Was there atrue decline of empires in the end of the millennium or did they just change and modify to new environments?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: In Christendom, the Islamic world, India, China, Southeast Asia, and the western and central Pacific, states came and went, but economies and civilizations were robust: Frontiers broadened, and colonists settled new areas, founding new states and empires or reviving old ones. These regions seem to have bucked the patterns detected by traditional historiography: to have endured beyond periods of decline and fall and dark ages. At first glance, the contrast with sub-Saharan Africa looks glaring. Ethiopia's dark age really was dark, in the sense that we know virtually nothing about it. Ghana's frustration and the absence of any evidence of comparable state-building initiatives elsewhere confirm the traditional picture of sub-Saharan Africa in this period as a region—like far northern Asia or Australia—about which historians can find almost nothing to say. As for the Americas, the myth of Maya collapse has long dominated the way we conventionally think of the period: It was more usual, we suppose, for civilizations to perish than to grow outward or renew themselves. This perception is exaggerated, but there is something in it. Teotihuacán, the Moche, the Nazca, the lowland Maya, Huari, Tiahuanaco—these casualties of the era were replaced, if at all, by unstable successors.