Highly recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast episode on the Bronze Age Collapse to learn more about the Sea-Peoples (https://youtu.be/B965f8AcNbw?list=PLR7yrLMHm11XAuYuZMPHPn9Hz...) . They discuss how the Sea-Peoples may be a symptom and a cause of the bronze age collapse, and the whole episode is extremely engaging and educational. (As all the episodes of this podcast are, cannot recommend it enough)
I second this recommendation. This particular episode is unfortunately one of the shorter ones, but it is very good. The entire podcast (at 18 episodes as of today) is brilliant.
If anyone's interested in the Sea Peoples and the Late Bronze Age, I recommend 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline. It gives a great overview of the primary sources and evidences for the factors leading to the Late Bronze Age collapse, including the role the Sea Peoples may have played as both a cause and symptom of larger societal issues.
In the decades before 1177 BC, there were eight empires on the Mediterranean. After, there were three barely-surviving city-states. That the "sea people" came into the picture just as things collapsed is not a coincidence. They were largely the desperate displaced people from fallen civilizations, both victims and agents of violence, acting in a feedback loop. It took centuries to recover; there's a reason it's called the Greek Dark Ages.
I also have a strong feeling that this collapse and the roving sea peoples are what the Illiad narrates. Or at least the body of traditional oral lyric poetry it's inspired on.
At that time, lots of the civilisations wrote on clay tablets, and as their cities burned their clay tables were baked and hardened and so managed to survive the destruction.
There were several. Clay tablets from Ugarit, a Linear B tablet from Pylos, cuneiform tablets from Hattusa (in the decades before the city was abandoned), and several records from Egypt during the reigns of Merneptah and Ramesses III.
Largely archaeological finds that yield tons of forensic evidence. Plus there are actually plenty of written records that have survived, albeit with major gaps. The Akkadians wrote on stone tablets, thousands of which have survived. Mostly they are banal transaction records (which still tell us a lot!) but there are many others, including some court records from ancient Egypt and elsewhere.
More specifically, the Akkadian language with cuneiform on clay tablets became the lingua franca of the late Bronze Age, long after the decline of the Akkadian empire. The Bronze Age collapse dates to about a thousand years after the end of the Akkadian empire, but it was still the language used for diplomatic purposes as far away as the Aegean Sea and the Egyptian imperial court. A number of royal and scribe family archives have been found, containing thousands of these clay tablet letters.
> but it was still the language used for diplomatic purposes as far away as the Aegean Sea and the Egyptian imperial court.
And also the language in general use in southern Mesopotamia, presumably subject to historical changes.
Note that while the various states in that region didn't call themselves "the Akkadians", they did tend to claim the title by giving their king the very traditional royal honor "King of Sumer and Akkad". By the twelfth century BC, the title was attached to Babylon.
The main literary primary sources are monumental inscriptions in Egypt and a cache of diplomatic letters from some of the cities that were destroyed in the Bronze Age collapse.
>> For the thirteenth century BC, we have no evidence at all of metal body-armour or shields. These are features of the earlier Mycenaean epoch – for example, the bronze lobster cuirass from a tomb at Dendra – or of the period after the fall of the Mycenaean palaces, especially the middle of the twelfth century BC.
I've seen that suit of armour up-close. I think it was in the War Museum, in Athens, but it might have been the Archeological Museum (I loved all museums as a child; also, as an adult). Wikipedia references imply it's in the Argos museum, where I haven't been, so when I saw it, it must have been on a loan:
Or maybe the one I saw was a copy. In any case, an impressive piece of kit and a bit steampunk in aesthetic. There's a clear picture of a beautiful boar's tusk helmet like the one found with the armour, here:
The Sea People are mysterious because, as my older brother who's teaching history said, they were not only multiethnic but groups of warriors from different geographic areas all around the Mediterranean sea.
They were behind the fall of some civilizations as they were moving around to plunder. Their attacks coincided with climate change (drought) and the scarcity of food in actual Iraq, Egypt, Syria, turkey, North Africa and so on.
I never realized how the late Bronze Age collapse still plays out today. As Steve Jobs said, A players hire other A players, but B players hire Sea People and it doesn’t take long for things to get a lot worse.
One of the rabbit holes I've gone down over the past few years has been the sea peoples.
Specifically, the fact that while a bunch of the claims of the Exodus for the Israelites are anachronistic and dismissed as being true at all, that's not exactly the case if the stories had been absorbed into the local tradition and appropriated following the forced relocation of the sea peoples into the Southern Levant.
Following Kadesh there's twelve tribes of Anatolian peoples brought into Egyptian captivity (one group of captives for each of Ramses II's 12 sons with him).
At least one of these tribes is later allied with Libya fighting against Ramses II's successor. At this battle the sea peoples are described as being without foreskins.
The Greeks themselves have a number of stories of someone coming from North Africa and being appointed king or prophet over themselves or the Thracians, whether Eumolpus (put in the water as a babe and raised by a different family), Danaus (leader of Libya and sibling to the Pharoh with 50 sons, like Ramses II who is described in his forensic report as appearing to be a Lybian Berber and who had 50 sons), or Zalmoxis (ex-slave who learned prophecy and predicting celestial events in Egypt).
In the Argonautica there's even a story of how their prophet Mopsus died by a snakebite as their normally sea-faring adventure was instead wandering back through the desert from North Africa by foot. Shortly after this they even tell a story about how a shepherd killed one of their elite warriors with the cast of a stone.
In Homer Odysseus seems to mention this one day battle against Egypt that was historically the sea peoples battle where they didn't have foreskins. In that story he's captive in Egypt for 7 years until "a certain Phrygian" shows up. Seven years after the actual historical one day battle is when a guy nicknamed 'Mose' conquered Egypt as an usurper which the following dynasty claimed involved outside help. Events the bear a striking resemblance to Manetho's story of the Exodus preserved in Josephus.
In fact, the Greek and Egyptian accounts of the Exodus all involved a mixture of people with the Greek historians claiming it involved their own ancestors too, contrary to the Biblical claims of ethnocentrism.
We're now finding things like Aegean style pottery made with local clay in early Iron Age Tel Dan, which lends itself to the theory that that Denyen sea peoples were the lost tribe of Dan and why the Song of Deborah refers to them "staying on their ships" or how Ezekiel 27 has them trading in what seem Anatolian goods with Tyre alongside the Greeks.
Perhaps the most mind blowing is that Tacitus's claims of Jews having been people from Crete hiding out in Libya is pretty much spot on a description of certain non-Semitic features in the Ashkenazi genome, from the prevalence of G2019S LRRK2 mutation which originated in the Berbers and seem to have been acquired around 4,500 ybp +/- 1k years, or the similarities between Ashkenazi genome and Cretean DNA, with one individual on Athrogenica finding their closest genetic match was 3,700 year old remains from a Minoan graveyard that had just been added from a 2017 study. I've now been wondering if the matrilineal endogamy present in the Ashkenazi went back much further than we currently think, and reflected an endogamous subpopulation tracing back to the sea peoples even in Judea, which might explain oddities like 2 Kings 5:27 explaining the existence of a group ancestrally white as snow as a curse.
Even things like the book of Joshua, completely anachronistic in describing a recapture of ancestral homelands may have been instead an appropriated story of Jason (one of the hellenizations of Yeshua). So while there were no walls to Jericho at the time that came crashing down, maybe those stories originally related to the destruction of Mycenaean sites where we're now finding it wasn't earthquakes: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/bssa/article-abstract/1...
> 2 Kings 5:27 explaining the existence of a group ancestrally white as snow as a curse
That’s a pretty strained reading of that text. The curse wasn’t being white, as in Caucasian, but as in covered in leprous sores. 2 Kings 5:27 reads,
> “Therefore the leprosy of Naaman shall cling to you and to your descendants forever." So he went out from his presence a leper, like snow.
Compare that description to Leviticus 13:9-11:
> When a man is afflicted with a leprous disease, he shall be brought to the priest, and the priest shall look. And if there is a white swelling in the skin that has turned the hair white, and there is raw flesh in the swelling, it is a chronic leprous disease in the skin of his body, and the priest shall pronounce him unclean.
The sea people sounds alot like "ship"-residing refugees sailing along the coasts to me. They would be armed, they would be desperate and pillage like the vikings. And they would end wherever there boats ended up falling apart. Either fighting the locals or mixing with them. I guess this is what you do, when your city is besieged, runs out of food and you still have an open harbor.
Another example might be the Anglo-Saxons "invasion" of Britain near the end of the Western Roman Empire. The reason why the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain isn't entirely clear but it appears throughout history there are periods of mass population movements due to various reasons such as climate change, population explosions or invasion by "steppe people" as Dan Carlin refers to them.
The entire history of Europe for the past 4,000 years is of migrations from the East to the West. First the Lusitaninans, Basques, Etruscans, and Belgae, then the Celts (let's include the Gauls in that group), then the Mycenaeans, then the Greeks, then the Romans (who were Latins,), then the Franks, Angles, Saxons, and other Germanic tribes, then the Huns and Slavs. Roughly.
In the Iberian Peninsula we also had a migration from the South to the North with the Muslim conquest that started in 711, but apparently they didn't leave that big of a genetic legacy.
Yeap there does seem to be a general drift from bottom-right towards top-left on the map of europe. Except, perhaps, the vikings who went from north to south?
> The reason why the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain isn't entirely clear
Ye, it's really complicated. I was taught as a kid that the initial Anglo Saxon 'invasion' was a rebellion by Anglo-Saxon warriors against the British King whop had hired them as mercenaries. But in fact it was a really complex movement of populations that played out over > two hundred years [0].
