At a recent science meeting, I was listening to a speaker describe his researches into ancient solar eclipses. As these events are so striking and so rare, such occurrences are often found in early historical records. The speaker had learnt to read Egyptian hieroglyphs and was deciphering one such text when he noticed a postscript. He colloquially rendered this fragment as: “the youth of today is not what it used to be.” An encouraging thought from 4500 years ago.