The Dark Ages...well there are two I can think of, not sure which one it is in your situation...
Anyway a Dark Age kind of means a time when the lights of learning, the arts and prosperous civilisation have gone out. Think about it - the great civilisations of the Classical World, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, the Roman Empire, Egypt - in the West, with the fall of the Roman Empire to the barbarians, the last ancient and prosperous civilisation, things took a great turn. The Eastern Empire lingered on, eventually to be brought down by Islam, which sort of carried on its learning. The barbarians in the west established states in the ruins of the great empire, that had invented so many things and brought learning, arts and a civilised life to so many places. The Romans put together machinery that would not be attempted again until the industrial age many centuries later. The barbarians were dumb, their ways of life brought the lands of the empire into the Dark Ages, only gradually rising up as they came into the hands of religion, trade and exploration. Even in the fifteenth and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European cities were very unclean compared to the condition of Roman cities way back.
Ancient Greece had a Dark Age. After the times of such legends as the Trojan War, when much of Greece were united and people such as Homer wrote their great tales, the lands broke up into warring city-states with hoplite armies, forging alliances and fighting for power. This sort of ended with Athens and Sparta finishing their big fight and the Persian invasion, followed by the rise of Alexander the Great.
But you get the meaning of a Dark Age, it's pretty simple.
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