Long distance trade declined toward the end of the Late Bronze Age — and in the Early/Middle Iron Age was increasingly carried out by private merchants rather than state-sponsored expeditions — but continued nonetheless. Imported materials like lapis and tin were still available and used in the Early Iron Age.

To quote Sarah Murray’s The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy (2017),

>Snodgrass originally argued that the use of bronze in Greece decreased after the LBA because the supply of tin, which must have been brought to Greece from far away to the East or North, was cut off at the end of the Bronze Age, forcing Greeks to find a new metal from which to make their tools and weapons. According to this bronze shortage theory, trade routes bringing copper and tin to Greece broke down just after some areas of Greece had learned the art of ironworking from Cyprus. When they could no longer obtain copper and tin, Greeks turned their metallurgical attention to forging iron (in places like Euboea where they had learned how to do it) or to the recycling of old Mycenaean bronzes (in places like West Greece where they had not). Bronze became more abundant again when trade with the east was reestablished around 900.

>This theory has been controversial. Morris questioned the bronze shortage hypothesis on the grounds that it draws too simple a connection between deliberately deposited metal artifacts and originally circulating quantities of metal. He argued that the prominence of iron in burial assemblages during the EIA reflects new social strategies that were put into place by an emergent elite that used a different metal to set itself apart within society. In this view, the use of iron for tools and jewelry was not the outcome of need generated by the lack of a preferable metal, bronze. Rather, changes in the socially determined meaning of metals led to different types of deliberate deposition, which is what we see in the archaeological record. We might also imagine that as iron became more common in the PG period, demand for bronze would have declined, because metal made from a local ore had replaced many uses of the old exogenous resource. In any case, the notion that tin was in short supply in the EIA has found little support from analyses of bronze objects, which have normal to high tin contents. Snodgrass has now stepped back from his original position, and most scholars have followed suit, questioning just how much access to tin waned…

I’ll add that materials like tin and lapis lazuli were not the products of direct trade between the eastern Mediterranean and central Asia; they were passed along by a series of middlemen. For example, the Mycenaeans obtained amber from people in central Europe, who acquired it from the Baltic, ostrich feathers and eggshells from the Egyptians, who got them from Nubia, and so on. Tin would’ve been imported to Mesopotamia from states further east like Elam (in what is now Iran), which acquired it from the city-states of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (awkwardly named, I know) in what is now Turkmenistan and parts of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan.

This is very different from the direct trade between regions via donkey caravans or ships — the Old Assyrian trade between Anatolia and the Assyrian city of Aššur, the 3rd/2nd millennium BCE trade between southern Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization, the trade expeditions between Egypt and the Horn of Africa, etc.

Yeah, we know quite a bit about the Hittites; they’re by far the best attested of the Late Bronze Age powers after Egypt, though the distribution of sources is decidedly uneven in terms of location, date, and contents. I discussed Hittite archives in this post.

I recommend starting with Warriors of Anatolia: A Concise History of the Hittites by Trevor Bryce, essentially a greatly condensed combination of his earlier books (The Kingdom of the Hittites and Life and Society in the Hittite World). The Hittites and Their World by Billie Jean Collins is also a pretty good introductory overview, especially the chapter on Hittite religion.

It'd be very difficult to do a proper, well-researched documentary on the collapses at the end of the Late Bronze Age, I think. Most lectures and documentaries on the topic are far less nuanced than they ought to be.

There was not a singular collapse that affected all regions to the same degree; 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 – the entirety of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East did not experience collapse – 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 even thrived from 1150-950 BCE. Unfortunately, this sort of nuanced analysis does not lend itself well to a documentary format.

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?

>Also, his transcription was fundamentaly flawed so it didn't work when later scholars tried to use it for translation that's why it was ignored for decades until Knorozov's work

As the article points out, Eric Thompson’s stranglehold on Maya studies is another reason it was Knorozov who made the breakthrough. American and European scholars were aware of the de Landa alphabet; it just wasn’t utilized to its maximum potential because there was so much resistance to the idea of Maya glyphs representing phonemes.

To quote Michael Coe’s Breaking the Maya Code,

>Until his death in 1975, only a few months after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, John Eric Sidney Thompson dominated modern Maya studies by sheer force of intellect and personality. Thompson never held a university post and never had any students; he never wielded power as a member of a grantgiving committee, or as an editor of a national journal; and within the organization that he served for so many years, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, he made no executive decisions. Yet on either side of the Atlantic, it was a brave or foolhardy Mayanist who dared go against his opinion…

>Thompson made some tremendous discoveries and should be given credit for them. Nevertheless, his role in cracking the Maya script was an entirely negative one, as stultifying and wrong as had been Athanasius Kircher’s in holding back decipherment of ancient Egyptian for almost two centuries…

>As might be expected, Thompson’s views on the Landa “alphabet” were distinctly ambivalent, but he was the first to see that Landa’s ti sign which ends his sample sentence ma in kati (“I don’t want to”) functions as the Yucatec locative preposition ti’, “at,” “on”; that it could also have functioned as a purely phonetic-syllabic sign, as the bishop implied, was something that Eric simply could not allow…

>These decipherments were all major advances, but Thompson failed to follow them up. Why? The answer is that Thompson was a captive of that same mindset that had led in the first century before Christ to the absurd interpretations of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Diodorus Siculus, to the equally absurd fourth-century AD Neoplatonist nonsense of Horapollon, and to the sixteenth-century fantasies of Athanasius Kircher. Eric had ignored the lesson of Champollion.

>In a chapter entitled “Glances Backward and a Look Ahead,” Thompson sums up his views on Maya hieroglyphic writing. “The glyphs are anagogical,” he says… The glyphs are not expressing something as mundane and down-to-earth as language, but something much deeper, according to Thompson.

Every decipherment has drawn upon earlier work — Thomas Young on Egyptian, Alice Kober on Linear B, Ignace Gelb and Piero Meriggi on Anatolian hieroglyphs, etc. — and that does not at all diminish Knorozov’s remarkable accomplishment.

I suspect they’re referring to Itjtawy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itjtawy

There are many other royal cities like Per-Ramesses and Tanis that have been located but scarcely excavated. I am optimistic that an archive of cuneiform tablets will eventually be found at Per-Ramesses.

Egyptian kings certainly portrayed themselves positively to an unrealistic degree in their monumental inscriptions on temples, obelisks, rock-cut monuments, etc., but it should be noted there are a number of unflattering incidents mentioned in Egyptian literature and archival texts. I listed some examples in this r/academicbiblical thread.

Adding my $0.02 as an Egyptologist who specializes in Egypt-Near Eastern interactions.

>No, the case for Israelites in Egypt is very weak.

We should be careful not to conflate “Israelite” with “Jewish,” though, and they asked about Jewish people in Egypt. The more relevant answer is that Judaism did not evolve out of Canaanite polytheism until the Iron Age, several centuries after the purported time of the Exodus. Not only are Jews not attested in New Kingdom Egypt, they are not attested anywhere in the Late Bronze Age. Even the papyri of the community of the Jewish temple at Elephantine, which date to the mid-1st millennium BCE, are in many ways strikingly at odds with, and show a general ignorance of, the historical accounts of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and suggest that accounts like the Exodus story had not yet been formalized.

Certainly “Israelites” — by which I mean people from the southern Levant in the region that would later become Israel — are quite well attested in Egypt throughout the Late Bronze Age. Of course, Egyptologists do not refer to these people as Israelites but rather Canaanites or Asiatics, partially because their precise geographic origins are often uncertain and partly becase the term Israel is not attested until the reign of Merneptah, as you noted.

Many Canaanites in Egypt were prisoners of war, brought back to Egypt in the thousands. The royal household in particular was full of servants of foreign extraction, and high-ranking nobles often had foreign servants as well. In a letter to his viceroy of Kush User-setet, for example, the 18th Dynasty king Amenhotep II mentions Near Eastern women in User-setet's household.

>You have taken up residence [in Nubia], a brave one who plunders in all foreign countries and a chariot-warrior who fought for His Majesty, Amenhotep II, who takes tribute from Naharin and decided the fate of the land of Ḫatti, the lord of a woman from Babylon, a maidservant from Byblos, a young maiden from Alalakh, and an old woman from Arapḫa...

Others were members of the elite. It was a standard practice from the reign of Thutmose III onward to raise the children of subject rulers in the Egyptian court as hostages before installing them on their fathers' thrones. This not only forged a bond between the Egyptian and Canaanite princes in the royal nursery (Egyptian kAp) but also instilled Egyptian values in the young Canaanite princes and princesses. This practice was later adopted by the Assyrians, and one sees similar hostages raised in the Neo-Assyrian court (e.g. the Arabian princess Tabua and the Babylonian noble Bel-ibni).

Immigrants in search of greener pastures and political refugees also traveled to Egypt. The most famous example of the latter is not a Canaanite but rather a Hittite, the deposed king Muršili III, who fled to Egypt after his uncle seized the throne in a coup.

Of course, the reverse is also true, and Egyptians often moved or traveled abroad. For example, a man with the Egyptian name of Amenmose (attested in cuneiform as Amanmašu) seems to have worked in the royal court of Ugarit and possibly also Carchemish and owned a cuneiform and Anatolian hieroglyphic seal. I provided more examples in one of my past r/askhistorians posts, Are there any records from pre-Achaemenid Egypt of ethnic Egyptians living and working outside of Egypt for foreign peoples?

>It may be that the story of the Exodus related to the Aegean and Anatolian sea peoples, particularly their battles against Egypt alongside Lybia against Merneptah (the main subject of the Israel Stele) and thereafter, later appropriated by the Israelites after their forced relocation into Israelite areas by Ramses III.

It should be noted that there is nothing even approaching a consensus when it comes to the Exodus account, and this is your own theory in particular.

There are many other interpretations of the Exodus story. One theory, championed by Richard Friedman, is that only a very small subset of the Israelites originated in Egypt (more specifically, the Levites). Others believe it is a garbled memory of the formation of Israel set against the context of the political vacuum resulting from the withdrawal of Egyptian forces from the southern Levant. (I personally find this the most likely.) Still others, such as Jan Assmann, trace the origins of the story not to a specific historical incident but rather mnemohistory, a collective memory through which the Israelites forged a common identity based on past events (regardless of the (un)reliability of the historical narratives).

I recently started watching Magnificent Century after reading Leslie Peirce’s superb book on the Ottoman harem and have enjoyed it a lot so far.

It's not uncommon to see literary texts from highly urbanized societies like Mesopotamia and Egypt mocking outside groups for their clothing, dietary habits, housing, perceived character traits, etc., but it cannot be emphasized enough that these are ideological statements and do not necessarily reflect how most people in those societies actually felt about outsiders.

We see many negative statements in Egyptian military inscriptions about "wretched Retjenu" (Canaan), for example, and yet kings like Thutmose III married Canaanite women. Similarly, Ramesses II was quite negative and dismissive about the Hittites in his Kadesh inscriptions, referring to the Hittite king as the "Enemy" and the "Fallen One," and yet he had few qualms about establishing a peace treaty with the Hittites, marrying Hittite princesses, exchanging gifts and technical experts with the Hittites, and so on.

The Egyptologist Thomas Schneider has used the terms topos (highly negative depictions of foreigners in ideological statements in monumental/royal inscriptions) and mimesis (more favorable and realistic depictions of foreigners in everyday texts) to differentiate between the contradictory attitudes we see in the Egyptian textual record.

I've written a few posts about this over on r/askhistorians.

• What was the the culture and ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians?

• Egyptian-Hittite relations

• Babylonian-Egyptian relations

• To what degree were Pantheons shared in the Late Bronze Age Near East?

• In the Ancient world, were kingdoms/Empires/Realm aware of events happening in far away places in other kingdoms/Empires/Realms?

• If the Amarna Letters were discovered in Egypt, why are their correspondences written by the Pharaohs and their officials and not just a collection of correspondences from foreign rulers?

• The biblical Hagar is described as Egyptian and working for a Hebrew family. Are there any records from pre-Achaemenid Egypt of ethnic Egyptians living and working outside of Egypt for foreign peoples?

Letters of the Great Kings of the Ancient Near East by Trevor Bryce and Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East by Amanda Podany are the best introductions to Bronze Age diplomacy. They're a bit more theoretical, but Mario Liverani's International Relations in the Ancient Near East and Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations edited by Raymond Cohen and Raymond Westbrook are very interesting reads as well. The latter includes contributions not only by Egyptologists and ancient Near Eastern historians but also specialists in political science and international relations.

They did take some protectionist measures with regard to long distance trade. I'll quote a couple of relevant sections of Klaas Veenhof's Mesopotamia: The Old Assyrian Period.

>The quantitative relation between the expensive "Akkadian textiles", imported from the south, and the institutional or domestic textile production in Assur... is still not clear, but the importance of the textile trade for Assur is underlined by evidence for clearly protectionist measures of the City Assembly, contained in the letters VS 26, 9 and AKT 3, 73:9ff., studied in Veenhof 2003d, 89ff. The first forbids trade in specific types of Anatolian textiles and the second probably obliges traders to buy more textiles, by limiting the quantity of tin that could be bought with the silver arriving from Assur.

p. 83

>But import of textiles and presumably copper from the south apparently did not prevent considering "Akkadians'' as rivals in the trade. This is implied by the just mentioned prohibition of selling gold to them and confirmed by a surprising stipulation in the draft of a treaty with a ruler in southern Anatolia, probably somewhere in the area of the great western bend of the Euphrates, near Hahhum. He has to promise that he will extradite Akkadians, presumably Babylonian traders who travelled north via the Euphrates and came to his country, to be killed by the Assyrians. But alongside such protectionism also good relations were necessary with cities and lands whose cooperation was essential for the trade and the safety of the caravans.

p. 98

Just my own translation. I’m an ancient Near Eastern historian who had to take Sumerian in grad school, although I specialize in the Late Bronze Age.

I’m not sure if there’s any prosopographical works for the Akkadian and Ur III periods, but here’s a few resources for names from later periods you may find interesting.

• Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire

• Hurrian Personal Names in the Kingdom of Ḫatti by Stefano de Martino

• Die hethitischen Frauennamen: Katalog und Interpretation by Thomas Zehnder

• Amarna Personal Names by Richard Hess

Inn-head-oo-on-(n)ah is the best way I can describe how her name is pronounced.

To break down her name:

• en (“priestess”)

• hedu (“ornament”)

• an (“sky/heaven”)

• a(k) (Sumerian genitive, translated as “of”)

Lady/priestess, the ornament of heaven

To add to this, we have tens of thousands of letters from the houses of Assyrian and Babylonian merchants from Ea-Nasir’s era, some of them predating him by a century or two. Quite a few letters include complaints about shabby treatment (e.g. that a correspondent writes terribly short and unsatisfactory letters) or reference shady business activities like smuggling goods past customs checkpoints — a practice that got some unlucky merchants sent to jail.

While Ea-Nasir’s letters are an early example of “customer service” complaints, his business activities and tablet storage were by no means unusual.

Additionally, it's important to draw a distinction between works attributed to Enheduanna and the works that were actually composed by Enheduanna. Most of the works attributed to Enheduanna were in fact created in the Old Babylonian period, several hundred years after the collapse of the Akkadian empire.

>For the Sumerian corpus, the tradition gives us the names of two alleged authors: Enheduanna and Lu-Inanna (Michałowski 1996: 183–86). Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon, the king of Akkad, as well as a priestess of the Moon-god Nanna at Ur. Up to six compositions are attributed to her: a long hymn to Inanna known as The Exaltation of Inanna or Ninmešarra (nin me šar2-ra “lady of all the me’s/divine powers”; Zgoll 1997); Inanna hymn C or Inninšagurra (in-nin ša3-gur4-ra “lady with a great heart”; Sjöberg 1975a); the narrative known as Inanna and Ebih (Attinger 1998); the collection of Temple Hymns (Sjöberg and Bergmann 1969); a balbale song of Nanna; and an Ur III tablet mentioning Nanna-Suen and Enheduanna (Goodnick Westenholz 1989).

>However, the main composition attributed to her that includes some possibly autobiographical data (Ninmešarra) was most likely composed several centuries after Enheduanna’s death, in the Old Babylonian period (Civil 1980: 229). Aside from the aforementioned Ur III text, no composition traditionally attributed to her appears in a single tablet that could be dated prior to 1800 (Veldhuis 2003: 31 n. 2). In fact, there can be little doubt that Enheduanna started to be regarded as an author only in a tradition that begins centuries after her death: This is a case of traditional authorship, not historical. The other supposed author is Lu-Inanna, “chief leatherworker (ašgab gal) of Enlil,” who according to the composition itself would have dictated the Tummal Chronicle to a scribe (Sollberger 1962; Oelsner 2003). However, this composition is not the historical document that it purports to be but rather a scribal artifact. Thus, the attribution of its authorship to a leatherworker is an ironic device within an erudite exercise in fake royal legitimation...

"Sumerian Literature" by Gonzalo Rubio in From an Antique Land: An Introduction to Ancient Near Eastern Literature edited by Carl Ehrlich

A History of Ancient Egypt by Marc Van de Mieroop is by far the best introductory overview of ancient Egyptian history. Since it's dry read, however, I recommend starting with Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt and Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt by Barbara Mertz.

For readable introductions to the major archaeological sites in Egypt, see Exploring Ancient Egypt by Ian Shaw.

Jason Thompson's A History of Egypt: From Earliest Times to the Present and Egypt: A Short History by Robert Tignor are worth a read as well.

Also, a dig season usually lasts only a couple of months for those of us in academic archaeology. It goes by all too quickly, and there’s a common (and surprisingly accurate) joke that the most exciting finds are made on the last day.

The rest of the year is spent teaching, applying for grants, publishing and presenting at conferences, etc.

French and German are required languages for many disciplines in the humanities. I had to pass translation exams in both back when I was a PhD student in Egyptology.

I wrote more about this in Seeing as Egypt was under British patronage for most of the last two centuries, why is the majority of ancient Egyptian research primarily in French?

The recently published Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East by Amanda Podany is well worth a read for anyone interested in ancient Syro-Mesopotamian history. Though the usual kings and queens appear, she focuses on some of the less famous but equally fascinating people from the ancient Near East.

Podany’s earlier book, Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East, also combines excellent scholarship with an engaging writing style.

They’re referring to Khaemwaset, a son of Ramesses II.

I also touched on this in Were there any archaeologists in ancient cultures?

No, he's right on the money. There are very noticeable differences in how archaeology was done between the early 1800s and the early 1900s. Early explorers like Ferlini made an absolute mess of sites in Egypt and Sudan, as did archaeologists like Amelineau. The work of later scholars like Petrie and Winlock is still dissatisfactory by modern standards, but it was a huge improvement.

The Turin collection is all well and good, but archaeology is not antiquarianism – collecting objects is not the end goal. The collection was acquired with a considerable amount of destruction and is no little source of frustration to Egyptologists today. Take the Turin king list, for example, which was found intact but thanks to Drovetti's carelessness is now a jumble of tattered fragments that Egyptologists have been trying to reconstruct for decades.

Jason Thompson's trilogy on the history of Egyptology is well worth a read, as I don't think most people realize how far Egyptology has come in a relatively short amount of time.

It is. The purpose of the article is to get people interested in Der Manuelian's new book about Reisner, not provide any novel insights about Carter.