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Much of the (over)emphasis on the impact of various migratory groups (today clumped together under the somewhat inaccurate label "Sea Peoples") is due to an unfortunate tendency to take Egyptian historical inscriptions at face value. Egyptian inscriptions were written to express the Egyptian worldview, not to record "what actually happened," and one should always exercise caution when using them as historical sources. For example, an inscription on the second pylon at Medinet Habu lists the city of Carchemish in Syria as destroyed by invaders, along with other Syrian cities such as Arwad. We know from textual and archaeological evidence from Carchemish, however, that Carchemish not only survived the end of the Bronze Age more or less intact but thrived after the collapse of the Hittite Empire, with an unbroken royal line descended from the Hittite Great Kings of the Late Bronze Age (as Millek notes above). Similarly, the Canaanite (or, as they would be called by the Greeks, Phoenician) city-states of the northern Levantine coast like Byblos and Sidon seem to have survived the end of the Late Bronze Age mostly unscathed.

The Egyptians were no doubt perfectly well aware of this, but they were not concerned with creating a faithful list of conquests and ensuring an accurate list of destroyed cities for future historians. The impact of the list was what mattered. A king who had (allegedly) defeated a confederation of enemies so powerful that they had destroyed the majority of the ancient Near East was a very mighty king indeed.

To cite another example of the often questionable veracity of Egyptian historical accounts, the Libyan battle reliefs from Taharqa's temple at Kawa in Sudan are direct copies of Old Kingdom battles scenes like those from the mortuary temple of Sahure at Abusir, created nearly 1800 years earlier. Even the names of the three defeated Libyans were recycled. This doesn't mean that Taharqa was trying to bamboozle people into thinking he had defeated Libyan forces when he hadn't; rather, the reliefs are simply a timeless expression of the king's role as protector of Egypt and his obligation to bring forth order from chaos.

As for the Sea Peoples, they were essentially dispossessed victims of the disturbances at the end of the Late Bronze Age (including but not limited to a devastating pandemic and prolonged drought) who migrated to other regions in search of greener pastures, both literally and figuratively. Some engaged in piracy (particularly in the vicinity of Cyprus and southern Anatolia), while others established new settlement sites in southern Anatolia and along the Levantine coast, becoming indistinguishable from the local populations fairly quickly (within the span of 1-2 generations).

Several of these groups originated in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly Greece, the Aegean islands, and western Anatolia, while others seem to have originated in south-central Europe (including but not limited to Sicily).

Some of the groups are attested more than 200 years before the end of the Bronze Age, often allied with the major powers like the Egyptians and Hittites. In the Battle of Kadesh (ca. 1280 BCE) fought between the Egyptians and Hittites, for instance, the Sherden fought on behalf of the Egyptians, and the Lukka fought on behalf of the Hittites. They were also often hired as mercenaries by the smaller city-states in the Levant. For example, in two letters to the king of Egypt (EA 122 and 123) dating to around 1340 BCE, the vassal king of Byblos complained that the Egyptian governor of nearby Kumidi killed a Sherden within his town.

I've written a bit more about this in a few past posts.

• What do we know about the so-called Sea People's origins?

• Tell me about the Philistines vs others in the Levant 1200 to 800 BCE

• Karatepe and Çineköy inscriptions: Luwian and Phoenician and Sea Peoples