, Hampshire, United Kingdom

Classically, the Iron Age is taken to begin in the 12th century BC in the ancient Near East, ancient India (with the post-Rigvedic Vedic civilization), and ancient Greece (with the Greek Dark Ages). In other regions of Europe, it started much later. The Iron Age began in the 8th century BC in Central Europe and the 6th century BC in Northern Europe. Iron use, in smelting and forging for tools, appears in West Africa by 1200 BC, making it one of the first places for the birth of the Iron Age.

The Iron Age is usually said to end in the Mediterranean with the onset of historical tradition during Hellenism and the Roman Empire, to end in India with the onset of Buddhism and Jainism, to end in China with the onset of Confucianism, and to end in Northern Europe with the early Middle Ages.

The arrival of iron use in various areas is discussed in more detail below, broadly in chronological order. Because iron working was introduced directly to the Americas and Australasia by European colonization, there was never an Iron Age in either location.

Iron use in the Bronze Age

By the Middle Bronze Age, increasing numbers of smelted iron objects (distinguishable from meteoric iron by the lack of nickel in the product) appeared throughout Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Indian subcontinent, the Levant, the Mediterranean, and Egypt. In some places, their use appears to have been ceremonial, and during the Bronze Age iron was an expensive metal, more expensive than gold. Some sources suggest that iron was being created in some places then as a by-product of copper refining, as sponge iron, and was not reproducible by the metallurgy of the time.

The earliest systematic production and use of iron implements originates in Anatolia. West African production of iron began at around the same time, and seems to have been clearly an independent invention (see Stanley J. Alpern's work in History in Africa, volume 2). Recent archaeological research at Ganges Valley, India showed early iron working by 1800 BC. By 1200 BC, iron was widely used in the Middle East but did not supplant the dominant use of bronze for some time.

The transition from bronze to iron

People made tools from bronze before they figured out how to make them from iron because iron's melting point is higher than that of bronze or its components, which makes it more difficult to make tools from iron .

During the Iron Age, the best tools and weapons were made from steel, which is an alloy consisting mostly of iron, with a carbon content between 0.02% and 1.7% by weight. Steel weapons and tools were superior to bronze weapons and tools. But steel was difficult to produce with the methods available at the time, and most of the metal produced in the Iron Age was wrought iron. Wrought iron is weaker than bronze, but people switched anyway. Iron is much cheaper than bronze, since it is much more common than copper and tin, which are the ingredients of bronze. Additionally it is easier to resharpen an iron tool, whereas bronze needs reforging.

At around 1800 BC, for reasons as yet unascertained by archaeologists, tin became scarce in the Levant, leading to a crisis of bronze production. Copper itself seemed to be in short supply. Various "pirate" groups around the Mediterranean, from around 1800-1700 BC onward, began to attack fortified cities in search of bronze, to remelt into weaponry.

Bronze was much more abundant in the period before the 12th to 10th century and Snodgrass and other authors suggest a shortage of tin, as a result of trade disruptions in the Mediterranean at this time, forced peoples to seek an alternative to bronze. This is confirmed by the fact that for a period, bronze items were recycled from implements to weapons, just before the introduction of iron.

Axial Age

German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term the Axial Age (Achsenzeit in the German language original) to describe the period from 800 BCE to 200 BCE, during which, according to Jaspers, similarly revolutionary thinking appeared in China, India and the Occident. The period is also sometimes referred to as the Axis Age.

Jaspers, in his Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History), identified a number of key Axial Age thinkers as having had a profound influence on future philosophy and religion, and identified characteristics common to each area from which those thinkers emerged. Jaspers saw in these developments in religion and philosophy a striking parallel without any obvious direct transmission of ideas from one region to the other, having found no recorded proof of any extensive inter-communication between Ancient Greece, the Middle East, India and China. Jaspers held up this age as unique, and one which to compare the rest of the history of human thought to. Jaspers' approach to the culture of the middle of the first millennium BCE has been adopted by other scholars and academics, and has become a point of discussion in the history of religion.

A Pivotal Age

Jaspers argued that during the Axial Age "the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently... And these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today". These foundations were laid by individual thinkers within a framework of a changing social environment.

Thinkers and movements

Jaspers' axial shifts included the rise of Platonism, which would later become a major influence on the Western world through both Christian and secular thought throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Buddhism, another of the world's most influential philosophies, was founded by Siddhartha Gautama, or the Buddha, who lived during this period. In China, Confucianism arose during this era, where it remains a profound influence on social and religious life. Zoroastrianism, another of Jaspers' examples, is crucial to the development of monotheism. Jaspers also included the authors of the Upanishads, Laozi, Homer, Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Archimedes, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Deutero-Isaiah as Axial figures. Jaspers held Socrates, Confucius and Siddhartha Gautama in especially high regard, describing them as exemplary human beings, or as a "paradigmatic personality".

Characteristics of the Axial Age

Jaspers argued that the Axial Age gave birth to philosophy as a discipline.

Jaspers described the Axial Age as "an interregnum between two ages of great empire, a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness". Jaspers was particularly interested in the similarities in circumstance and thought of the Age's figures. These similarities included an engagement in the quest for human meaning. and the rise of a new elite class of religious leaders and thinkers in China, India and the Occident. The three regions all gave birth to, and then institutionalised, a tradition of travelling scholars, who roamed from city to city to exchange ideas. These scholars were largely from extant religious traditions; in China, Confucianism and Taoism; in India, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism; in the Occident, the religion of Zoroaster; in Canaan, Judaism; and in Greece, sophism and other classical philosophy.

Jaspers argues that these characteristics appeared under the same sociological circumstances: China, India and the Occident each comprised multiple small states engaged in internal and external struggles.

The term and the theory

The word axial in the phrase Axial Age means pivotal. The name comes from Jaspers' use of the German word Achse, which means both "axis" and "pivot".

German sociologist Max Weber played an important role in Jaspers' thinking. Shmuel Eisenstadt argues in the introduction to The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations that Max Weber's work in his The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism and Ancient Judaism provided a background for the importance of the period, and notes parallels with Eric Voegelin's Order and History. Wider acknowledgement of Jaspers' work came after he presented it at a conference and published it in D?dalus in 1975, and Jaspers' suggestion that the period was uniquely transformative and important generated discussion amongst other scholars, such as Johann Aranason.

Religious historian Karen Armstrong explored the period in her The Great Transformation, and the theory has been the focus of academic conferences. Usage of the term has expanded beyond Jaspers' original formulation. Armstrong argues that the Enlightenment was a "Second Axial Age", including thinkers such as Isaac Newton, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, and that religion today needs to return to the transformative Axial insights. In contrast, it has been suggested that the modern era is a new Axial Age, wherein traditional relationships between religion, secularity and traditional thought are changing.

Dark Ages

In European historiography, the term Dark Ages or Dark Age refers to the Early Middle Ages, the period encompassing (roughly) 476 AD to 1000 AD.

This concept of a dark age was created by the Italian scholar Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) in the 1330s, and was originally intended as a sweeping criticism of the character of Late Latin literature. Later historians expanded the term to refer to the transitional period between Classical Roman Antiquity and the High Middle Ages, including not only the lack of Latin literature, but also a lack of contemporary written history, general demographic decline, limited building activity and material cultural achievements in general (for example, as shown in the impoverishment of a number of technologies, eg. in pottery). Popular culture has further expanded on the term as a vehicle to depict the Middle Ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and expanding its scope.

The rise of archaeology and other specialties in the 20th century has shed much light on the period and offered a more nuanced understanding of its positive developments. Other terms of periodization have come to the fore: Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, and the Great Migrations, depending on which aspects of culture are being emphasized.

When modern scholarly study of the Middle Ages arose in the 19th century, the term Dark Ages was at first kept, with all its critical overtones. When the term Dark Ages is used by historians today, it is intended to be neutral, namely to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" to us only because of the paucity of historical records compared with later times.

Petrarch and the Dark Ages

"Triumph of Christianity" by Tommaso Laureti (1530-1602), ceiling painting in the Sala di Constantino, Vatican Palace. Images like this one celebrate the destruction of ancient pagan culture and the victory of Christianity. See also iconoclasm

It is generally accepted that the concept was created by Petrarch in the 1330s. Writing of those who had come before him, he said that "amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius, no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom". Christian writers had traditional metaphors of "light versus darkness" to describe "good versus evil." Petrarch was the first to co-opt the metaphor and give it secular meaning by reversing its application. Classical Antiquity, so long considered the "dark" age for its lack of Christianity, was now seen by Petrarch as the age of "light" because of its cultural achievements, while Petrarch's time, lacking such cultural achievements, was now seen as the age of darkness.

Why did Petrarch call it an age of darkness? An Italian, Petrarch saw the Roman Empire and the classical period as expressions of Italian greatness. He spent much of his time traveling through Europe rediscovering and republishing the classic Latin and Greek texts. He wanted to restore the classical Latin language to its former purity. Humanists saw the preceding 900-year period as a time of stagnation. They saw history unfolding, not along the religious outline of St. Augustine's Six Ages of the World, but in cultural (or secular) terms through the progressive developments of classical ideals, literature, and art.

Petrarch wrote that history had had two periods: the classic period of the Greeks and Romans, followed by a time of darkness, in which he saw himself as still living. Humanists believed one day the Roman Empire would rise again and restore classic cultural purity, and so by the late 14th and early 15th century humanists such as Leonardo Bruni believed they had attained this new age, and that a third, Modern Age had begun. The age before their own, which Petrarch had labeled dark, thus became a "middle" age between the classic and the modern. The first use of the term "Middle Age" appears with Flavio Biondo around 1439.

The Dark Ages concept after the Renaissance

Main article: Middle Ages in history

Historians prior to the 20th century wrote about the Middle Ages with a mixture of positive and negative, but mostly negative sentiment.

Reformation

During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th century, Protestants wrote of it as a period of Catholic corruption. Just as Petrarch's writing was not an attack on Christianity per se—in addition to his humanism he was deeply occupied with the search for God—neither of course was this an attack on Christianity, but the opposite: a drive to restore what Protestants saw as a "purer" Christianity. In response to these attacks Roman Catholic reformers developed a counter image, depicting the age as a period of social and religious harmony, and not "dark" at all .

Enlightenment

During the 17th and 18th century, in the Age of Enlightenment, religion was seen as antithetical to reason. Because the Middle Ages were seen as the "Age of Faith," it was seen as a period contrary to reason, and thus contrary to the Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant and Voltaire were two Enlightenment writers who were vocal in attacking the religiously- dominated Middle Ages as a period of social decline. Many modern negative conceptions of the age come from Enlightenment authors. Yet just as Petrarch, seeing himself on the threshold of a "new age," was criticizing the centuries up until his own time, so too were the Enlightenment writers criticizing the centuries up until their own. These extended well after Petrarch's time, since religious domination and conflict were still common into the 17th century and beyond, albeit diminished in scope.

Consequently an evolution had occurred in at least three ways. Petrarch's original metaphor of light versus dark had been expanded in time, implicitly at least. Even if the early humanists after him no longer saw themselves living in a dark age, their times were still not light enough for 18th century writers who saw themselves as living in the real Age of Enlightenment, while the period covered by their own condemnation had been extended and was focused also on what we now call Early Modern times. Additionally Petrarch's metaphor of darkness, which he used mainly to deplore what he saw as a lack of secular achievements, was now sharpened to take on a more explicitly anti-religious meaning in light of the draconian tactics of the Catholic clergy.

In spite of this, the term Middle Ages, used by Biondo and other early humanists after Petrarch, was the name in general use before the 18th century to denote the period up until the Renaissance. The earliest recorded use of the English word "medieval" was in 1827. The term Dark Ages was also in use, but by the 18th century tended to be confined to the earlier part of this medieval period. Starting and ending dates varied: the Dark Ages were considered by some to start in 410, by others in 476 when there was no longer an emperor in Rome itself, and to end about 800, at the time of the Carolingian Renaissance under Charlemagne, or to extend through the rest of the first millennium up until about the year 1000.

Romantics

In the early 19th century the Romantics reversed the negative assessment of Enlightenment critics. The word "Gothic" had been a term of opprobrium akin to "Vandal" until a few self-confident mid-18th century English "goths" like Horace Walpole initiated the Gothic Revival in the arts—which for the following Romantic generation began to take on an idyllic image of the Age of Faith. This image, in reaction to a world dominated by Enlightenment rationalism in which reason trumped emotion, expressed a romantic view of a Golden Age of chivalry. The Middle Ages were seen with romantic nostalgia as a period of social and environmental harmony and spiritual inspiration, in contrast to the excesses of the French Revolution, and most of all to the environmental and social upheavals and sterile utilitarianism of the emerging industrial revolution. The Romantics' view of these earlier centuries can still be seen in modern-day fairs and festivals celebrating the period with costumes and events (see "Renaissance fair").

Just as Petrarch had turned the meaning of light versus darkness on its head, so had the Romantics turned the judgment of Enlightenment critics on its head. However, the period idealized by the Romantics focused largely on what we now call in English the High Middle Ages, extending into Early Modern times. In one respect this was a reversal of the religious aspect of Petrarch's judgment, since these later centuries were those when the universal power and prestige of the Church was at its height. To many users of the term, the scope of the Dark Ages was becoming divorced from this period, now denoting mainly the earlier centuries after the fall of Rome.

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages form the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three "ages": the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modern Times.

The Middle Ages are commonly dated from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century to the beginning of the Renaissance in the 15th century. These dates are approximate, and are based upon nuanced arguments; for other dating schemes and the reasoning behind them, see "Periodisation Issues", below.

A period of great change in culture, politics, science, society, agriculture and economics, the Middle Ages witnessed the first sustained urbanization of northern and western Europe. Modern European states owe their origins to events unfolding in the Middle Ages; European political boundaries as of 2007 are, in many regards, the result of the military and dynastic achievements in this tumultuous period.

Terminology

The Middle Ages are commonly referred to as the "medieval period" or simply "medieval" (sometimes spelled "mediaeval" or, historically, "medi?val"). This spelling comes from the Latin medius (middle) and ?vus (age).

Some early historians have described non-European countries as "mediaeval" when those countries show characteristics of "feudal" organization. The pre-westernisation period in the history of Japan, and the pre-colonial period in developed parts of sub-Saharan Africa, are also sometimes termed "mediaeval." Modern historians are far more reluctant to try to fit the history of other regions to the European model, however, and these terms have fallen out of favour.

Origins: The Later Roman Empire

Main article: Roman Empire

The Roman empire reached its greatest territorial extent during the 2nd century. The following two centuries witnessed the slow decline of Roman control over its outlying territories. The Emperor Diocletian split the empire into separately administered eastern and western provinces in 285. Under his arrangement, the western Roman empire was governed from Ravenna by a lesser emperor and the region was considered subordinate to the wealthier east. The division between east and west was encouraged by Constantine, who refounded the city of Byzantium as the new capital, Constantinople, in 330.

Military expenses increased steadily during the 6th century, even as Rome’s neighbours became restless and increasingly powerful. Tribes who previously had contact with the Romans as trading partners, rivals, or mercenaries had sought entrance to the empire and access to its wealth throughout the 4th century. Diocletian’s reforms had created a strong governmental bureaucracy, reformed taxation, and strengthened the army. These changes bought the Empire time, but these reforms demanded money. Rome’s declining revenue left it dangerously dependent on tax revenue. Future setbacks forced Rome to pour ever more wealth into its armies, spreading the empire’s wealth thinly into its border regions. In periods of expansion, this would not be a critical problem. The defeat in 378 at the Battle of Adrianople, however, destroyed much of the Roman army, leaving the western empire undefended. Without a strong army in the west, and with no promise of salvation coming from the emperor in Constantinople, the western Empire sought compromise.

Known in traditional historiography collectively as the “barbarian invasions”, the Migration Period, or the Volkerwanderung ("wandering of the peoples") specifically by German historians, this migration of peoples was a complicated and gradual process. Some early historians have given this period the epithet of "Dark Ages". The term is no longer used by academic historians, who reject the pejorative meaning of the phrase. Recent research and archaeology have also revealed complex cultures persisting throughout the period. Some of these "barbarian" tribes rejected the classical culture of Rome, while others admired and aspired to it. Theodoric the Great of the Ostrogoths, as only one example, had been raised in Constantinople and considered himself an heir to its culture, employing cultured Roman ministers like Cassiodorus. Other prominent tribal groups that migrated into Roman territory were the Huns, Bulgars, Avars and Magyars along with a large number of Germanic and later Slavic peoples. Some tribes settled in the empire’s territory with the approval of the Roman senate or emperor. In return for land to farm and, in some regions, the right to collect tax revenues for the state, federated tribes provided military support to the empire. Other incursions were small-scale military invasions of tribal groups assembled to gather plunder. The most famous invasion culminated in the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410.

By the end of the 5th century, Roman institutions were crumbling. The final independent, ethnically Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the barbarian king Odoacer in 476. The Eastern Roman Empire (called by historians the "Byzantine Empire") maintained its order by abandoning the west to its fate. Even though Byzantine emperors maintained a claim over the territory, and no barbarian king dared to elevate himself to the position of emperor of the west, attempts to reassert Byzantine control over the west failed. For the next three centuries, the western empire would be without a legitimate emperor. It was, instead, ruled by kings who enjoyed the support of the largely barbarian armies. Some kings ruled as regents for titular emperors, and some ruled in their own name. Throughout the 5th century, cities throughout the empire declined, receding inside heavily fortified walls. The western empire, particularly, experienced the decay of infrastructure which was not adequately maintained by the central government. Where civic functions and infrastructure such as chariot races, aqueducts, and roads were maintained, the work was frequently done at the expense of city officials and bishops. Augustine of Hippo is an example of a bishop who acted as an able administrator. One scholar, Thomas Cahill, has dubbed Augustine the last of the classical men and the first of medieval men.

Early Middle Ages

Map of Europe in 998.

Map of territorial boundaries ca. 450 AD.

The Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries

Main article: Early Middle Ages

The end of the 7th century found the western Roman empire an overwhelmingly rural and decentralized region that had lost its privileged position at the centre of an empire. Between the 5th and 8th centuries, new peoples and powerful individuals filled the political void left by Roman centralized government. Elite families from both Roman aristocracy and barbarian nobility established regional hegemonies within the former boundaries of the Empire, creating weak kingdoms like that of the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Visigoths in Spain and Portugal, the Franks and Burgundians in Gaul and western Germany, and Saxons in England. The social effects of the fracture of the Roman state were manifold. Cities and merchants lost the economic benefits of safe conditions for trade and manufacture, and the intellectual life suffered from the loss of a unified cultural and educational milieu of far-ranging connections.

The breakdown of Roman society was often dramatic. As it became unsafe to travel or carry goods over any distance, there was a collapse in trade and manufacture for export. The major industries that depended on long-distance trade, such as large-scale pottery manufacture, vanished almost overnight in places like Britain.

Eastern Hemisphere, 600ad.

The Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries, which conquered the Persian Empire, Roman Syria, Roman Egypt, Roman North Africa, Visigothic Spain and Portugal, and other parts of the Mediterranean, including Sicily and southern Italy, increased localisation by halting much of what remained of seaborne commerce. Thus, whereas sites like Tintagel in Cornwall had managed to obtain supplies of Mediterranean luxury goods well into the 6th century, this connection was now lost.

The patchwork of petty rulers was incapable of supporting the depth of civic infrastructure required to maintain libraries, public baths, arenas and major educational institutions. Any new building was on a far smaller scale than before. Roman landholders beyond the confines of city walls were also vulnerable to extreme changes. They could not just pack up their land and move elsewhere. Some were dispossessed and fled to Byzantine regions, others quickly pledged their allegiances to their new rulers. In areas like Spain and Italy, this often meant little more than acknowledging a new overlord, while Roman forms of law and religion could be maintained. In other areas where there was a greater weight of population movement, it might be necessary to adopt new modes of dress, language and custom.

The Catholic Church was the major unifying cultural influence, preserving its selection from Latin learning, maintaining the art of writing, and a centralised administration through its network of bishops. Some regions that had previously been Catholic were occupied by Arians, which raised debates over orthodoxy. Clovis I of the Franks is a well-known example of a barbarian king who chose Catholic orthodoxy over Arianism. His conversion marked a turning point for the Frankish tribes of Gaul. Bishops were central to Middle Age society due to the literacy they possessed. As a result, they often played a significant role in shaping good government. However beyond the core areas of Western Europe there remained many peoples with little or no contact with Christianity or with classic Roman culture. Martial societies such as the Avars and the Vikings were still capable of causing major disruption to the newly emerging societies of Western Europe.

The Early Middle Ages also witnessed the rise of monasticism within the west. Although the impulse to withdraw from society to focus upon a spiritual life is experienced by people of all cultures, the shape of European monasticism was determined by traditions and ideas that originated in the deserts of Egypt and Syria. The style of monasticism that focuses on community experience of the spiritual life, called cenobitism, was pioneered by the saint Pachomius in the 4th Century. Monastic ideals spread from Egypt to western Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries through hagiographical literature such as the Life of Saint Anthony. Saint Benedict wrote the definitive Rule for western monasticism during the 6th century, detailing the administrative and spiritual responsibilities of a community of monks led by an abbot. Monks and monasteries had a deep effect upon the religious and political life of the Early Middle Ages, in various cases acting as land trusts for powerful families, centres of propaganda and royal support in newly conquered regions, bases for mission and proselytization, or outposts of education and literacy.

Romanesque architecture flourished in the early Middle Ages: Hildesheim.

Outside of Italy building in stone was rarely attempted until the 8th Century, when a new form of architecture called the Romanesque, and based on Roman forms, gradually developed. Celtic and Germanic barbarian forms were absorbed into Christian art, although the central impulse remained Roman and Byzantine. High quality jewellry and religious imagery were produced throughout Western Europe, Charlemagne and other monarchs provided patronage for religious artworks and books. Some of the principal artworks of the age were the fabulous Illuminated manuscripts produced by monks on vellum, using gold, silver and precious pigments to illustrate biblical narratives. Early examples include the Book of Kells and many Carolingian and Ottonian Frankish manuscripts.

High Middle Ages

Main article: High Middle Ages

The High Middle Ages were characterized by the urbanization of Europe, military expansion, and intellectual revival that historians identify between the 11th century and the end of the 13th. This revival was aided by the cessation of invasions by Scandinavians and Hungarians, as well as the assertion of power by castellans to fill the power vacuum left by the Carolingian decline. The High Middle Ages saw an explosion in population. This population flowed into towns, sought conquests abroad, or cleared land for cultivation. The cities of antiquity had been clustered around the Mediterranean. By 1200 the growing urban centres were in the centre of the continent, connected by roads or rivers. By the end of this period Paris might have had as many as 200,000 inhabitants.In central and northern Italy and in Flanders the rise of towns that were self-governing to some degree within their territories stimulated the economy and created an environment for new types of religious and trade associations. Trading cities on the shores of the Baltic entered into agreements known as the Hanseatic League, and Italian city-states such as Venice, Genoa, and Pisa expanded their trade throughout the Mediterranean. This period marks a formative one in the history of the western state as we know it, for kings in France, England, and Spain consolidated their power during this time period, setting up lasting institutions to help them govern. The Papacy, which had long since created an ideology of independence from the secular kings, first asserted its claims to temporal authority over the entire Christian world. The entity that historians call the Papal Monarchy reached its apogee in the early 13th century under the pontificate of Innocent III. Crusades and the advance of Christian kingdoms and military orders into previously pagan regions in the Baltic and Finnic northeast brought the forced assimilation of numerous native peoples to the European entity.

Late Middle Ages

Main article: Late Middle Ages

A priest blesses victims of the Black Death.

The Late Middle Ages was a period initiated by calamities and upheavals. During this time, agriculture was affected by a climate change that has been documented by climate historians, and was felt by contemporaries in the form of periodic famines, including the Great Famine of 1315-1317. The Black Death, a bacterial disease that spread among the malnourished populace like wildfire, killed as much as a third of the population in the mid-14th century, in some regions the toll was as high as one half of the population. Towns were especially hard-hit because of the crowded conditions. Large areas of land were left sparsely inhabited, and in some places fields were left unworked. As a consequence of the sudden decline in available labourers, the price of wages rose as landlords sought to entice workers to their fields. Workers also felt that they had a right to greater earnings, and popular uprisings broke out across Europe. This period of stress, paradoxically, witnessed creative social, economic, and technological responses that laid the groundwork for further great changes in the Early Modern Period. It was also a period when the Catholic Church was increasingly divided against itself. During the time of the Western Schism, the Church was led by as many as three popes at one time. The divisiveness of the Church undermined papal authority, and allowed the formation of national churches. The fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 had a great effect upon the European economy and intellectual life.

Middle Ages in history

Main article: Middle Ages in history

After the Middle Ages ended subsequent generations imagined, portrayed and interpreted the Middle Ages in different ways. Every century has created its own vision of the Middle Ages; the 18th century view of the Middle Ages was entirely different from the 19th century which was different from the 16th century view. The reality of these images remains with us today in the form of film, architecture, literature, art and popular conception.

Medieval and Middle Ages

"Middle Age"

The term "Middle Age" ("medium ?vum") was first coined by Flavio Biondo, an Italian humanist, in the early 15th Century. Until the Renaissance (and some time after) the standard scheme of history was to divide history into six ages, inspired by the biblical six days of creation, or four monarchies based on Daniel 2:40. The early Renaissance historians, in their glorification of all things classical, declared two periods in history, that of Ancient times and that of the period referred to as the "Dark Age". In the early 15th Century it was believed history had evolved from the Dark Age to a Modern period with its revival of things classical so scholars began to write about a middle period between the Ancient and Modern, which became known as the Middle Age. This is known as the three period view of history.

The plural form of the term, Middle Ages, is used in English, Dutch, Russian, Bulgarian and Icelandic while other European languages use the singular form (Italian medioevo, French le moyen ?ge, German das Mittelalter). This difference originates in different Neo-Latin terms used for the Middle Ages before media aetas became the standard term. Some were singular (media aetas, media antiquitas, medium saeculum and media tempestas), others plural (media saecula and media tempora). There seem to be no simple reason why a particular language ended up with the singular or the plural form. The term "mediaeval" (American: medieval) was first contracted from the Latin medium ?vum, or more precisely "middle epoch", by Enlightenment thinkers as a pejorative descriptor of the Middle Ages.

The common subdivision into Early, High and Late Middle Ages came into use after World War I. It was caused by the works of Henri Pirenne (in particular the article "Les periodes de l'historie du capitalism" in Academie Royale de Belgique. Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres, 1914) and Johan Huizinga (The Autumn of the Middle Ages, 1919).

Dorothy Sayers - a noted scholar in mediaeval literature as well as a famous writer of detective books - strongly objected to the term :"That new-washed world of clear sun and glittering colour, which we call the Middle Age (as though it were middle-aged), has perhaps a better right than the blown summer of the Renaissance to be called the Age of Re-Birth"

Viking Age

Historical considerations

In England the Viking Age began dramatically on June 8, 793 when heathen Norsemen destroyed the Abbey church on Lindisfarne, a centre of learning famous across the continent. Monks were killed in the abbey itself, thrown into the sea to drown or carried away as slaves along with the church treasures. Three Viking ships had beached in Portland bay 4 years earlier but the incursion may have been a trading expedition that went wrong rather than a piratical raid. Lindisfarne was different. The devastation of Northumbria's Holy Island shocked and alerted the royal Courts of Europe. Never before has such an atrocity been seen, declared the Northumbrian Scholar, Alcuin of York. More than any other single event, the attack on Lindisfarne demonized perception of the Vikings for the next twelve centuries. Not until 1890's did scholars outside Scandinavia begin seriously to reassess the achievements of the Vikings, recognizing the artistry, the technological skills and the seamanship.

Until Victoria's reign in Britain, Vikings were portrayed as violent and bloodthirsty. The chronicles of medieval England had always portrayed them as rapacious 'wolves among sheep'. During the nineteenth century public perceptions changed. In 1920 a winged-helmeted Viking was introduced as a radiator cap figure on a new Rover car. That marked the cultural rehabilitation of the Vikings in Britain.

The first challenges to the many anti-Viking images in Britain emerged in the 17th century. Pioneering scholarly editions of the Viking Age began to reach a small readership in Britain. Archaeologists began to dig up Britain's Viking past. Linguistic enthusiasts started to work on identifying Viking-Age origins for rural idioms and proverbs. The new dictionaries of the Old Norse language enabled the Victorians to grapple with the primary Icelandic sagas.

In Scandinavia Thomas Bartholin and Ole Worm, the 17th-century Danish scholars and Olaf Rudbeck in Sweden were the first to set the standard for using runic inscriptions and Islandic Sagas as historical sources. During the Age of Enlightenment and Nordic Renaissance historical scholarship in Scandinavia became more rational and pragmatic in the works of a Danish historian Ludvig Holberg and Swedish Olof von Dalin. The latter half of the 18th century the Islandic sagas were still used as important historical sources but the Viking Age was not regarded as a golden age but rather as a barbaric and uncivilized period in the history of the Nordic countries. Until recently the history of the Viking Age was largely based on Icelandic sagas, the history of the Danes written by Saxo Grammaticus, the Russian Primary Chronicle and the The War of the Irish with the Foreigners. Few scholars still accept these texts as reliable sources; historians nowadays rely more on archeology and numismatics, disciplines that have made valuable contributions toward understanding the period. [6]

Historical background

The Vikings that travelled to western and eastern Europe were essentially from Denmark, Norway and Sweden. They eventually made it into Greenland and North America.

It is believed that Denmark was largely settled by Germanic people from present-day Sweden in the fifth and sixth centuries. Their language became the mother-tongue of present-day Scandinavian languages. By 800, a strong central authority appears to have been established in Jutland and the Danes were beginning to look beyond their own territory for land, trade and plunder.

Norway had been settled over many centuries by Germanic peoples from Denmark and Sweden who had established farming and fishing communities around its coasts and lakes. The mountainous terrain and the fjords formed strong natural boundaries and the communities remained independent of each other, unlike the situation in Denmark which is lowland. By 800, it is known that some 30 petty kingdoms existed in Norway.

The sea was the easiest way of communication between the Norwegian kingdoms and the outside world. It was in the eighth century that ships of war began to be built and sent on raiding expeditions to initiate the Viking Age, but the northern sea rovers were traders, colonizers and explorers as well as plunderers.

Prior to 1000, details of Swedish events are obscure. It is known that there were two tribes in the country during Roman times: the Suiones (Swedes) in the north Svealand; and the Gothones (Goths), in the south (hence called Gothia).

Etymology of "Viking", see Viking (Etymology)

Probable causes of Viking expansion

Viking society was based on agriculture and trade with other peoples and placed great emphasis on the concept of honour both in combat (for example, it was unfair and wrong to attack an enemy already in a fight with another) and in the criminal justice system.

It is unknown what triggered the Vikings' expansion and conquests, although it coincided with the Medieval Warm Period (800 – 1300) and stopped with the start of the Little Ice Age (about 1250 – 1850). The lack of pack-ice would have allowed Scandinavians to go "a-Viking" or "raiding". Vikings traded with the Muslim world, and large quantities of Arabic coins have been found in Scandinavia.

With the means of travel (longships and open water), their desire for goods led Scandinavian traders to explore and develop extensive trading partnerships in the territories they explored. It has been suggested that the Scandinavians suffered from unequal trade practices imposed by Christian advocates and that this eventually led to the breakdown in trade relations and raiding. British merchants who declared openly that they were Christian, and would not trade with heathens and infidels (Muslims and the Norse) would get preferred status for availability and pricing of goods through a Christian network of traders. A two-tiered system of pricing existed with both declared and undeclared merchants trading secretly with banned parties. Viking raiding expeditions were separate from and coexisted with regular trading expeditions. A people with the tradition of raiding their neighbours when their honour had been impugned might easily fall to raiding foreign peoples who impugned their honour.

Historians also suggest that the Scandinavian population was too large for the peninsula, and there were not enough crops to feed everyone. This led to a hunt for more land to feed the ever growing Viking population. Particularly for the settlement and conquest period that followed the early raids, the internal strife in Scandinavia resulted in the progressive centralisation of power into fewer hands. This meant that lower classes who wanted not to be oppressed by greedy kings went in search of their own lands. Thus, Iceland became Europe's first modern republic, with an annual assembly of elected officials called the Althing.

Historic overview

The beginning of the Viking Age in the British Isles is commonly given as 793, when it is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that the Northmen raided the important island monastery of Lindisfarne.

"AD. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island (Lindisfarne), by rapine and slaughter." -Anglo Saxon Chronicle.

In 794, according to the Annals of Ulster, there was a serious attack on Lindisfarne's mother-house of Iona which was followed in 795 by raids upon the northern coast of Ireland. From bases there, they were able to attack Iona again in 802, cause great slaughter amongst the C?li D? Brethren, and burn the Abbey to the ground.

The end of the Viking Age is traditionally marked in England by the failed invasion attempted by Haraldr Har?r??i, who was defeated by the Saxon king Harold Godwinson in 1066; in Ireland, the capture of Dublin by Strongbow and his Hiberno-Norman forces in 1171; and 1263 in Scotland by the defeat of King H?kon H?konarson at the Battle of Largs by troops loyal to Alexander III. Godwinson himself was subsequently defeated within a month by another Viking descendant, William, Duke of Normandy (Normandy had itself been acquired by Vikings (Normans) in 911). Scotland took its present form when it regained territory from the Norse between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries.

The traditional definition is no longer accepted by most Scandinavian historians and archaeologists. Instead, the Viking age is thought to have ended with the establishment of royal authority in the Scandinavian countries and the establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion. The date is usually put somewhere in the early 11th century in all three Scandinavian countries, but for Denmark it can be argued to be much earlier, and for Sweden much later.

The end of the Viking-era in Norway is marked by the battle of Stiklestad, in the year 1030, They proclaimed Norway as a Christian nation and Norwegians could no longer be called vikings.

The clinker-built longships used by the Scandinavians were uniquely suited to both deep and shallow waters, and thus extended the reach of Norse raiders, traders and settlers not only along coastlines, but also along the major river valleys of north-western Europe. Rurik also expanded to the east, and in 859 founded the city of Novgorod (which means "new city") on Volkhov River. His successors (the Rurik Dynasty) moved further founding the first East Slavs state of Kievan Rus with the capital in Kiev, which persisted until 1240, the time of Mongol invasion. According to one author, the word "Rus" originally meant "Viking raider" [citation needed], as distinct from the native Slavic people. Other Norse people, particularly those from the area that is now modern-day Sweden and Norway, continued south on Slavic rivers to the Black Sea and then on to Constantinople. Whenever these Viking ships ran aground in shallow waters, the Vikings would reportedly turn them on their sides and drag them across the land into deeper waters.

The Kingdom of the Franks under Charlemagne was particularly hard-hit by these raiders, who could sail down the Seine River with near impunity. Near the end of Charlemagne's reign (and throughout the reigns of his sons and grandsons) a string of heavy raids began, culminating in a gradual Scandinavian conquest and settlement of the region now known as Normandy. The very name "Normandy" itself derives from the Norse settlers who had taken control of the region.

In 911, the French king, Charles the Simple, was able to make an agreement with the Viking warleader Rollo, a chieftain of disputed Norwegian or Danish origins - the material suggesting a Norwegian origin identifies him with Hrolf Gangr, also known as Rolf the Walker. Charles gave Rollo the title of duke, and granted him and his followers possession of Normandy. In return, Rollo swore fealty to Charles, converted to Christianity, and undertook to defend the northern region of France against the incursions of other Viking groups. The results were, in a historical sense, rather ironic: several generations later, the Norman descendants of these Viking settlers not only thereafter identified themselves as French, but carried the French language, and their variant of the French culture into England in 1066, after the Norman Conquest, and became the ruling aristocracy of Anglo-Saxon England.

Age of Discovery

The Age of Discovery or Age of Exploration was a period from the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th century, during which European ships traveled around the world in search of new trading routes and partners to feed burgeoning capitalism in Europe. They also were in search of trading goods such as gold, silver and spices. In the process, Europeans encountered peoples and mapped lands previously unknown to them. Among the most famous explorers of the period were Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Ferdinand Magellan.

The Age of Exploration was rooted in new technologies and ideas growing out of the Renaissance. These included advances in cartography, navigation, firepower and shipbuilding. Many people wanted to find a route to Asia through the west of Europe. The most important development was the invention of first the carrack and then caravel in Iberia. These vessels evolved from medieval European designs with a fruitful combination of Mediterranean and North Sea designs and the addition of some Arabic elements. They were the first ships that could leave the relatively placid and calm Mediterranean and sail safely on the open Atlantic.

Exploration by Land

The south-oriented map, made by Arab geographer al-Idrisi in 1154, was one of the most accurate world maps prior to the advent of the first portolans in the XIIIth century's Europe

The prelude to the Age of Exploration was a series of European expeditions crossing Eurasia by land in the late Middle Ages. While the Mongols had threatened Europe with pillage and destruction they also unified much of Eurasia creating trade routes and communication lines stretching from the Middle East to China (although land routes from Han Dynasty China to the Roman Empire existed beforehand, see Silk Road). A series of Europeans took advantage of these to explore eastwards. These were almost all Italians as the trade between Europe and the Middle East was almost completely controlled by traders from the Italian city states. Their close links to the Levant created great curiosity and commercial interest in what lay further east. The Papacy also launched expeditions in hopes of finding converts, or the fabled Prester John.

The first of these travelers was Giovanni de Plano Carpini who journeyed to Mongolia and back from 1244–1247. The most famous voyage, however, was that of Marco Polo who traveled throughout the Orient from 1271 to 1295, a guest at the Yuan Dynasty court of Kublai Khan. His journey was written up as Travels and the work was read throughout Europe. In 1439, Niccol? Da Conti published an account of his travels to India and Southeast Asia. In 1466-1472, a Russian merchant Afanasy Nikitin of Tver described his travels to India in his book A Journey Beyond the Three Seas.

These voyages had little immediate effect, however; the Mongol Empire collapsed almost as quickly as it formed and soon the route to the east became far more difficult and dangerous. The Black Death of the fourteenth century also blocked travel and trade. The land route to the East was always to be too long and difficult for profitable trade and it was also controlled by Islamic empires that had long battled the Europeans. The rise of the aggressive and expansionist Ottoman Empire further limited the possibilities for Europeans.

Exploration begins in Portugal

Main article: Portugal in the Age of Discovery

The Fra Mauro map (1459) in Venice, provided one of the first practical descriptions of Europe, Africa and Asia.

It was not until the carrack and then the caravel were developed in Iberia that European thoughts returned to the fabled East. These explorations have a number of causes. Monetarists believe the main reason the Age of Exploration began was because of a severe shortage of bullion in Europe. The European economy was dependent on gold and silver currency, but low domestic supplies had plunged much of Europe into a recession. Another factor was the centuries long conflict between the Iberians and the Muslims to the south. The eastern trade routes were controlled by the Ottoman Empire after the Turks took control of Constantinople in 1453, and they barred Europeans from those trade routes. The ability to outflank the Muslim states of North Africa was seen as crucial to their survival. At the same time, the Iberians learnt much from their Arab neighbours. The carrack and caravel both incorporated the Arab lateen sail that made ships far more manoeuvrable. It was also through the Arabs that Ancient Greek geography was rediscovered, for the first time giving European sailors some idea of the shape of Africa and Asia.

The Santa Maria at anchor by Andries van Eertvelt, painted c. 1628 shows the famous carrack of Christopher Columbus.

The first great wave of expeditions was launched by Portugal under Prince Henry the Navigator. Sailing out into the open Atlantic the Madeira Islands were discovered in 1419, and in 1427 the Azores, both becoming Portuguese colonies. The main project of Henry the Navigator was exploration of the West Coast of Africa. For centuries the only trade routes linking West Africa with the Mediterranean world were over the Sahara Desert. These routes bringing slaves and gold were controlled by the Muslim states of North Africa, long rivals to Portugal. It was the Portuguese hope that the Islamic nations could be bypassed by trading directly with West Africa by sea. It was also hoped that south of the Sahara the states would be Christian and potential allies against the Muslims in the Maghreb. The Portuguese navigators made slow but steady progress, each year managing to push a few miles further south, and in 1434 the obstacle of Cape Bojador was overcome. Within two decades, the barrier of the Sahara had been overcome and trade in slaves and gold began in what is today Senegal. Progress continued as trading forts were built at Elmina and S?o Tom? e Pr?ncipe became the first sugar producing colony. In 1482 an expedition under Diogo C?o made contact with the Kingdom of Kongo. The crucial breakthrough was in 1487 when Bartolomeu Dias rounded (and later named) the Cape of Good Hope and proved that access to the Indian Ocean was possible. In 1498 Vasco da Gama made good on this promise by reaching India.

European colonization of the Americas

The Cantino planisphere (1502), one of the oldest surviving Portuguese nautical charts, showing the results of the explorations of Vasco da Gama's to India, Columbus' to Central America and Pedro ?lvares Cabral's to Brazil. The meridian of Tordesillas, separating the Portuguese and Spanish halves of the world is also depicted

Main article: European colonization of the Americas

Portugal's rival Castile had been somewhat slower than its neighbour to begin exploring the Atlantic, and it was not until late in the fifteenth century that Castilian sailors began to compete with their Iberian neighbours. The first contest was for control of the Canary Islands, which Castile won. It was not until the union of Aragon and Castile and the completion of the reconquista that the large nation became fully committed to looking for new trade routes and colonies overseas. In 1492 the joint rulers of the nation conquered the Moorish kingdom of Granada, that had been providing Castile with African goods through its tribute, and they decided to fund Christopher Columbus' expedition that they hoped would bypass Portugal's lock on Africa and the Indian Ocean reaching Asia by travelling west.

Columbus did not reach Asia, but rather found a New World, America. In 1500, the Portuguese navigator, Pedro ?lvares Cabral also discovered a new world, the land that is today called Brazil. The issue of defining areas of influence became critical, being resolved by Papal intervention in 1494 when the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the world between the two powers. The Portuguese "received" everything outside of Europe east of a line that ran 270 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands; this gave them control over Africa, Asia and eastern South America (Brazil). The Spanish received everything west of this line, territory that was still almost completely unknown, and proved to be mostly the western part of the American continent plus the Pacific Ocean islands.

Columbus and other Spanish explorers were initially disappointed with their discoveries. Unlike Africa or Asia the Caribbean islanders had little to trade with the Spanish ships. The islands thus became the focus of colonization efforts. It was not until the continent itself was explored that Spain found the wealth it had sought in the form of abundant gold. In the Americas the Spanish found a number of empires that were as large and populous as those in Europe. However, small bodies of Spanish conquistadors, with large armies of allied natives, managed to conquer them. The most notable amongst the conquered nations were the Aztec empire in Mexico (conquered in 1521) and the Inca empire in modern Peru and Ecuador (conquered in 1532). During this time, pandemics of European disease such as Smallpox devastated the indigenous populations, helping greatly in the conquest. Once Spanish sovereignty was established, the main focus would eventually become the extraction and export of gold and especially silver, though other goods were also traded.

In 1519, the same year that Cortez's army landed in Mexico the Spanish crown funded the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese (it was not an uncommon practice in those pre-nationalistic times for the various seafaring countries to employ experienced navigators from other countries - usually Portuguese or Italians). The goal of the mission was to find the Spice Islands by travelling west, and thus placing them in the Spanish sphere. The expedition was a success and became the first to circumnavigate the world upon its return three years later, though Magellan died in the Pacific, leaving Juan Sebasti?n Elcano the task of completing the voyage. The voyage would lead eventually to Spain establishing a presence in the Pacific which was for a long time crossed by the Manila galleons, thereby creating a trade link joining China, the Americas and Europe via the trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic routes.

Age of Reason

17th century philosophy in the West is generally regarded as seeing the start of modern philosophy, and the shaking off of the medieval approach, especially scholasticism. It is often called the "Age of Reason" and is considered to succeed the Renaissance and precede the Age of Enlightenment. Alternatively, it may be seen as the earlier part of the Enlightenment.

Europe

In Western Philosophy, the period is usually taken to start in the seventeenth century with the work of Ren? Descartes, who set much of the agenda as well as much of the methodology for those who came after him. The period is typified in Europe by the great system-builders — philosophers who present unified systems of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and ethics, and often politics and the physical sciences too. Immanuel Kant classified his predecessors into two schools: the Rationalists and the Empiricists[1], and Early Modern Philosophy (as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy is known) is often characterised in terms of a supposed conflict between these schools.[citation needed] This division is a considerable oversimplification, and it is important to be aware that the philosophers involved did not think of themselves as belonging to these schools, but as being involved in a single philosophical enterprise.[citation needed]

Although misleading in many ways, this stupidification——— has continued to be used to this day, especially when writing about the 17th and 18th centuries. The three main Rationalists are normally taken to have been Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz. Building upon their English predecessors Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the three main Empiricists were John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. The former were distinguished by the belief that, in principle (though not in practice), all knowledge can be gained by the power of our reason alone; the latter rejected this, believing that all knowledge has to come through the senses, from experience. Thus the Rationalists took mathematics as their model for knowledge, and the Empiricists took the physical sciences.

This emphasis on epistemology is at the root of Kant's distinction; looking at the various philosophers in terms of their metaphysical, moral, or linguistic theories, they divide up very differently. Even sticking to epistemology, though, the distinction is shaky: for example, most of the Rationalists accepted that in practice we had to rely on the sciences for knowledge of the external world, and many of them were involved in scientific research; the Empiricists, on the other hand, generally accepted that a priori knowledge was possible in the fields of mathematics and logic.

This period also saw the birth of some of the classics of political thought, especially Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, and John Locke's Two Treatises of Government.

The seventeenth century in Europe saw the culmination of the slow process of detachment of philosophy from theology. Thus, while philosophers still talked about – and even offered arguments for the existence of – a deity, this was done in the service of philosophical argument and thought. (In the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, 18th-century philosophy was to go still further, leaving theology and religion behind altogether.)

Age of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment (French: Sicle des Lumires; German: Aufklrung) was an eighteenth century movement in European and American philosophy, or the longer period including the Age of Reason. The term can more narrowly refer to the intellectual movement of The Enlightenment, which advocated reason as the primary basis of authority. Developing in France, Britain and Germany, its sphere of influence also included Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Scandinavia, Spain and, in fact, the whole of Europe. Many of the United States' Founding Fathers were also heavily influenced by Enlightenment-era ideas, particularly in the religious sphere (deism) and, in parallel with classical liberalism, in the political sphere (which had a major influence on its Bill of Rights, in parallel with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen).

The Enlightenment is generally agreed to have ended around the year 1800 and the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15). Although some historians argue that the true end of the Enlightenment occurred with the rise of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan in the early-twentieth century.

History

The Enlightenment, or the age of reason, is often closely linked with the Scientific Revolution, for both movements emphasized reason, science, and rationality, while the former also sought their application in comprehension of divine or natural law. Inspired by the revolution of knowledge commenced by Galileo and Newton, and in a climate of increasing disaffection with repressive rule, Enlightenment thinkers believed that systematic thinking might be applied to all areas of human activity, carried into the governmental sphere in their explorations of the individual, society and the state. Its leaders believed they could lead their states to progress after a long period of tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny which they imputed to the Middle Ages. The movement helped create the intellectual framework for the American and French Revolutions, Poland's Constitution of May 3, 1791, the Latin American independence movement, the Greek national independence movement and the later Balkan independence movements against the Ottoman Empire, and led to the rise of classical liberalism, democracy, and capitalism.

The Enlightenment is matched with the high baroque and classical eras in music, and the neo-classical period in the arts. It receives modern attention as a central model for many movements in the modern period. Another important movement in 18th century philosophy, closely related to it, focused on belief and piety. Some of its proponents, such as George Berkeley, attempted to demonstrate rationally the existence of a supreme being. Piety and belief in this period were integral to the exploration of natural philosophy and ethics, in addition to political theories of the age. However, prominent Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume questioned and attacked the existing institutions of both Church and State. The 19th century also saw a continued rise of empiricist ideas and their application to political economy, government and sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology.

The boundaries of the Enlightenment cover much of the seventeenth century as well, though others term the previous era the "Age of Reason." For the present purposes, these two eras are split; however, it is acceptable to think of them joined as one long period.

Europe had been ravaged by religious wars; when peace in the political situation had been restored, after the Peace of Westphalia and the English Civil War, an intellectual upheaval overturned the accepted belief that mysticism and revelation are the primary sources of knowledge and wisdom—which was blamed for fomenting political instability. Instead (according to those that split the two periods), the Age of Reason sought to establish axiomatic philosophy and absolutism as foundations for knowledge and stability. Epistemology, in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and Ren? Descartes, was based on extreme skepticism and inquiry into the nature of "knowledge." The goal of a philosophy based on self-evident axioms reached its height with Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza's Ethics, which expounded a pantheistic view of the universe where God and Nature were one. This idea then became central to the Enlightenment from Newton through to Jefferson. The ideas of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo and other philosophers of the previous period also contributed to and greatly influenced the Enlightenment; for instance, according to E. Cassirer, Leibniz’s treatise On Wisdom "... identified the central concept of the Enlightenment and sketched its theoretical programme" (Cassirer 1979: 121–23). There was a wave of change across European thinking, exemplified by Newton's natural philosophy, which combined mathematics of axiomatic proof with mechanics of physical observation, a coherent system of verifiable predictions, which set the tone for what followed Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in the century after.

The Age of Enlightenment is also prominent in the history of Judaism, perhaps because of its conjunction with increased social acceptance of Jews in some western European states, especially those who were not orthodox or who converted to the officially sanctioned version of Christianity.

Conflicts

As with theology, philosophy became a source of partisan debate, with different schools attempting to develop rationales for their viewpoints. Philosophers such as Spinoza searched for a metaphysics of ethics, which influenced pietism and the transcendental philosophy of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant.

Religion was linked to another concept which inspired a great amount of Enlightenment thought, namely the rise of the Nation-state. In the medieval and Renaissance periods, the state was restricted by the need to work through a host of intermediaries. This system existed because of poor communication, where localism thrived in return for loyalty to some central organization. Following improvements in transportation, organization, navigation and finally the influx of gold and silver from trade and conquest, however, the state assumed more authority and power. Intellectuals responded with a series of theories on the purpose and limit of state power. Throughout The Enlightenment, absolutism was therefore cemented. A string of philosophers (amongst them John Locke) reacted by advocating limitations on legitimate state power, influencing both Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The influence of these Enlightenment ideas extended to organizations seeking to affect state and social development and ultimately had a profound effect on the actions of politically active individuals worldwide.

Within the period of the Enlightenment, the question of what was the proper relationship of the citizen to the state continued to be explored. The idea that society is a contract between individual and some larger entity, whether society or state, was developed philosophically by a series of thinkers, including Rousseau, Montesquieu and Jefferson. Other thinkers, heralding romanticism, advocated the idea that nationality had a basis beyond mere preference. Philosophers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder expounded the idea that language had a decisive influence on cognition and thought, and that the meaning of a particular book or text was open to deeper exploration based on deeper connections, an idea now called hermeneutics. The two concepts—of the contractual nature between the state and the citizen, and the reality of the nation beyond that contract—had a decisive influence in the development of liberalism, democracy and constitutional government which followed.

At the same time, the integration of algebraic thinking, acquired from the Islamic world over the previous two centuries, and geometric thinking which had dominated Western mathematics and philosophy since at least Eudoxus, precipitated a scientific and mathematical revolution. Sir Isaac Newton's greatest claim to prominence came from a systematic application of algebra to geometry, and synthesizing a workable calculus which was applicable to scientific problems. The Enlightenment was a time when the solar system was truly discovered: with the accurate calculation of orbits, such as Halley's comet, the discovery of the first planet since antiquity, Uranus by William Herschel, and the calculation of the mass of the Sun using Newton's theory of universal gravitation. These series of discoveries had a momentous effect on both pragmatic commerce and philosophy. The excitement engendered by creating a new and orderly vision of the world, as well as the need for a philosophy of science which could encompass the new discoveries, greatly influenced both religious and secular ideas. If Newton could order the cosmos with natural philosophy, so, many argued, could political philosophy order the body politic.

Within the Enlightenment, two main theories contended to be the basis of that ordering: divine right and natural law. The writings of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627–1704) set the paradigm for the divine right: that the universe was ordered by a reasonable God, and therefore his representative on earth had the powers of that God. The orderliness of the cosmos was seen as proof of God; therefore it was a proof of the power of monarchy. Natural law began, not as a reaction against divinity, but instead, as an abstraction: God did not rule arbitrarily, but through natural laws that he enacted on earth. Thomas Hobbes, though an absolutist in government, drew on this argument in Leviathan. Once the concept of natural law was invoked, however, it took on a life of its own. If natural law could be used to bolster the position of the monarchy, it could also be used to assert the rights of subjects of that monarch. If there were natural laws, then there were natural rights associated with them, just as there are rights under man-made laws.

What both theories had in common was the need for an orderly and comprehensible function of government. The "Enlightened Despotism" of, for example, Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia, was not based on mystical appeals to authority, but on the pragmatic invocation of state power as necessary in order to hold back the anarchy of warfare and rebellion. Regularization and standardization were seen as good things because they allowed the state to reach its power outwards over the entirety of its domain and because they liberated people from being entangled in endless local custom. Additionally, they expanded the sphere of economic and social activity.

Thus rationalization, standardization and the search for fundamental unities occupied much of the Enlightenment and its arguments over proper methodology and nature of understanding. The culminating efforts of the Enlightenment include, amongst other things, the economics of Adam Smith, the physical chemistry of Antoine Lavoisier, the idea of evolution pursued by Johann Wolfgang Goethe and the declaration by Jefferson of inalienable rights. Development in the philosophy of the Enlightenment was also the basis for overthrowing the idea of a completely rational and comprehensible universe, and led, in turn, to the metaphysics of Hegel and Romanticism.

Influence

The Enlightenment occupies a central role in the justification for the movement known as modernism. The neo-classicizing trend in modernism came to see itself as a period of rationality which overturned established traditions, analogously to the Encyclopaediasts and other Enlightenment philosophers. A variety of 20th century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, traced their intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment, and away from the purported emotionalism of the 19th century. Geometric order, rigor and reductionism were seen as Enlightenment virtues. The modern movement points to reductionism and rationality as crucial aspects of Enlightenment thinking, of which it is the heir, as opposed to irrationality and emotionalism. In this view, the Enlightenment represents the basis for modern ideas of liberalism against superstition and intolerance. Influential philosophers who have held this view include J?rgen Habermas and Isaiah Berlin.

This view asserts that the Enlightenment was the point when Europe broke through what historian Peter Gay calls "the sacred circle," whose dogma had circumscribed thinking. The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy and reason as primary values of society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change. From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for violating established ideas.

With the end of the Second World War and the rise of post-modernity, these same features came to be regarded as liabilities - excessive specialization, failure to heed traditional wisdom or provide for unintended consequences, and the romanticization of Enlightenment figures - such as the Founding Fathers of the United States, prompted a backlash against both Science and Enlightenment based dogma in general. Philosophers such as Michel Foucault are often understood as arguing that the Age of Reason had to construct a vision of unreason as being demonic and subhuman, and therefore evil and befouling, whence by analogy to argue that rationalism in the modern period is, likewise, a construction. In their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote a critique of what they perceived as the contradictions of Enlightenment thought: Enlightenment was seen as being at once liberatory and (through the domination of instrumental rationality) tending towards totalitarianism.

Yet other leading intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, see a natural evolution, using the term loosely, from early Enlightenment thinking to other forms of social analysis, specifically from The Enlightenment to liberalism, anarchism and socialism. The relationship between these different schools of thought, Chomsky and others point out , can be seen in the works of von Humboldt, Kropotkin, Bakunin and Marx, among others.

Important figures

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1672) Dutch philosopher who is considered laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment.

Balthasar Bekker (1634–1698) Dutch, a key figure in the Early Enlightenment. In his book De Philosophia Cartesiana (1668) Bekker argued that theology and philosophy each had their separate terrain and that Nature can no more be explained from Scripture than can theological truth be deduced from Nature.

Robert Hooke (1635–1703) English, probably the leading experimenter of his age, Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society. Performed the work which quantified such concepts as Boyle's Law and the inverse-square nature of gravitation, father of the science of microscopy.

Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783) French. Mathematician and physicist, one of the editors of Encyclop?die.

Thomas Abbt (1738–1766) German. Promoted what would later be called Nationalism in Vom Tode f?r's Vaterland (On dying for one's nation).

Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) French. Literary critic known for Nouvelles de la r?publique des lettres and Dictionnaire historique et critique.

G.L. Buffon (1707–1788) French. Author of L'Histoire Naturelle who considered Natural Selection and the similarities between humans and apes.

James Burnett Lord Monboddo Scottish. Philosopher, jurist, pre-evolutionary thinker and contributor to linguistic evolution. See Scottish Enlightenment

James Boswell (1740–1795) Scottish. Biographer of Samuel Johnson, helped established the norms for writing Biography in general.

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Irish. Parliamentarian and political philosopher, best known for pragmatism, considered important to both liberal and conservative thinking.

Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) French. Philosopher, mathematician, and early political scientist who devised the concept of a Condorcet method.

Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) French. Author, encyclopaedist and Europe's first outspoken atheist. Roused much controversy over his criticism of religion as a whole in his work The System of Nature.

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French. Founder of the Encyclop?die, speculated on free will and attachment to material objects, contributed to the theory of literature.

Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801): Polish. Leading poet of the Polish Enlightenment, hailed by contemporaries as "the Prince of Poets." After the 1764 election of Stanis?aw August Poniatowski as King of Poland, Krasicki became the new King's confidant and chaplain. He participated in the King's famous "Thursday dinners" and co-founded the Monitor, the preeminent periodical of the Polish Enlightenment, sponsored by the King. Consecrated Bishop of Warmia in 1766, Krasicki thereby also became an ex-officio Senator of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. On Warmia's 1772 annexation by Frederick the Great's Prussia in the First Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Krasicki became a subject of the Prussian King and a habitu? at the Prussian court. In 1795 Krasicki became Archbishop of Gniezno and thus Primate of Poland. He is remembered especially for his Fables and Parables.

Benito Jer?nimo Feij?o e Montenegro (1676–1764) was the most prominent promoter of the critical empiricist attitude at the dawn of the Spanish Enlightenment. See also Mart?n Sarmiento.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American. Statesman, scientist, political philosopher, pragmatic deist, author. As a philosopher known for his writings on nationality, economic matters, aphorisms published in Poor Richard's Alamanac and polemics in favour of American Independence. Involved with writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787.

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English. Historian best known for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Johann Gottfried von Herder German. Theologian and Linguist. Proposed that language determines thought, introduced concepts of ethnic study and nationalism, influential on later Romantic thinkers. Early supporter of democracy and republican self rule.

David Hume Scottish. Historian, philosopher and economist. Best known for his empiricism and scientific scepticism, advanced doctrines of naturalism and material causes. Influenced Kant and Adam Smith.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German. Philosopher and physicist. Established critical philosophy on a systematic basis, proposed a material theory for the origin of the solar system, wrote on ethics and morals. Influenced by Hume and Isaac Newton. Important figure in German Idealism, and important to the work of Fichte and Hegel.

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) American. Statesman, political philosopher, educator, deist. As a philosopher best known for the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) and his interpretation of the United States Constitution (1787) which he pursued as president. Argued for natural rights as the basis of all states, argued that violation of these rights negates the contract which bind a people to their rulers and that therefore there is an inherent "Right to Revolution."

Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830) German who founded the Order of the Illuminati.

Hugo Ko???taj (1750–1812) Polish. He was active in the Commission for National Education and the Society for Elementary Textbooks, and reformed the Krak?w Academy, of which he was rector in 1783–86. An organizer of the townspeople's movement, in 1789 he edited a memorial from the cities. He co-authored the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's Constitution of May 3, 1791, and founded the Assembly of Friends of the Government Constitution to assist in the document's implementation. In 1791–92 he served as Crown Vice Chancellor. In 1794 he took part in the Ko?ciuszko Uprising, co-authoring its Uprising Act (March 24, 1794) and Proclamation of Po?aniec (May 7, 1794), heading the Supreme National Council's Treasury Department, and backing the Uprising's left, Jacobin wing.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) German. Dramatist, critic, political philosopher. Created theatre in the German language, began reappraisal of Shakespeare to being a central figure, and the importance of classical dramatic norms as being crucial to good dramatic writing, theorized that the centre of political and cultural life is the middle class.

John Locke (1632–1704) English Philosopher. Important empiricist who expanded and extended the work of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. Seminal thinker in the realm of the relationship between the state and the individual, the contractual basis of the state and the rule of law. Argued for personal liberty with respect to property.

Leandro Fern?ndez de Morat?n (1760–1828) Spanish. Dramatist and translator, support of republicanism and free thinking. Transitional figure to Romanticism.

Montesquieu (1689–1755) French political thinker. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions all over the world.

Nikolay Novikov (1744–1818) Russian. Philanthropist and journalist who sought to raise the culture of Russian readers and publicly argued with the Empress. See Russian Enlightenment for other prominent figures.

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English/American. Pamphleteer, Deist, and polemicist, most famous for Common Sense attacking England's domination of the colonies in America. The pamphlet was key in fomenting the American Revolution. Also wrote The Age of Reason which remains one of the most persuasive critiques of the Bible ever written.

Francois Quesney (1694–1774) French economist of the Physiocratic school. He also practiced surgery.

Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Main figure of the Spanish Enlightenment. Preeminent statesman.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) Natural philosopher and theologian whose search for the operation of the soul in the body led him to construct a detailed metaphysical model for spiritual-natural causation.

French Encyclop?distes

Voltaire (1694–1778) French Enlightenment writer, essayist, deist and philosopher

Sebasti?o de Melo, Marquis of Pombal (1699-1782) Portuguese statesman notable for his swift and competent leadership in the aftermath of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. He also implemented sweeping economic policies to regulate commercial activity and standardize quality throughout the country. The term Pombaline is used to describe not only his tenure, but also the architectural style which formed after the great earthquake.

Leibniz

Lord Monboddo

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Political philosopher that wrote the Social Contract.

Helv?tius

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

Olympe de Gouges

Cesare Beccaria

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Economist who wrote the Wealth of Nations

Isaac Newton

John Wilkes

Antoine Lavoisier

Mikhail Lomonosov

Mikhailo Shcherbatov

Ekaterina Dashkova

Mary Wollstonecraft

Industrial Age

Information Age

Information Age is a name given to the period after the industrial age. Information Age is applied to the period where information rapidly propagated, especially applying to the 1980s onward. Under conventional economic theory, the Information Age also heralded the era where information was a scarce resource and its capture and distribution generated competitive advantage. Microsoft became one of the largest companies in the world based on its influence in creating the underlying mechanics to facilitate information distribution. One could argue, though, that it actually began during the later half of the 19th century with the invention of the telephone and telegraphy. It is often used in conjunction with the term post-industrial society. When information ceased being scarce, the Knowledge Economy commenced. The Knowledge Economy started around 1992 and continued to approximately 2002. The current economic era is defined as the Intangible Economy. In the Intangible Economy, four factors of production - knowledge assets (what people know and put into use), collaboration assets (whom people interact with to create value), engagement assets (the level of energy and commitment of people), and time quality (how quickly value is created) are the four key resources from which economic activity and competitive advantage are primarily derived and delivered today. It is helpful to understand that Google is now a serious competitor to Microsoft as it relies on Intangible Economy principles to run its operations.

Early Information Age

In 1837 Samuel Morse created a device which converted physical movement into electrical impulses that could travel over large distances. In 1844, telegraphy was used to transmit data along an experimental telegraph line from Washington, DC to Baltimore, Maryland. Slightly more than twenty years later, the first telegraph cables were stretched across the Atlantic Ocean, in 1858, but failed to stay in operation; however, uninterrupted service began in 1866.

This invention set off a stream of devices used for the processing of information, the typewriter, the mechanical calculator, and finally, the telephone in 1876. "Informationalization" of previous devices occurred, such as the steam organ.

The ability to distribute large runs of printed material had created the means for information transmission to change economic and social behavior. Telephones and ticker tape machines would be part of the infrastructure for the growth of stock markets, as well as the ability to trade precious metals, such as gold. It was the telegraph that allowed the news of Krakatoa's explosive eruption to spread around the world rapidly.

Recording added a new means of distribution; namely that of sound. However, the distribution was either person to person, as in the telegraph, or through the distribution of a physical object. Since physical objects cannot be transported as quickly as electrical signals, the next stage of information technology was to be able to transmit pure information, as the telegraph did, but with mass reception.

Broadcasting

The information technologies of the 19th century allowed faster and wider dissemination of information than previously possible. However, ultimately such information had to be reduced to the same form which had been the final form for centuries: paper, whose analogs go back to stone and clay tablets. With the development of what was called wireless transmission, when combined with the ability to transmit voice and sound from the telephone, and recording technology, a new medium began to be born, which placed a different final result in the hands of the individual. These technologies would eventually become radio.

Television followed, allowing video to be displayed with sound. While radio brought the world's events to our homes, it was television that brought the first pictures of the world to many people. TVs were first used as a way to get information and news from other places, but quickly became a very important entertainment device, as well as a useful tool for learning. Unlike radio, television brought with it a whole new industry of content delivery, mainly Cable television providers. Not only were stations producing and broadcasting their own shows, but the broadcasting industry allowed homes to receive more and more channels. With the later advances in technology, direct services such as cable and satellite television provided increasingly diverse amounts of content.

Information technology

With recording technologies, transmission, and with early computers, it didn't take very long for scientific advances to merge together into the new field of Information Technology. Information technology is the use of technology to enhance the speed and the efficiency of the transfer of information.

The information age continues to this day, and technological advances such as mobile phones, high speed connections, Voice Over IP have changed lifestyles around the world and spawned new industries around controlling and providing information.

The Personal Computer

At first, computers were big, costly, and available only to universities and big corporations. Before the 1990s, most discoveries in information technology were driven by full time researchers having access to the high priced equipment.

In the 1980s however, small computers started to become available. A personal computer or PC is generally a microcomputer intended to be used by one person at a time, and suitable for general purpose tasks such as word processing, programming, editing or playing a personal computer game, and is usually used to run purchased or other software not written by the user. Unlike minicomputers, a personal computer is often owned by the person using it, indicating a low cost of purchase and simplicity of operation. The user of a modern personal computer may have significant knowledge of the operating environment and application programs, but is not necessarily interested in programming nor even able to write programs for the computer.

The term PC was popularized by Apple Computer and soon after many other companies began offering personal computers. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) developed the first open standard Personal Computer (IBM PC launched in US markets in 1981, the first deliveries to European markets were in 1982 and 1983), which standardized the software development. For the first time in the world history we had PC's that used the similar operating systems that allowed the computers' users to communicate by using the same platform.

Soon after, we saw the birth of what we know as current information technology: personal computers in our own homes, using communication devices known as modems, to access information on remote servers. The first incarnation of those were BBS servers, setup by education facilities or even individual people, to store both information and allow discussion with chat and messages.

The Internet

The Internet was originally conceived as a distributed, fail-proof network that could connect computers together and be resistant to any point of failure. It was created mainly by DARPA; its initial software applications were email and computer file transfer.

With the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, the Internet really took off as a global network. Now, the Internet is the ultimate place to accelerate the flow of relevant information.

Digital Revolution

The Digital Revolution is a recent term describing the effects of the rapid drop in cost and rapid expansion of power of digital devices such as computers and telecommunications (e.g mobile phones). It includes changes in technology and society, and is often specifically used to refer to the controversies that occur as these technologies are widely adopted.

Technological breakthroughs have revolutionized communications and the spread of information. In 1875, for example, the invention of the telephone breached distance through sound. Between 1910 and 1920, the first AM radio stations began to broadcast sound. By the 1940s television was broadcasting both sound and visuals to a vast public. In 1943, the world's first electronic computer was created. However, it was only with the invention of the microprocessor in the 1970s that computers became accessible to the public. In the 1990s, the Internet migrated from universities and research institutions to corporate headquarters and homes.

All of these technologies deal with information storage and transmission. However, the one characteristic of computer technology that sets it apart from earlier analog technologies is that it is digital. Analogue signals work by having a signal (usually electric) where the voltage is proportional to some variable. Digital technology however converts everything into binary values that are either 0 or 1. This is the "universal language" of nearly every modern device.

To use an analogy, a digital world is a world united by one language, a world where people from across continents share ideas with one another and work together to build projects and ideas. More voluminous and accurate information is accumulated and generated, and distributed in a twinkling to an audience that understands exactly what is said. This in turn allows the recipients of the information to use it for their own purposes, to create ideas and to redistribute more ideas. The result is progress. Take this scenario to a technological level—all kinds of computers, equipment and appliances interconnected and functioning as one unit. Even today, we see telephones exchanging information with computers, and computers playing compressed audio data files or live audio data streams that play music over the Internet like radios. Computers can play movies and tune in to television. Some modern homes allow a person to control central lighting and air-conditioning through computers. These are just some of the features of a digital world.

Information and Communications Technology

Information and Communications Technology in the United Kingdom education system refers to a broad field encompassing computers, communications equipment and the services associated with them. It includes the telephone, cellular networks, satellite communication, broadcasting media and other forms of communication. ICT is therefore fairly synonymous with Information Technology, however ICT is a subject interested in studying the information age, where as Information Technology is more the cause of the Information Age.

Digital and ICT revolution

The digital and ICT revolutions are twin revolutions. To understand their relationship, let us look at the history of voice telephony. According to Robert W. Lucky, "The crux of Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1875 was the use of analog transmission - the voltage impressed on the line was proportional to the sound pressure at the microphone". The growth of the telephone was relatively slow; it was not until the 1920s that a national telephone network was established in the US. In the late 1940s, an alternative to analog transmission of voice was considered with pulse-code modulation (an encoded signal of pulses). This marked the start of digitization in telecommunications.

However, it was only in 1961 that the first digital carrier system was installed. Digitization meant the widespread replacement of telephone operators with digital switches. In 1971 the first fiber optic cables suitable for communications were made, leading to efforts to send communications signals via light waves. (Light wave transmission systems are inherently digital.) By about 1989, "ones and zeros" had become the language of telephone networks in the U.S. Digitization was a critical development because with digital transmission "noise and distortion were not allowed to accumulate, since the ones and zeros could