It occurred to me this morning*, while I was driving around listening to A History of the World in 6 Glasses, and a reference was made to Sumerian transaction records of beer disbursement (think stone spreadsheets) in the 21st Century BCE, that we get further away each century (and each decade, and, indeed, year) from our Mirror Year (i like to say it in my head so it rhymes!) - the equidistant year on the opposite side of the very arbitrary Moment Zero - and therefore, likely, know less and less about each mirror year than we did previously.
Last weekend I had the opportunity at Gary Con to play two sessions of Gary Gygax's post-TSR role playing game, Dangerous Journeys, which is set on Ærth, an alternative historical Earth, and (in these sessions and in the primary sourcebook of the game) takes place in a version of Ancient Egypt. As part of character generation in the game, you (can) roll for all aspects of your lot in life, as we all do as we're being rolled up - your level of wealth, parentage, personal traits and peccadillos, as well as physical and mental abilities - and that rolled lot in life affects how you bumble through the world. The GM didn't explicitly say it, but we easily could have been setting out on our adventure in the year 2024 BCE.
I've been thinking about life in the modern world versus what life might have been like in earlier generations (and even ancient - when does ancient start by the way? - generations), and how someone from one might settle and mettle in to another... As I started to dig in to the 21st Century BCE, I did find that there was a lot less that we seemed to know (according to our repository of all knowledge, Wikipedia) than even one century later in the 20th Century BCE. This biasedly confirmed my original take that we will always continue to know less than we did about our mirror year (or more so our mirror century, as in any given year big things can {and do} happen to let them stand out), but I had just been considering that, due to an increase in academic inquiry and improved methodologies and overall knowledge, I would have expected instead to find some kind of equilibrium of knowledge of our mirror year.
Although the highly arbitrary mid-point was only invented around 500 CE (aka AD), I think it's not too much of a stretch to think that people living in the first few centuries of the Common Era were, while certainly aware of the goings on of their immediate ancestors, in terms of civilizational history perhaps comparatively even as to our own knowledge of our own mirror year. Traditional Western history had the idea of a Dark Age prior to the European Renaissance, however at that same moment Arabic cultural, scientific, and philosophical civilization was preserving the ancient knowledges of earlier Ancient Greek tradition.
I think we like to think that our modern situation makes us special (exceptional, as it were), and that we are uniquely positioned to understand and judge not only our forebears, but also our less geographically-fortunate (shall we say) contemporaries. Every age thinks of themselves as Enlightened however, and only when we have some time distance do we start to suspect that an era may not have been all that. I don't, however, think that that interim of time is necessarily the century (or centuries) of retrospect that we might think, historically. I wonder if it really might be closer to just 20 or 25 years or so that we can really start to intelligently reflect.
Which means, depending on when we want to mark our start of our foolish historical moment (whether it's the 2016 election of a game show host as president; the first as tragedy, then as farce "Tea Party" elections of 2010; the launch of Twitter in 2006; or more depressingly perhaps the height of dumb cancel culture, which hopefully is in our past, but not sure how far back...), we may have quite a wait yet, or be close to the moment when we can finally get a grasp of what we've wrought...
* I've helpfully charted my core sentence in this paragraph in purple...
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