The walls of Medinet Habu will continue to stand on the west bank of the Nile, facing the setting sun, for as long as stone endures.

The feathered warriors carved on those walls looked out on the Egypt of Ramesses III; now they look out on the Egypt of modern tourists and scholars who come to read what was written there.

What they do not see — what no ancient Egyptian artist could have intended them to see — is the genetic evidence from Ashkelon, the paleoclimatic records from Mediterranean sediment cores, the cuneiform tablets from the last days of Ugarit, the Linear B tablets from the burning of Pylos.

All of this evidence, assembled from across the ancient world and interpreted by the modern sciences of archaeology, paleoclimatology, and genomics, has produced a picture of the Bronze Age Collapse and the Sea Peoples that would have been incomprehensible to anyone who lived through it.