What was the world like between year 0 AD and 1000 AD? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Tim Prendergast, Art and vintage home furnishings gallery owner, on Quora:

One absolute truth that most people rarely consider, is that the world during the first millennium was a very, very dark place after nightfall. Even though cities existed during that thousand year epoch, the world descended at night into a darkness we would have trouble comprehending. Even the interiors of people’s homes were pitch black except for minuscule pools of dim candle light. Other than vague moonlight, the only available light was small oil lamps or camp fires as well as torches. But that would have only been a tiny glow in a vast blackness. It’s why the world is still diurnal. For the entire history of our species, humans have slept at night because of the often impenetrable blackness and the lurking danger.

The beauty of this situation was that the clear night sky would be ablaze with stars and planets, galaxies, moons and comets, asteroids and meteors. It was so vivid that ancient people not only looked at the night sky with curiosity, they studied it. They had naturally “dark adapted” eyes. The night sky was so clear that they became familiar with it to a degree we can’t imagine. They understood its contours, they had names for everything. The Milky Way has a name like an avenue because it was a route to be traveled and understood. It wasn’t just something out there to be feared, it was fully present and revered. It is ironic that the more we know the less we see. Our modern astronomers and telescopes are reaching back nearly to the Big Bang and the beginning of time in our universe, able to literally see the invisible, but most of modern humanity is wholly unacquainted with our own cosmic neighborhood because the night sky has been rendered almost meaningless.

Ancients the world over “read” the night sky and correlated it to the passage of time and the change of seasons and they wove its meaning into their daytime pursuits. As agriculture took root and cultures shifted from nomadic to agrarian with the consequence being the establishment of villages, then towns, then cities, the night sky helped guide the people towards accurate planting and harvesting routines. They were inextricably linked to the heavens in a way that we aren’t. It fueled mysteries that defied knowledge and it became central to ancient religions. But it also hastened the growth of civilizations. The insatiable ability for humankind to not just acquire knowledge but to actually imagine it into reality is nothing less than miraculous.

It was the night sky and people’s confident knowledge of it that guided the early Polynesians and Peruvians to populate the Pacific. The Sun and stars kept the Mediterranean abuzz with international trade and it was the night sky that possibly guided the Chinese and Leif Erickson to cross vast oceans to plant seeds of new cultures on new continents and sowed the seeds of destruction of many civilizations in the “new world”. Early mariners charted their courses by the night sky as well as in tandem with the motion of the sun. The sky told them when the easterlies would blow them across the Atlantic or when to hunker down because the coming season would produce no trade winds. Across the Islamic world, founded in the first millennium, the call to prayer is timed to the phases of the moon. The modern constellations descend from such ancient observations. Our current map of the sky and it’s constellations is a living record of the past. It’s right there, in front of us. Our earliest mechanical clocks, dating to the second millennium, had hands that circled the dial like the earth spinning on its axis, counting the beats of time like metronomic slices of the universe itself, cosmic ideas turned into lyrical realities, existence made measurable and real.

Modern society has virtually erased the night sky with twenty-four-hour global economies and the glowing lights that illuminate such economies, but our modern world owes a huge debt to the wisdom that was gleaned from a strikingly visible universe that held profound existential meaning to our ancient ancestors. It was during the first millennium that the knowledge of the previous several thousand years began to coalesce. They beheld the vastness of the night sky and tried, with wonder and great success, to figure out our place in that cosmic firmament.

Do yourself a favor and drive out to Joshua Tree National Park, or Anza Borrego State Park east of San Diego, or deep into the backcountry wherever you are … pack a tent, some blankets and pillows and whatever gear will help you survive the night, then lie back under the ceaseless inky dome, listen to the coyotes yelping and bickering in the darkness and then watch the spectacle unfold above and all around you. It is breathtaking. It is humbling. It is the infinite. It’s what the night sky looked like a thousand years ago for everyone. See what they saw! Carpe Noctem!

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