Egypt was not caught entirely by surprise in the way that some of the cities of Ugarit and Canaan appear to have been.

All of these factors combined to give Egypt a resilience that allowed it to survive, though in diminished form.

The Egypt that emerged from the Bronze Age Collapse was not the Egypt of Ramesses II or Thutmose III.

It was a less powerful, less expansive state that gradually lost its Canaanite empire and eventually fragmented into competing local powers.

But the core Egyptian civilization — the language, the religion, the administrative systems, the material culture — survived and continued to develop for many more centuries.

The Broader Category Problem: What “Sea Peoples” Actually Means