Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and a limited-geography model can fit the text into a small region archaeology has not fully dug. Why treat silence as disproof?

Silence alone would not be decisive, and the limited-geography model is the serious reply. Two things keep the question live. The positive anachronisms, horses and steel and wheat where the record shows none, are not silence but mismatch. And the text itself describes populations and warfare on a scale that should leave traces. The limited model answers the geography by shrinking the story well below what the text seems to claim. It is a real response, and it comes at the cost of the plain reading.