Late Bronze Age
c. 1500-1200   Canaan is modestly populated (compared to the large population centers along the Nile and the Euphrates and Tigris rivers); agriculture based on dry farming and terracing. Wealth concentrated in cities along trade routes.

c. 1470-60       Southern Levant (retenu) is conquered by Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III, in a campaign using c. 15,000 men. The subsequent annual tours to collect tribute required no more than the presence of c. 700 military personnel stationed in garrisons across the region (in Gaza, Kumidi—in the Lebanese Beqa’a valley, Beth Shean, Jaffa, and Ullaza on the Orontes).

c. 1420            A peace treaty sealed by diplomatic marriage between Egypt and the Hurrian empire of Mitanni divides economic control of the Levant: Egypt controls the south, Mitanni the north. The Hurrians, whose kingdom was based in northern Mesopotamia and reached from Aleppo (Syria) all the way to ancient Nuzi in the east (near Kirkuk, Iraq), were famous for their superior use of chariots and the quality of their bows. (1)

c. 1350            Mittani was conquered by Hittites, leading to the displacement of the Hurrian elite. Centuries later, the Assyrians still call Syro-Palestine the land of the Hittites (“Hatti-land”).

c. 1360-40       Abdi-Heba, the ruler of urusalim, pleads for help from his Egyptian suzerain (Pharaoh Amenophis III or Amenophis IV/Akhen-Aten) against the marauding hapiru. The system of tribute extraction aggravates the conflict between agro-pastoral rural populations and their urban masters; hapiru (bands of escapees from debt-slavery and others) threaten urban royalty and some of the city rulers join the hapiru in rebellion against Egypt.

13th century     Direct Egyptian control, as evidenced in the archeological record (Egyptian villas, fortresses, etc.), with the purpose to guard trade routes, such as the “Horus-Road” from the Nile Delta to Gaza and caravan routes to the Gulf of Aqaba and Timna copper mines, exploited during the Ramesside period.

12th century     The system of Canaanite city-states collapses, involving abandonment in some and violent destruction in other centers. Egypt withdraws and the Hittite empire is completely destroyed. Elsewhere in the region, other states (Assyria, Urartu, Elam, and Babylonia) gain independence. Among the precipitating factors: migration (invasion of Nile Delta by the Libyans and of the coastal plains of Canaan by the Sea Peoples); climate change (extended droughts, peak of desertification of erstwhile savannas); urban-rural socio-economic conflict. Collapse of copper trade from Cyprus; hence the shift from bronze to the cheaper and locally mined iron.

The biblical historians retain genuine memories of conditions of what archeologists call the Bronze Age. They trace later situations of landownership, tribal origins and coalitions to settings that correspond to how the past is generally remembered by Iron Age Canaanites with roots in the earlier society, embellished with anachronistic elements that represent their own times, such as the domestic use of dromedaries and the presence of settled, inimical Philistines. Stories about slavery in Egypt may recall the role of the Egyptians in maintaining an oppressive system that forced many to escape into a hapiru existence (a classless class, joined by a “mixed multitude”). The decline of the city-states, conflicts between urban elites and pastoralists, and the internal migrations of the time are a plausible backdrop to the stories of a people who see their forebears as wandering pastoralists and formerly free, then enslaved, escapees from Egypt who inherit the (abandoned) Canaanite cities; they are literally living in houses they had not built and harvest crops they had not sown.