>>40409
> Dark ages has largely fallen out of use among academics
have to say (who?) in here.

>. There never was a Dark Age,
there was, be it mathematics, engineering, free thinking, religious tolerance, geography I think pretty much everything regress, it's borderline madness to call it evolution. not to mention history is not linear, there can be golden ages and dark ages it's not a straight line like for example marx suggests.

>Part of the reason they used to call it that was because of the lack of literature from the era
this pretty much disregard every other regression.

>antiquity spans a huge time frame
why would you take entire antiquity? you take greco-roman heritage in the account and compare to them and when you compare you can see the dark ages.

>, yet we have very little from the time written about it
You know in antiquity many things were written it's just we barely know them and we know many of them thanks to other scripts refere them, they might be lost, they might be burn down by certain desert cult, smashing down the statues.
Not to mention high literacy rate and free thinking is completely disregarded amongst other things. I'm not even going to point out why the high literacy rate if noone writes a thing, good luck claiming they learned how to read for graffitis.