More than 3,000 years ago, a long bronze sword emblazoned with the insignia of Ancient Egypt’s Ramses II — the most powerful pharaoh of the era — was set down in a mud hut somewhere in the Nile Delta.

A team of archaeologists digging up an ancient fort in the area spotted the bronze blade and cleaned it, revealing this month they had found a shimmering blade with the intricacies of an ornamental cartouche — the personal emblem used by the pharoahs — still visible. It had not lost its reflective shine under the layers of rust and grime accumulated over millennia….

My first thought was to send out a tweet with a wisecrack like “I suppose those swords weren’t much help with the Red Sea crashing down upon the pharoah’s troops.” Because Ramses II was the pharoah Moses dealt with. I figured that even people as ignorant as I am would get that.

But I didn’t do that. Because the next second, I thought, “Bronze? Was the Bronze age still going on at the point?” So I started looking things up, mostly on Wikipedia (criticize Wikipedia all you want, but if you’re looking for basics — when and where, and a rough idea of how this fits into the overall human saga — it can’t be beat).

And I found that the lengthy reign of Ramses II was at the tail end of the Bronze Age. Reading on, I learned that that period ended more dramatically than with a technological development (iron). You have to look more broadly at something called the Late Bronze Age Collapse:

The Late Bronze Age collapse was a time of widespread societal collapse during the 12th century BC associated with environmental change, mass migration, and the destruction of cities. The collapse affected a large area of the Eastern Mediterranean (North Africa and Southeast Europe) and the Near East, in particular Egypt, eastern Libya, the Balkans, the Aegean, Anatolia, and, to a lesser degree, the Caucasus…

And I’m like, what the what? The next sentence confuses me more:

It was sudden, violent, and culturally disruptive for many Bronze Age civilizations, and it brought a sharp economic decline to regional powers, notably ushering in the Greek Dark Ages…

Nope. I had no idea the Greeks — the West’s ultimate trendsetters — just couldn’t wait for the rest of Europe, and went ahead and had their own Dark Ages about 1,700 years earlier.

I mean, I sort of knew that the Greeks’ heyday was in the past by the time the Romans took the baton, but I hadn’t ever thought about how that decline happened.

(Of course, of course, of course, when you click on that Greek Dark Ages link above, you find that “Currently, the term Greek Dark Ages is being abandoned.” You know that had to happen, right? That’s what experts do. Somehow they sense I’m about to learn and maybe even to some extent understand something, and decide that they’ll start calling it something else.)

So how did this Late Bronze Age Collapse happen? Well, there were a bunch of causes, such as the Sea Peoples. And here we are again. I had never heard of these Sea Peoples. And yet they were a major thorn in the side of the established order.

So who were they? Well, there the record is pretty scarce, and the “experts” don’t know exactly. I find this a bit reassuring. They set themselves up as the authorities on the Sea Peoples, and don’t know much more than I do.

But at least they’d heard of them. I really, really need to find more time to study…

Where’s the time for it, though? Human life is so absurdly short…