They were this smart 3,700 years ago yet....
I bet the politicians of the time stopped progress for their selfish reasons just like today.
Imagine what could have been. Travel to the stars for your vacation. Electric cars powered by unicorns....
Actually that is not far from the truth ... all we know today about the entire electromagnetic spectrum - from Einstein to Tesla (the man) - comes from 4 equations altered from their original form by a self-taught moma’s boy named Oliver Heaviside in the 19th century.
He took James Clerk Maxwell 200 quaternions (a sort of field equations) and, discarding all but 4, transformed them from field to vector equations - because these were obvious mathematical “abominations,” and he not believing in fields, eliminated them.
So what were in the original remaining 196? If you can find a copy of the original - not a modern edition - by Maxwell and have a good working knowledge of math, you might discover that it is possible to move in one step from any place to any other place in the Universe; that energy is unlimited; that communications is not limited by distance or time; among many other things which to our self-limited knowledge seems like magic.
No unicorns required.