Context: I recently learned that the commonly repeated claim that classic Greece and Rome was scientifically and technologically stagnant is not the historic consensus and has not been so for decades. It is a common knowledge today that no serious historian believes the middle ages to be stagnant but I feel the claim that Greece and Rome was technologically locked in time is still fairly prevalent, even in academic circles. Of course, among historians not specializing in the antique world.
The Islamic Golden Age has basically always been recognized as a light of civilization in a dark (ha) age. Talk of medieval ‘stagnation’ is usually in reference to Western Europe experiencing total civilizational collapse and the Byzantine Empire entering a long, slow decline.
And both of those things are true, mind you - they just didn’t result in any sort of period of stagnation where IGNORANCE RULED and SUPERSTITION WAS KING (at least no more than it was before). Europe almost immediately began after the fall of the Empire, as in every period, building on what they had in exciting, innovating ways. They just had… lost a lot of pillars of society’s more complex functions, and needed time to rebuild them.
My favorite comparison is always the Greek ‘Dark Age’ over a thousand years before. Greek material technology actually advanced quite considerably during the Greek Dark Age. But societal complexity had suffered from a near-total civilizational collapse so much that the actual, practical capabilities of Greek polities was reduced in spite of these innovations, and took hundreds of years to recover.
Recovery necessarily implies damage - but recovery is almost always dynamic and innovative as well.