Ecclesiastes 12.6: What is the ‘silver cord’?

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Ecclesiastes is not a book I’ve read very much. I know the broad outline of the book, and its concluding thesis (‘Fear God and keep his commandments’), but not much of the specifics.

I came to Ecclesiastes 12.6, and I’m curious about this ‘silver cord’. Attempts to search the phrase keep bringing me to versions of a belief that the ‘silver cord’ is an invisible rope that tethers the soul to the body; if a person has an out-of-body experience, the soul straying too far from the body might snap the silver cord, causing bodily death. (This speculation dominates even the Wikipedia page.)

I greatly doubt this is what the ‘silver cord’ meant to the author and his original audience.

The text itself doesn’t seem to imply it has any particular metaphysical properties. It appears within a list of fairly mundane objects, where the surrounding context seems to be that ‘all things break down’. It seems the only reason there is so much wild speculation about the silver cord is precisely because no one knows what it is in context.

What exactly is the thing? Are there any other texts (Jewish or otherwise) from the second century BC or earlier that have verbal or conceptual parallels? How would the ‘silver cord’ have been understood by the author and his original audience?

Ecclesiastes 12.1-8

Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return with the rain; on the day when the guards of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the women who grind cease working because they are few, and those who look through the windows see dimly; when the doors on the street are shut, and the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low; when one is afraid of heights, and terrors are in the road; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails; because all must go to their eternal home, and the mourners will go about the streets; before the silver cord is snapped, and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher; all is vanity.