New Kingdom of Egypt in the context of "Conventional Egyptian chronology"

The Greek Dark Ages (c. 1180–800 BC) was a period in Ancient Greece characterized by societal collapse of civilization, where the palaces and cities of the Mycenaeans were either destroyed, abandoned, or both.

At around the same time, the Hittite civilization in modern-day Turkey also suffered serious disruption and collapse, with cities from Troy to Gaza being destroyed. Moreover, in Egypt, the New Kingdom fell into disarray, leading to the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt. Following this mass destruction, there were fewer, smaller settlements, which suggests widespread famine and depopulation. On the Greek mainland, the Linear B script, used by Mycenaean bureaucrats to write the Greek language, ceased to be used. The later Greek alphabet did not develop until hundreds of years later, in the beginning of the Protohistoric Iron Age, c. 800 BC.

The Late Bronze Age collapse was a period of societal collapse in the Mediterranean basin during the 12th century BC. It is thought to have affected much of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, in particular Egypt, Anatolia, the Aegean, eastern Libya, and the Balkans. The collapse was sudden, violent, and culturally disruptive for many Bronze Age civilizations, creating a sharp material decline for the region's previously existing powers.

The palace economy of Mycenaean Greece, the Aegean region, and Anatolia that characterized the Late Bronze Age disintegrated, transforming into the small isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark Ages, which lasted from c. 1100 to c. 750 BC, and were followed by the better-known Archaic Age. The Hittite Empire spanning Anatolia and the Levant collapsed, while states such as the Middle Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia and the New Kingdom of Egypt survived in weakened forms. Other cultures, such as the Phoenicians, enjoyed increased autonomy and power with the waning military presence of Egypt and Assyria in West Asia.

Ancient Egypt was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150 BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower Egypt were amalgamated by Menes, who is believed by the majority of Egyptologists to have been the same person as Narmer. The history of ancient Egypt unfolded as a series of stable kingdoms interspersed by the "Intermediate Periods" of relative instability. These stable kingdoms existed in one of three periods: the Old Kingdom of the Early Bronze Age; the Middle Kingdom of the Middle Bronze Age; or the New Kingdom of the Late Bronze Age.

The pinnacle of ancient Egyptian power was achieved during the New Kingdom, which extended its rule to much of Nubia and a considerable portion of the Levant. After this period, Egypt entered an era of slow decline. Over the course of its history, it was invaded or conquered by a number of foreign civilizations, including the Hyksos, the Kushites, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks and then the Romans. The end of ancient Egypt is variously defined as occurring with the end of the Late Period during the Wars of Alexander the Great in 332 BC or with the end of the Greek-ruled Ptolemaic Kingdom during the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC. In AD 642, the Arab conquest of Egypt brought an end to the region's millennium-long Greco-Roman period.

The Hittites (/ˈhɪtaɪts/) were an Anatolian Indo-European people who formed one of the first major civilizations of the Bronze Age in West Asia. Possibly originating from beyond the Black Sea, they settled in modern-day Turkey in the early 2nd millennium BC. The Hittites formed a series of polities in north-central Anatolia, including the kingdom of Kussara (before 1750 BC), the Kanesh or Nesha Kingdom (c. 1750–1650 BC), and an empire centered on their capital, Hattusa (around 1650 BC). Known in modern times as the Hittite Empire, it reached its peak during the mid-14th century BC under Šuppiluliuma I, when it encompassed most of Anatolia and parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia, bordering the rival empires of the Hurri-Mitanni and Assyrians.

Between the 15th and 13th centuries BC, the Hittites were one of the dominant powers of the Near East, coming into conflict with the New Kingdom of Egypt, the Middle Assyrian Empire, and the Empire of Mitanni. By the 12th century BC, much of the Hittite Empire had been annexed by the Middle Assyrian Empire, with the remainder being sacked by Phrygian newcomers to the region. From the late 12th century BC, during the Late Bronze Age collapse, the Hittites splintered into several small independent states, some of which survived until the eighth century BC before succumbing to the Neo-Assyrian Empire; lacking a unifying continuity, their descendants scattered and ultimately merged into the modern populations of the Levant and Mesopotamia.

Isis was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. Isis was first mentioned in the Old Kingdom (c. 2686 – c. 2181 BCE) as one of the main characters of the Osiris myth, in which she resurrects her slain brother and husband, the divine king Osiris, and produces and protects his heir, Horus. She was believed to help the dead enter the afterlife as she had helped Osiris, and she was considered the divine mother of the pharaoh, who was likened to Horus. Her maternal aid was invoked in healing spells to benefit ordinary people. Originally, she played a limited role in royal rituals and temple rites, although she was more prominent in funerary practices and magical texts. She was usually portrayed in art as a human woman wearing a throne-like hieroglyph on her head. During the New Kingdom (c. 1550 – c. 1070 BCE), as she took on traits that originally belonged to Hathor, the preeminent goddess of earlier times, Isis was portrayed wearing Hathor's headdress: a sun disk between the horns of a cow.

In the first millennium BCE, Osiris and Isis became the most widely worshipped Egyptian deities, and Isis absorbed traits from many other goddesses. Rulers in Egypt and its southern neighbor Nubia built temples dedicated primarily to Isis, and her temple at Philae was a religious center for Egyptians and Nubians alike. Her reputed magical power was greater than that of all other gods, and she was said to govern the natural world and wield power over fate itself.

The Third Intermediate Period of ancient Egypt began with the death of Pharaoh Ramesses XI in 1077 BC, which ended the New Kingdom, and was eventually followed by the Late Period. Various points are offered as the beginning for the latter era, though it is most often regarded as dating from the foundation of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty by Psamtik I in 664 BC, following the departure of the Nubian Kushite rulers of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty after they were driven out by the Assyrians under King Ashurbanipal. The use of the term "Third Intermediate Period", based on the analogy of the well-known First and Second Intermediate Periods, was popular by 1978, when British Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen used the term for the title of his book on the period. While Kitchen argued that the period was 'far from being chaotic' and hoped that his work would lead to the abolishment of the term, with his own preference being the 'Post-Imperial epoch', his use of the term as a title seems only to have entrenched its use.

The period was ruled by non-native Egyptians and is viewed as one of decline and political instability including division of the state, coinciding with the Late Bronze Age collapse of civilizations in the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean (including the Greek Dark Ages).

Nubia (/ˈnjuːbiə/, Nobiin: Nobīn, Arabic: النُوبَة, romanized: an-Nūba) is a region along the Nile river encompassing the area between the confluence of the Blue and White Niles (in Khartoum in central Sudan), and the first cataract of the Nile (south of Aswan in southern Egypt) or more strictly, Al Dabbah. It was the seat of one of the earliest civilizations of ancient Africa, the Kerma culture, which lasted from around 2500 BC until its conquest by the New Kingdom of Egypt under Pharaoh Thutmose I around 1500 BC, whose heirs ruled most of Nubia for the next 400 years. Nubia was home to several empires, most prominently the Kingdom of Kush, which conquered Egypt in the eighth century BC during the reign of Piye and ruled the country as its 25th Dynasty.

From the 3rd century BC to 3rd century AD, northern Nubia was invaded and annexed to Egypt, ruled by the Greeks and Romans. This territory was known in the Greco-Roman world as Dodekaschoinos.