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3.4 How Technology Spread: Medieval TimesVersion 1.4 February 2023                           (Previous Version) These are the questions we ask in the introduction (Section 0.1.6 – paragraph 17): What were the medieval empires like, in China, India, the Middle East, Europe, and North and South America? Why did some civilisations die out? How did some survive and others fail? Has climate change caused problems for earlier civilisations? Is a good king any better for society than a bad one? What kind of government helps a society survive, or thrive? This chapter covers the period from roughly 1,500 years ago to about 500 years ago. In east Eurasia the Han dynasty was succeeded by a number of Chinese empires – eg Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming – with interludes of warring states. India saw many empires rise and fall, with the north succumbing to the Moghuls in the 1500s.  In west Eurasia the Roman Empire split, the western half fell to the Visigoths from Germany, allowing smaller empires to rise and fall in Western Europe. The eastern half became the Byzantine Empire which lasted until the 1400s, when it eventually fell to the Ottoman Turks. In the mid-600s CE Arabs united by Islam expanded rapidly across North Africa and into Iberia (now Spain) and throughout the Middle East to the edge of India.  During the 1200s the Mongol Empire created by Genghis Khan conquered most of the Eurasian land mass, from China in the east to much of the Islamic caliphate in the west. Central Asian Turks were pushed into Anatolia (now Turkey), then from 1300s CE created the Ottoman Empire over the Balkans, Middle East and North Africa.  In the Americas the Aztec and Incan Empires rose but fell to European invaders and their diseases. We need to understand how the advance of technology depended on early differences in the local geography – including the climate and the flora and flora on each continent – which impacted on earlier developments in antiquity and archaeological times. Much of our knowledge of this period comes from written material, including written laws, trading and accounting records, plays and poems, and philosophical and religious writing. This material is still supplemented and cross referenced to artefacts, ancient ruins, and other scientific evidence. We propose to look at how we know what we know about history under the following headings:
As stated in the chapter overview, this is the current summary of our conclusions in this area: Societies developed government differently regarding centralized control, nepotism or meritocracy, accountability and the rule of law; knowledge spread between some societies but not others; many collapsed as selfish, narrow minded, short sighted elites failed to address social or environmental challenges.  more                                                             Statement 17
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