Uh.
Technology wasn't being developed as rapidly and as visibly as it is now, but technological progress and history are not synonymous. There were some incredibly dramatic shifts in the world over, say, the 400-year span from 400 to 800 AD, going from the fragmentation of the Roman world to the building of Arabian and Frankish empires and even the shift of the ERE away from the old Roman ways into a much more Greek sort of realm.