“And what they knew....was lost.”
After being assigned in Babylon, Iraq for a number of years, visiting foreign battle fields & forgotten cities, and the study of warfare, I have come to the same conclusion that there have been great leaps forward by mankind in understanding the universe and all number of issues that surround us presently - most of which have been lost due to conflict, disease, or a culture subdued into thinking that such information is evil and thus destroyed...
This brings mankind into a darkness and it take a very long time for generations at some later date to rise out of it...losing time and precious data like this device once held. That is sad.
Or simple lack of the means of communication of the knowledge. Then it just dies out when the people who understood it die. No one grasped the need for recording things in some way.