We understand them better than they understood themselves.

We can see the patterns of drought and trade disruption and population movement that shaped their experience from the outside, with the perspective of history.

We can trace their DNA through time.

We can date their cities’ destructions to within decades.

What we cannot do is feel what they felt.

We cannot stand on the deck of an Aegean ship in 1185 BCE and look toward the Levantine coast and feel the mixture of desperation and hope that the crossing must have involved.

We cannot sit in the last administration of the palace at Pylos and read the frantic tablets about coastal defense and wonder what was coming.