Pharaoh Meneptah, the son of Rameses II, did not benefit much by the alliance with the Hittites, to whom he had to send a supply of grain during a time of famine.  He found it necessary, indeed, to invade Syria, where their influence had declined, and had to beat back from the Delta region the piratical invaders of the same tribes as were securing a footing in Asia Minor.  In Syria, Meneptah fought with the Israelites, who apparently had begun their conquest of Canaan during his reign.

Before the Kassite Dynasty had come to an end, Rameses III of Egypt (1198-1167 B.C.) freed his country from the perils of a great invasion of Europeans by land and sea.  He scattered a fleet on the Delta coast, and then arrested the progress of a strong force which was pressing southward through Phoenicia towards the Egyptian frontier.  These events occurred at the beginning of the Homeric Age, and were followed by the siege of Troy, which, according to the Greeks, began about 1194 B.C.

The land raiders who were thwarted by Rameses III were the Philistines, a people from Crete.[417] When the prestige of Egypt suffered decline they overran the coastline of Canaan, and that country was then called Palestine, “the land of the Philistines”, while the Egyptian overland trade route to Phoenicia became known as “the way of the Philistines”.  Their conflicts with the Hebrews are familiar to readers of the Old Testament.  “The only contributions the Hebrews made to the culture of the country”, writes Professor Macalister, “were their simple desert customs and their religious organization.  On the other hand, the Philistines, sprung from one of the great homes of art of the ancient world, had brought with them the artistic instincts of their race:  decayed no doubt, but still superior to anything they met with in the land itself.  Tombs to be ascribed to them, found in Gezer, contained beautiful jewellery and ornaments.  The Philistines, in fact, were the only cultured or artistic race who ever occupied the soil of Palestine, at least until the time when the influence of classical Greece asserted itself too strongly to be withstood.  Whatsoever things raised life in the country above the dull animal existence of fellahin were due to this people....  The peasantry of the modern villages ... still tell of the great days of old when it (Palestine) was inhabited by the mighty race of the ’Fenish’."[418]

When the Kassite Dynasty of Babylonia was extinguished, about 1140 B.C., the Amorites were being displaced in Palestine by the Philistines and the Israelitish tribes; the Aramaeans were extending their conquests in Syria and Mesopotamia; the Muski were the overlords of the Hittites; Assyrian power was being revived at the beginning of the second period of the Old Empire; and Egypt was governed by a weakly king, Rameses VIII, a puppet in the hands of the priesthood, who was unable to protect the rich tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaohs against the bands of professional robbers who were plundering them.