Did you mean the hydrologic cycle?
Yes.
I doubt that they understood that,
It is apparent they understood it just as they knew about germs. They said what they knew but we ignore it;
1140c. (he is dried) by the wind of the great Isis, together with (which) the great Isis dried (him) like Horus.
1146a. N. is the pouring down of rain; he came forth as the coming into being of water;
1146b. for he is the
Nḥb-kȝ.w-serpent with the many coils;
We decided they were stinky footed bumkins because we decided the Bible writers were ignorant and believed rain came from a firmament above. We never considered that the Bible writers confused ancient knowledge OR that there is no such thing as linear progress. By the same token it would never occur to us that Darwin flushed the toilet that
homo omnisciencis is now spiraling downward within because we've been killing in his name for over a century while ignoring all forms of common sense.
We don't get to decide reality. Not even experiment can decide reality. Reality was decided long before our species existed and is still being decided based on forces and processes we hardly begin to fathom. Our job isn't to understand reality because we never will: It is to understand experiment and the current paradigms have all FAILED utterly to do so. We can't even explain how the hydrologic cycle was understood many thousands of years before the Bible and why Egyptologists never noticed the characteristics of a language they claim is gobbledty gook!!!
Every belief that has been handed down to us through confused language (every belief) is wrong and these beliefs underlie modern science, its definitions, and its axioms. They underlie Darwin because he believed in linear progress. Beliefs provide fear and ego whether that means eternal damnation or the certainty that we are masters of reality. Whether we believe in salvation or annihilation at the hands of others it is a form of hubris that makes us close our eyes to the reality before us.
You are fearful of losing your faith in linear progress so you parse my words wrong and call them irrelevancies. The reality is your premises are wrong so you attack the messenger rather than deal with the message.