Different tribes and nations have existed all around the Mediterranean sea in the bronze age and later. They would know their land-neighbors, and may have communicated and traded with each other directly via sea travel (during calm summer months, as soon as seafaring was advanced enough). Yet they would not have been a military threat to each other as long as the sea travel was too risky and expensive, compared to campaigns over land. So I imagine that for some time, the Mediterranean allowed trade but blocked conquest, until a time when conquest became viable due to ship technology allowing safe travel of armies. The question is when (with what nation) those dynamics changed.
I imagine that in prehistory, rafts and canoes only followed the shorelines at best, but at some point in antiquity, it must have become common to cross the Mediterranean sea at different points every year for communication, raids and trade (at Gibraltar and Sicily mostly supposedly), maybe during the calm season only at first.
Similarly, I imagine that for waging war, there must have been evolutionary stages of shipbuilding that allowed to cross the Mediterranean en masse with an armada, not too expensively, and without risking not being able to return. I imagine during the Greco-Persian wars, technology was not advanced enough for direct (non-shore-following) warfare across the sea, while during the Punic wars it was advanced enough.
So are there in literature known stages for when the Mediterranean became traversable for different purposes? Possibly with the required advances in shipbuilding and navigation required?
The purpose of my question is to understand 1. when knowledge transfer became reliable across the Mediterranean and 2. when countries on the other side become viable military targets / significant military threats, compared to neighboring territories reachable on land.
I have trouble finding details about bronze age sea trade routes. It seems established that tin got from the British isles to middle east, but other than crossing the English Channel, I am not sure where sea-faring ships were used as opposed to river-boats.
Update1: as an example Wikipedia has a map of Phoenician trade routes, but it's not clear if the Phoenicians also had a navy to attack lands along those routes, in particular without following the directions with the ships (As opposed to conquering North Africa by land, and establishing other colonies without need for warfare).
Update2: Some websites declare: "The Phoenicians were famed in antiquity for their ship-building skills, and they were credited with inventing the keel, the battering ram on the bow, and caulking between planks". So it seems that before the Phoenicians, only near-shore travels were common, and at the end of their period, seafaring was advanced enough to cross the Mediterranean with more safety in greater number, but maybe there was no definite time when such traversals became significant for military conquest. It would still be interesting to know which nation first became an existential threat to all other nations in the Mediterranean due to seafaring.
Update3: The sea peoples mentioned in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples as: "The Sea Peoples are a purported seafaring confederation that attacked ancient Egypt and other regions of the East Mediterranean prior to and during the Late Bronze Age collapse". But it does not indicate where those were based, nor what ships they used, nor whether their ships could travel away from the coast: "The Sea Peoples remain unidentified in the eyes of most modern scholars".
Udate4: It would seem that a safe upper bound would be the roman conquests of Sicily in 241 BC and then Carthage itself in 146 BC, at which time any nation bordering the Mediterranean would likely have to consider defenses against a roman invasion via the sea.
