Peter Brand’s Ramesses II, Egypt's Ultimate Pharaoh is coming out next month and will be the best overview of the reign of Ramesses II.

In the meantime, Kitchen’s classic Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt is well worth a read. Some of his conclusions are questionable, particularly those centering on the Exodus and other biblical matters, but there’s no Egyptologist alive who’s more familiar with the historical texts of the Ramesside period.

> Regarding historic texts, the only thing that comes to mind is the case of Teuta in Polybius who still is referred to with the masculine title of Basileus (βασιλεύς) .

The Egyptian ruler Hatshepsut is another example. Although often referred to today as a queen – that is, a queen regnant – she in fact used the traditional Egyptian word for king (nswt, 𓇓𓏏𓈖). There was not an independent term for "queen" in Egyptian; the title usually translated as such (ḥmt-nswt, 𓈞𓏏𓇓) literally means "wife of the king," and Hatshepsut obviously could not be her own wife.

Additionally, texts from Hatshepsut's reign use both the 3rd singular masculine suffix pronoun (=f) and 3rd singular feminine suffix pronoun (=s) to refer to Hatshepsut, with some inscriptions even switching back and forth between the two. It remains unclear how much of this was intentional and how much was scribal error.

I'll also note that some ancient languages do not distinguish between masculine and feminine but rather animate and inanimate (e.g. Sumerian and Hittite). For example, whether one translates Sumerian lugal.ani as "his king" or "her king" depends on the context – which is unfortunately not always clear, particularly with fragmentary texts.

They are very dated, and I wish people would stop recommending them. It’s extremely insulting as an ancient historian to see so many people apparently believe that we’ve learned nothing of interest in the last 90 years. I wrote more about the first volume here.

Susan Wise Bauer’s History of the Ancient World is probably your best bet. For ancient Egypt in particular, I recommend Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs and Red Land, Black Land by Barbara Mertz.

Additionally, it is not uncommon for monarchies to contain democratic institutions at the local level. For ancient Near Eastern examples, see Andrea Seri’s Local Power in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and Daniel Fleming’s Democracy's Ancient Ancestors: Mari and Early Collective Governance.

In any case, a geographic argument is rather dubious. It should be noted that early states in Greece like the Mycenaean kingdoms were in fact monarchies, and kingdoms developed in many regions without unifying rivers — the Canaanite city-states of the Levant, the kingdoms of ancient Cyprus like Idalion and Paphos, Elam and the other kingdoms of ancient Iran, the Anatolian city-states of the Early/Middle Bronze Age and the subsequent Hittite empire, etc., to say nothing of societies further afield like the Maya kingdoms of Mesoamerica.

It depends where one wants to dig. Excavations in some countries like Greece and Israel regularly take volunteers with no dig experience, whereas it’s very difficult to join a dig in Iraq even as an archaeologist. The AIA fieldwork opportunities page is a good place to start.

Local workers are usually hired for digging.

• The square is excavated from north to south using shovels, pickaxes, or hoes. Usually only a 5 or 10 cm layer is removed at a time, since you want to be able to quickly identify any changes in soil texture or material culture indicating that you’ve moved from one period of occupation into an earlier one.

• All of this dirt is shoveled into buckets (guffa in Arabic), and the buckets are loaded into wheelbarrows.

• Each of the buckets is dumped into the sifter and examined for bones, seals and seal impressions, beads, potsherds, and other small objects.

• The square is swept clean after completing a pass so that it can be photographed.

• Any architecture (stone or mudbrick) or statuary we come across is articulated. This is usually done with a trowel and a stiff brush.

Typically each square has one or two archaeologists and three or four workers. I like to get down and dirty and dig as much as possible too, but a lot of my time has to be spent doing paperwork (mapping the square, packaging and labeling artifacts we find, recording details about soil color and texture, etc.).

Additionally, a couple of local villagers are hired to cook meals and wash pottery.

It’s just a very slow process. Every step has to be documented in careful detail (mapped, photographed, recorded, etc.), every bucket of dirt has to be sifted with a mesh screen for small finds, any architecture has to be articulated (i.e. the dirt between stones is removed carefully and slowly), and so on. It’s not uncommon to dig down only about 20-30 cm a day.

I've been working in the same 10x10 meter square for about a decade, and we haven't even gotten out of the Iron Age levels, with the Bronze Age and earlier levels still untouched. Multiply that square by 800-1000 and you get a sense of how long it takes to excavate the citadel of a standard mound (~8-10 hectares), to say nothing of the sprawling lower town!

Additionally, many excavations only run for a couple of months a year. Partly this is because of weather and seasonal rain patterns, but it’s also because archaeologists and hired diggers have other obligations during the rest of the year (typically teaching or museum work for archaeologists and farming/agriculture for local workers).

They'll be excavated eventually, but it takes decades if not centuries to fully excavate a major site like Girsu. Babylon has been excavated for over a century, but only about 3% of the Neo-Babylonian levels have been excavated (and virtually nothing of the Old/Middle Babylonian levels has yet been uncovered).

Archaeologists choose where and what to dig based on their research questions, usually after surveying a site and (when possible) mapping it with techniques like ground-penetrating radar. If you are interested in early glass production, for example, you are going to focus on excavating crafts workshops from the Middle Bronze Age rather than, say, tombs and houses from the Neo-Assyrian period.

Yes, but it's still a rather strange statement, at least in my opinion as an ancient historian who digs in the Middle East. It's hardly uncommon for Mesopotamian archaeologists to uncover new temples and palaces, and many are known from texts but have not yet been found. The entire point of conferences like ASOR and ICAANE is the dissemination of new archaeological and historical discoveries.

Perhaps he meant that people believed that the damage to the site from slipshod excavations in the late 1800s and early 1900s and the more recent looting precluded the discovery of more monumental architecture.

Most scribes were fairly well off since their abilities were in demand — it’s been estimated that only 1% of ancient Egyptians were literate — but some were far more powerful and wealthy than others, and their duties and level of literacy varied. There is quite a difference between a personal scribe of the vizier, an army scribe, and a local village scribe! Keep in mind that the people we lump together as scribes held a wide variety of positions that partially determined their status and responsibilities — priest, butler/cupbearer, physician/exorcist, construction foreman, treasury official, etc.

For more info, see Ancient Egyptian Scribes: A Cultural Exploration by Niv Allon and Hana Navratilova and the chapter “Scribes” by Alessandro Roccati in The Egyptians edited by Sergio Donadoni.

Be aware that Durant’s first volume is so badly outdated that it is virtually obsolete. My r/askhistorians post on the book has more info.

I second this. The Met publications are almost uniformly excellent, and their volume on the MK is an up-to-date and beautifully illustrated overview.

The Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt: History, Archaeology and Society by Wolfram Grajetzki and Daily Life in Ancient Egypt by Kasia Szpakowska are also well worth a read. The latter focuses on the well-documented Middle Kingdom pyramid town of Lahun.

It was the Assyrian king Sargon II (721–705 BCE), who reprimanded one of his officials for wanting to write to him in Aramaic, which was written alphabetically on parchment rather than with cuneiform on clay tablets like Akkadian.

>[As to what you wrote]: "There are informers [... to the king] and coming to his presence; if it is acceptable to the king, let me write and send my messages to the king on Aram[aic] parchment sheets" — why would you not write and send me messages in Akkadian? Really, the message which you write in it must be drawn up in this very manner — this is a fixed regulation!

Intact tombs were an exception to the usual system of partage in which finds were divided between Egypt and the institutions sponsoring excavations. To quote Carnarvon’s permit,

>Mummies of the Kings, of Princes, and of High Priests, together with their coffins and sarcophagi, shall remain the property of the Antiquities Service.

>Tombs which are discovered intact, together with all objects they may contain, shall be handed over to the Museum whole and without division.

On the contrary, there are hieroglyphic texts that are probably forgeries. A granite bowl of Horemheb published by Donald Redford is now thought to be a forgery, and the inscribed statue of Tetisheri in the British Museum is generally believed to be a forgery as well.

Most forgeries are a pastiche of genuine inscriptions, which can make them difficult to detect at first glance.

Yes, as the Wiki article correctly notes, highly complex systems of administration and bureaucracy had already developed by the Bronze Age.

To add a few relevant publications:

• Ancient Egyptian Administration edited by Juan Carlos Moreno García

• Officials and Administration in the Hittite World by Tayfun Bilgin

• Bronze Age Bureaucracy: Writing and the Practice of Government in Assyria by Nicholas Postgate

• Mittelassyrische Verwaltung und Sozialstruktur by Stefan Jakob

• The Organization of Power: Aspects of Bureaucracy in the Ancient Near East edited by McGuire Gibson and Robert Biggs

• In the Service of the King: Officialdom in Ancient Israel and Judah by Nili Fox

The Tempest stela from 18th Dynasty Egypt has been much discussed and debated. Many scholars believe it describes damage and odd weather caused by the eruption of Thera, but this remains uncertain.

Durant’s first volume is so badly dated that it is virtually obsolete. There are far better surveys of ancient history available now.

I wrote more about this in a previous post.

Not necessarily. Many Egyptians, especially members of the elite, chose to represent themselves in a Greek or hybrid Greco-Egyptian style. As Lorelei Corcoran noted in Portrait Mummies from Roman Egypt,

>It is futile to classify the subjects of the portraits in ethnic groups, as "Romans," "Greeks," or "Egyptians." For their part, "Romans" seem only to have made up one percent of the population of Roman Egypt (Steenken 1987, p. 14), certainly not enough to justify the numbers and geographic diversity of portrait burials. The ethnic or racial distinctions between "Greeks" and "Hellenized Egyptians" appear, moreover, by this period to have blurred (Shore 1972, p. 17). The patrons of the portrait mummies can be characterized as members of the wealthy sector of society of Roman Egypt that was at the time ethnically diverse, but culturally homogeneous, maintaining a strong indigenous tradition that critically "absorbed, modified and rejected foreign influences" (Ritner 1986, p. 243). The reassignment of the portrait mummies to the Egyptian sphere, however, raises an important question, "Where and how were those 'Greek and Roman' settlers in Roman Egypt buried?" Some must have become assimilated to this sector of society. The persistence of native burial customs might have been partially due to the intermarriage of foreign men with native Egyptian women who transmitted the traditions to their children (Pomeroy 1984, pp. 122-23). Other foreigners were either shipped home or buried (or cremated) in Egypt according to their own native fu- nerary traditions.

People of Greek descent made up a relatively small percentage of the population even in the Greco-Roman period.

The 9th millennium BCE is not really all that early; humans had been making art for millennia by that point.

Some have argued, for example, that far earlier cave paintings contain narrative scenes.

>Humans seem to have an adaptive predisposition for inventing, telling and consuming stories. Prehistoric cave art provides the most direct insight that we have into the earliest storytelling, in the form of narrative compositions or ‘scenes’ that feature clear figurative depictions of sets of figures in spatial proximity to each other, and from which one can infer actions taking place among the figures. The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe hosts the oldest previously known images of humans and animals interacting in recognizable scenes and of therianthropes—abstract beings that combine qualities of both people and animals, and which arguably communicated narrative fiction of some kind (folklore, religious myths, spiritual beliefs and so on)...

>Here we describe an elaborate rock art panel from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 (Sulawesi, Indonesia) that portrays several figures that appear to represent therianthropes hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids; this painting has been dated to at least 43.9 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. This hunting scene is—to our knowledge—currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.

“Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art” by Maxime Aubert, Rustan Lebe, et al. in Nature 576, 442–445 (2019)

They’re attested between the 14th and 12th centuries BCE, which is a fairly broad span of time.

For more info, see The Philistines and Other Sea Peoples in Text and Archaeology edited by Ann Killebrew.

>The research that has been conducted and neglected over time, is there a reasonable basis for why it isn't used, or does it simply not fit the more exciting narrative as some of the points you brought up later?

(1) Much of this research has been published in edited books and journals that are expensive, difficult to find, and often rather dry to read. Recent examples include Collapse and Transformation: The Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age in the Aegean and Anatolia Between the 13th and the 12th Century BCE.

(2) This is a rapidly evolving area of study, with new finds constantly providing more information or overturning previous theories. For example, our understanding of the Hittite (or "Neo-Hittite") kingdoms of the Iron Age has advanced enormously since David Hawkins' publication of the Iron Age Luwian texts in the early 2000s due to the excavation of more Syro-Anatolian sites and the discovery of many more Luwian inscriptions. There is a list of new inscriptions here, itself now incomplete and outdated.

(3) There is, as you mentioned, also an element of pop history works wanting to exaggerate the Bronze-Iron Age transition for entertainment value. ("And then all of the societies collapsed, writing totally disappeared, and people lived in villages for 200 years!" – A wildly inaccurate description, to say the least.)

>When you speak of the collapse and how it was not a uniform effect across the entire Mediterranean region, do you mean there is no correlation and it was individual events suffered in these regions that appear to us in the modern day more like a chain reaction since they happened so closely relatively from our perspective? Basically there is minimal relation between what occurred in these seperate regions, one factor being the time periods they occurred in?

I wouldn't say minimal relation. Rather, we should be careful not to focus on external factors (e.g. migrations) at the expense of internal factors that made kingdoms vulnerable to this sort of chain reaction.

It is tempting to blame the collapse of the Hittite empire on invading groups – the "Sea Peoples," Aramaeans, and the like – and indeed many scholars have done so. That by itself is quite dissatisfactory, however, as it fails to explain why the empire fell to these groups when it had survived so many other invasions over the centuries.

For example, the Hittite empire experienced a series of invasions during the 14th century BCE, known today as the "concentric attacks." By the end of the century, most of the Hittite kingdom had fallen to attacks from the Kaška in the north and from Arzawa in the west. Even the capital city of Ḫattuša had been captured and burned, with the kingdom consisting of little more than the besieged territory of the city of Šamuḫa. The events were remembered dramatically in a decree of king Hattušili III, who reigned in the 13th century BCE.

>In earlier days the Ḫatti lands were sacked by its enemies. The Kaškan enemy came and sacked the Ḫatti lands, and he made Nenašša his frontier. From the Lower Land came the Arzawan enemy, and he too sacked the Ḫatti lands, and he made Tuwanuwa and Uda his frontier...

The king of Egypt was so convinced of the imminent demise of the weakened Hittite kingdom that he opened diplomatic relations with the kingdom of Arzawa in western Anatolia, expecting it to become the next great power in the Middle East.

>I have heard everything [is done]. The land of Ḫattuša (i.e. the Hittite empire) has been frozen/paralyzed.

As it turned out, however, the Hittites saw a reversal of fortunes under Šuppiluliuma I and his son Muršili II. Not only did the empire survive, it expanded to its maximum extent, encompassing western and central Anatolia as well as much of the Levantine coast.

So why was the Hittite empire vulnerable at the end of the Late Bronze Age when it had survived far more devastating invasions in the past? Here one has to look at the internal factors unique to the Hittite empire, such as the civil war that created multiple centers of power and a devastating pandemic that wiped out much of the Hittite population.

>According to the information you have given, the disappearance of many settlements would be due more to local issues conflicts, rather than an external force (excluding things like the changing climate) and as such outside intervention would not serve as a catalyst to the diminishing civilizations of the Mediterranean which would answer my question generally that there was no event in Central Europe that contributed to the collapse(s) of the Bronze age civilizations

It's a bit of both. To again take the Hittite empire as an example, the Hittites experienced a grain shortage toward the end of the LBA and imported grain from Egypt to supplement their reserves. Pirates based on Cyprus and the Levantine coast, however, interfered with these shipments.

This sort of piracy would've been a mere nuisance in more stable periods – pirates and bandits are well attested in earlier periods – but it greatly affected an empire already strained by other factors (internal warfare, pandemic, drought, etc.) and had an outsized effect on long distance trade and the political stability of the Hittite empire.

(2/2)

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

(1/2)

There has been an enormous amount of scholarship published on the Bronze-Iron Age transition over the last couple of decades. Unfortunately, most of this research is not reflected in popular history works on the topic.

To begin, one should keep in mind that societies in the Bronze Age were in constant flux; many kingdoms rose and fell over the centuries, and the end of the Late Bronze Age was not an unprecedented event. For example, much of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world experienced a considerable amount of disruption at the end of the Early Bronze Age. Egypt fragmented into petty kingdoms at the end of the Old Kingdom, the Akkadian empire collapsed, there was a large-scale abandonment of walled cities in the southern Levant, and many sites in Greece like the House of the Tiles at Lerna were destroyed or abandoned for several centuries. It has long been thought that this was due primarily if not entirely to climate change and drought, as noted in "Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?"

>The drought hit in roughly 2200 BC, when the Akkadian Empire dominated what is now Syria and Iraq. By 2150 BC, the empire was no more. The central authority had disintegrated, and many people had voted with their feet, leaving the region.

>The overlap between an epic drought and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire was no mere coincidence, according to Weiss, an archaeologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. When he and his colleagues discovered the evidence of drought in the early 1990s, they proposed that the abrupt climate disruption had brought the ancient empire down. This example has become a grim warning of how vulnerable complex societies can be to climate change.

>For Weiss, it was the start of a research endeavour spanning decades. He has become convinced that the drought of 2200 BC was not confined to Mesopotamia, but rather that it had effects around the globe. What’s more, the Akkadian Empire was not the only complex society that was disrupted or overthrown as a result. “We’ve got Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Aegean and the Mediterranean all the way to Spain,” says Weiss. In all these places, he says, there is evidence from around 4,200 years (kyr) ago for a drying climate, for the collapse of central authorities, and for people moving to escape the newly arid zones...

To get back to the end of the Late Bronze Age, this was not a singular collapse – "the" collapse, as OP put it – that affected all regions to the same degree. Rather, the end of the Late Bronze Age affected different regions in different ways over slightly different periods of time.

Some cities and kingdoms were destroyed and never regained their prominence (e.g. Ugarit and Emar), some simply moved locations (e.g. Enkomi to Salamis, Alalakh to Tell Tayinat), and others were scarcely affected by the end of the Bronze Age at all (e.g. Carchemish, Byblos, Paphos). It has become increasingly clear that we must look not at the overall picture but rather specific places at specific times to understand how each of the great powers (and especially each of the regions within them) collapsed, survived, or thrived from 1150-950 BCE.

To take the Hittite empire as an example, some of the southern parts of the empire like Tarḫuntašša and Malatya (Išuwa in the Bronze Age) essentially split off and became de facto independent states toward the end of the Bronze Age. These kingdoms preserved aspects of Hittite culture until the Neo-Assyrian conquests of the 8th/7th centuries BCE – religious beliefs and practices, Luwian and the Anatolian hieroglyphic writing system, architectural and artistic styles, administrative titles, Hittite royal names like Šuppiluliuma and Ḫattušili, etc.

The collapse of the Hittite heartland in central Anatolia was due partly to the loss of these outlying regions (the Hittite imperial core was always short on manpower and grain), but also from pressures unique to the Hittite empire, such as raids from the Kaška who lived in northern Anatolia. I discussed this more in How did the civilizations fall in the end of the Bronze Age? and When and how did we learn that the bronze age had really collapsed and was a thing and not just an imaginary folk idea like Atlantis?

The situation in Syria is similar; some sites disappeared forever at the end of the Bronze Age, whereas others survived or even flourished during the Bronze-Iron Age transition. To quote the ASOR article "What Actually Happened in Syria at the end of the Late Bronze Age?" by Jesse Michael Millek,

>The year, approximately 1200 BCE. The place, the geographic area of modern-day Syria. War has broken out as marauding pirates and nomads ravage the great cites of Ugarit, Emar, and Carchemish, looting and burning everything in their way. These groups became known in the Egyptian records as the infamous Sea Peoples.

>Famine plagued the region as climate change slowly deteriorated the ability to grow crops, and the final nail in the coffin were earthquakes, which destroyed anything left untouched by the ruinous hordes. Once all these calamities passed, the Late Bronze Age came to its end, and the region entered a Dark Age for the next 200 years.

>Or at least that’s how the Hollywood blockbuster version of events would go. But reality is far more complicated than modern scriptwriters - and many archaeologists - would lead us to believe.

>What about the supposed “wave of destruction?” The Sea Peoples are alleged to have destroyed many sites in Syria including Ugarit, Tell Sukas, Tell Tweini, Carchemish, Kadesh, Qatna, Hama, Alalakh, and Emar. The trouble is that only two of these were actually destroyed around 1200 BCE.

>Both Qatna and Hama were destroyed in the mid-14th century BCE, well before the end of the Late Bronze Age, and neither show any evidence of destruction around 1200 BCE. For Alalakh, a reanalysis showed that the supposed 1200 BCE destruction by the Sea Peoples occurred a century earlier, around 1300 BCE.

>Excavators also presumed that the Sea Peoples had destroyed Tell Sukas and Tell Tweini. But a closer examination of the archeological record reveals that neither site was actually destroyed. At Tell Sukas, the Late Bronze Age buildings show no signs of burning or collapse; only some patches of floor had been burned, hardly evidence of a tremendous destruction event. At Tell Tweini, what had been assumed to be evidence of a massive destruction event turned out to be debris from rebuilding activity that took place hundreds of years after 1200 BCE.

>The same pattern is found elsewhere, sites are listed as destroyed but no evidence of destruction has been uncovered. At Tell Nebi Mend, ancient Kadesh, excavations demonstrated that the site continued to be inhabited from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age without interruption. The same is true for Carchemish. There was a smooth transition from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age. This is despite the fact that Carchemish is listed as destroyed in the Egyptian records chronicling the march of the Sea Peoples...

It's available online for free courtesy of the OI at the University of Chicago. It's outdated in places but still worth a read.

Absolutely. Egypt was only one of several powerful kingdoms of its time. We have many texts from the Hittite empire, Assyria, Mycenaean Greece, etc. referring to splendid furniture, jewelry, palaces, and so on, but they have survived only in rare instances (e.g. jewelry from the royal tombs of Ur and Nimrud and the furniture from the Midas mound at Gordion).

As Edward Chiera noted in They Wrote on Clay,

>In Egypt stone is plentiful, and the great pharaohs utilized it for temples and pyramid, imperishable testimonies to their names. Even had Egypt's history not been practically continuous, still no one could have failed to notice these reminders of the existence of a great civilization. In Mesopotamia, on the other hand, stone hardly exists. Some sort of gypsum is found in the north, and this exclusively was used by the Assyrian kings in the decoration of their palaces. But this stone is of such poor quality as to be virtually soluble in water; any inscription or statue left exposed to the elements will promptly disintegrate. In the southern part of the land even gypsum is lacking, and for this reason the ancient Babylonians treasured what pieces of stones they could import from distant lands and used those pieces exclusively for the images of their gods and their most important records. For building materials they had to make the most of what was at hand, river clay...

>The walls exposed to the elements were protected by plaster of mud and straw, or sometimes with baked bricks set in bitumen. Courtyards were also paved with baked bricks, but the interior of the walls was a solid mass of sun-dried bricks. Building costs were thus cut considerably, and the construction remained solid so long as the roof stood and the facing continued in good condition. But, let the edifice be neglected for a number of years, and it would crumble into dust. When the central government became too weak or too poor to take proper care of the network of canals that irrigated the land, large tracts of fertile territory were converted into a desert almost overnight, and whole cities had to be abandoned. The roofs of the buildings caved in, and the core of the huge walls, no longer protected, was exposed to the rain. Water slowly worked in; the bricks began to swell up, and the walls to crack and fall. After a few rainy seasons, the upper part of the walls completely disintegrated and left merely a little mound of dirt to mark the site of a once splendid palace. All furniture and perishable objects that had not been taken away when the buildings were abandoned remained buried in the wet debris; with the passing of years they too disappeared and are now gone forever. We should have no idea of the magnificence of the ancient furnishings but for the fact that occasionally we find thrones, chairs, and tables sculptured on the reliefs which adorned the palaces…