When you read this stuff it becomes apparent that a whole lot of very basic things changed fundamentally in the first millennium BC —that set it off from the second third fourth and fifth millenniums.
That is the first millennium BC is the dawn of time/civilization as we know it.
The navigation of the Mediterranean resumed and/or kicked up a notch, for one thing. In the western Med the Phoenicians and their buddies the Etruscans took over from the earlier Mycenaean Greeks, and were a few centuries later trying to cope with or accommodate classical Greek colonists, and then just a few hundred years later, with the Romans.
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/ancientnavigation/index