Quick questions on Evaluation and historiography of New Kingdom Egypt during the Ramesside period: HSC Ancient History

Deir el-Medina, a walled village on the west bank at Thebes housing the workmen who cut and decorated the royal tombs, is the single richest source of "ordinary life" evidence surviving from anywhere in the ancient world. Excavated extensively by the French archaeologist Bernard Bruyere between 1922 and 1951, it has produced thousands of ostraca (cheap limestone flakes and potsherds) and papyri: work rosters, private letters, wills, marriage settlements, court records and the Turin Strike Papyrus, which records the crew's Year 29 protest, under Ramesses III, over late grain rations, usually described as history's earliest documented labour strike.

Two gaps matter most for this dot point. First, Pi-Ramesses, the Delta capital Seti I began and Ramesses II expanded into a genuine military-administrative city with stables, chariot workshops and harbour access, was largely dismantled after the Twentieth Dynasty, its stone reused by later kings to build Tanis. The government's own working archive, from the actual seat of Ramesside power, has therefore almost entirely vanished, leaving historians to reconstruct policy and administration mainly from Theban, not Delta, sources. Second, the vast peasant majority, farming state, temple or private land under corvee obligations, is almost silent in the surviving record: they were not the audience of royal monuments and rarely left the kind of durable written trace Deir el-Medina's craftsmen did.

The clearest case of royal propaganda distorting the record is the Battle of Kadesh (c. 1274 BC), fought between Ramesses II and the Hittite king Muwatalli II near the Orontes River. Misled by two captured Hittite scouts posing as deserters, Ramesses advanced with his army strung out in four divisions; the Hittite chariotry ambushed and routed one division before reinforcements allowed the king to rally. The "Poem" and the "Bulletin" of Kadesh, carved at Abydos, Karnak, Luxor, the Ramesseum and Abu Simbel, present this near-disaster as a personal, Amun-granted triumph, with Ramesses shown alone in his chariot trampling the enemy.

"Historians disagree about how much Egypt declined" is an ungraded, vague claim; name Kitchen, Cline, Assmann or McDowell and state their actual position.