[www.academia.edu]

End of the conclusion: (I've broken it into paragraphs that are not in the original as the block of words is a bit to hard to read)

""The archaeological evidence for Egyptian interaction in the eastern Mediterranean during the OK fits into the pattern of third millennium state-to-state gift exchange, commodity trade and war booty, highlighted in the fragmentary Egyptian textual record, the Ebla texts, and records from southern Mesopotamia. The roots of this pattern are found in the ED. Trade involved the exchange of luxury items such as gold, silver and other metals, lapis lazuli, exotic timbers, resins, oils, perfumes, stone vessels, raw stones, beads, amulets, palettes and other stone objects, foodstuffs, animals and people. Other products may have included textiles and papyrus.

This exchange was prosecuted at a state-to-state level by Egyptian officials at the behest of the state. Its primary rationale was to provide the royal court and elites with high-status goods not available locally, to advance Egypt’s political, economic, security interests and relationships with influential foreign elites, and to project the king politically to local audiences.

Under Pepy I and II, at Byblos this may have assumed an extended religious dimension. Thus far, there is no evidence on the Egyptian side that this exchange was in the hands of private merchants. Yet the acquisition of valuable products was the fundamental motivation of this economic behaviour, rather than political domination or empire building.

This activity, fuelled by the acquisition of cedar wood, probably reached its furthest geographical and quantitative peak during the 4th Dynasty. However, throughout the OK, the Egyptian state, with varying degrees of success, continued engaging in direct and down-the-line contact with most of the key political and commodity production centres of the Levant. It was a key player and a major market for regional commodities in the trading systems of the Levant, yet not apparently dominant. While relationships may have soured from time to time, resulting in military action in Canaan in the latter stages of the OK, the pressures that engulfed the entire region at the end of the EB III probably fuelled these crises.""

This is from a paper published in 2009 are these findings still valid or have they been superceded?