Dark Ages  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

This page Dark Ages is part of the Middle Ages series.
Illustration:"Hell" detail from Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1504)

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Dark Ages may refer to:

In history and sociology

• Dark Ages (historiography), the concept of a supposed period of intellectual darkness that occurred in Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire
  • the European Middle Ages (5th to 15th centuries AD)
  • the Western European Early Middle Ages (ca. 500 to 1000 AD)
  • the Migration period of ca. 300 to 700 AD
    • However, historians are generally uncomfortable with the term "Dark Ages" being applied to any of the above.
• the Greek Dark Ages (ca. 1100 BC–750 BC), a period in the history of Ancient Greece and Anatolia from which no records, and only scant archaeological evidence, survive
• the Dark Ages of Cambodia (ca. 1450-1863)
• a hypothetical Digital Dark Age
• The saeculum obscurum or "dark age" in the history of the Papacy, running from 904-964

In astrophysics

• Dark Ages, in Big Bang cosmology, a nickname for the time between Recombination (of electrons with hydrogen and helium nuclei) and Reionization