Imagine how much historical knowledge wasn’t written down because our ancestors thought: “What idiot isn’t going to know this?”
So ancient Egypt’s best friend basically was called Punt. They traded all kinds of fun stuff with them; ebony, incense, gold, silver, myrrh, leopard skins, baboons for pets… and the Egyptians wrote a lot about the land, the people living there, what their houses looked like, records of trading expeditions to there (like, robust, oceangoing ships with thousands of men); they wrote down everything imaginable about this place… except for where it actually was.
We still to this day have no geographic fix on this ancient empire’s whereabouts, because what idiot wouldn’t know, right?