> Europe was entering the Dark Ages

The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture. There was a genuine decline at the fringes, which includes Britain which maybe why it was so ingrained in Anglophone culture, but also history written by imperialists like Gibbon who thought the decline of Empires an intrinsically bad and regressive thing.

The Eastern Roman Empire went on, the western broke up into successor states. Some things got worse, some things got better, there was progress made (especially for women and people at the bottom like slaves), and the early medieval period laid the foundations for progress later on.

> Muhammad was having his visions

Is that a bad thing? I know less about the history of that region than some others, but I think you need to look at prior conditions in places such as the Arabian peninsula to assess that.

Amazing, but it's also terrifying that the Maya civilization then faltered, instead of getting onto the exponential development spiral. The great Roman civilization also faltered, but at least the Byzantium continued to carry some of its achievements. The great Arabian civilization was for some time more advanced than European (which was in the middle of the dark ages), but it also did not stay progressing for too long. There's no guarantee that our current "western civilization" line is not going to falter and decline in a similar way.

That's how amazing Rome was - doing something far larger 1000 years prior to the Maya.

All of this without pack animals or the wheel.

The Dark Ages never happened. They had electric lighting and then the sunlight came out.