Although the treaty between the Egyptians and Hittites in 1258 B.C.E. seemed to indicate a future of peace and cooperation, this was not to be. Groups of seafaring peoples whom the Egyptians called Sea Peoples raided, migrated, and marauded in the eastern Mediterranean. Just who these people were and where they originated is much debated among scholars. They may have come from Greece, or islands in the Mediterranean such as Crete and Sardinia, or Anatolia (modern Turkey), or from all of these places. Wherever they came from, their raids, combined with the expansion of the Assyrians (see “What explains the rise and fall of the Assyrians?"), led to the collapse of the Hittite Empire.

In Egypt, the pharaoh Ramesses III (r. 1186–1155 B.C.E.) defeated the Sea Peoples in both a land and sea battle, but these were costly, as were other military engagements. Egypt entered into a long period of political fragmentation and conquest by outsiders that scholars of Egypt refer to as the Third Intermediate Period (ca. 1070–712 B.C.E.). The long wars against invaders weakened and impoverished Egypt, causing political upheaval and economic decline.

The decline of Egypt allowed new powers to emerge. South of Egypt was a region called Nubia, which, as early as 2000 B.C.E., served as a conduit of trade through which ivory, gold, ebony, and other products flowed north from sub-Saharan Africa. Small kingdoms arose in this area. As Egypt expanded during the New Kingdom (see Chapter 1), it took over northern Nubia, incorporating it into the growing Egyptian empire. The Nubians adopted many features of Egyptian culture, many Nubians became officials in the Egyptian bureaucracy and officers in the army, and there was significant intermarriage between the two groups.

With the contraction of the Egyptian empire in the Third Intermediate Period, an independent kingdom, Kush, rose in power in Nubia, with its capital at Napata in what is now Sudan. The Kushites conquered southern Egypt, and in 727 B.C.E., the Kushite king Piye (r. ca. 747–716 B.C.E. ) swept through the Nile Valley to the delta in the north. United once again, Egypt enjoyed a brief period of peace during which the Egyptian culture continued to influence that of its conquerors. In the seventh century B.C.E., invading Assyrians (see “What explains the rise and fall of the Assyrians?") pushed the Kushites out of Egypt, and the Kushite rulers moved their capital farther up the Nile to Meroë. Meroë became a center for the production of iron. Iron products from Meroë were the best in the world and were traded to much of Africa and across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to India.