The Phoenicians were not beneficiaries of the collapse in any simple sense — they too were disrupted and faced new challenges — but they were among the populations that adapted most successfully to the post-collapse world.

The Sea Peoples, having disrupted the old trade networks, inadvertently helped create the conditions in which the Phoenician network could expand.

Whether this is a meaningful historical observation or merely a coincidence of timing is a matter of historical interpretation.

The Assyrian Records And Later Memories

The Sea Peoples phenomenon fades from the primary historical record after the reign of Ramesses III, but some of the named groups continue to appear in subsequent records, offering partial evidence for their later history.

The Philistines appear repeatedly in the records of the Assyrian Empire, which expanded across the Levant during the ninth and eighth centuries BCE.