The administrative and cultural infrastructure of Egyptian civilization, which had developed over two millennia before the collapse, proved resilient enough to absorb the shocks that destroyed its neighbors.

But Egypt too was diminished.

The New Kingdom — the period of Egyptian imperial power that had included Thutmose III, Akhenaten, Ramesses II, and Ramesses III himself — went into decline after the Sea Peoples crisis.

Within a century of Ramesses III’s death, Egypt would be divided, its empire in Canaan lost, its political unity fractured.

The world that had made Egypt great was gone, replaced by the Iron Age world in which new powers — the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the emerging kingdoms of Israel and Judah — would take center stage.

The Sea Peoples were not simply the destroyers of the old world.