the sea peoples — late bronze age eastern mediterranean, c. 1200-1150 BC
The thing about the Sea Peoples is that they're a problem we made for ourselves and then decided was a problem somebody else made for us, and the structure of how we made the problem is more interesting than any of the answers we've come up with about who they actually were.
Here's the situation. Around 1200 BC, give or take, a bunch of stuff goes wrong all at once in the eastern Mediterranean. The Hittite Empire collapses — Hattusa is abandoned, the royal archive ends mid-sentence, the whole apparatus that ran Anatolia for four centuries just stops. Ugarit, the major coastal trade entrepôt of the northern Levant, is destroyed by fire and never reoccupied; we have a famously panicked tablet from the king there saying "the enemy ships are already here, they have done damage" which got found in the kiln, unfired, because nobody was around to fire it. Mycenaean palace civilization on the Greek mainland collapses — Pylos, Mycenae, Tiryns all destroyed or abandoned within a generation, the Linear B administrative system disappears entirely and Greek-speakers forget how to write for four hundred years. Cyprus's palace economy ends. Most of the Levantine coast is destroyed or depopulated. Egypt holds on but takes serious damage and goes into a slow institutional decline that ends with the Twenty-First Dynasty and the formal end of the New Kingdom about a century later. This is, by any reasonable measure, the largest synchronized civilizational collapse in pre-modern history that we can actually document, and it happens fast — the destructive phase is something like fifty years.
We have one good narrative source for this and it's Egyptian. Specifically it's Ramesses III's mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, on the west bank at Thebes, which has on its outer walls a long pictorial-and-textual account of two big battles Ramesses fought against invaders in his fifth and eighth regnal years (so roughly 1180 and 1177 BC, though the Egyptian chronology has some slack in it). The eighth-year inscription is the famous one, the one everybody knows, and it lists the names of the invaders in a specific formula — "the Peleset, the Tjeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen, and the Weshesh, lands united" — and it describes a coordinated assault by these groups, by both land and sea, that supposedly destroyed the Hittite Empire and Cyprus and Carchemish and Arzawa and Alashiya before being repelled by Ramesses at the eastern edge of the Delta. The inscription also names the previous wave from Ramesses's fifth year, the "Sherden" and "Lukka" and others, and there are earlier references in Ramesses II's records (Kadesh, sixty years prior) to Sherden mercenaries, and even earlier references in the Amarna correspondence to "Lukka" raiders. So the Egyptians have been seeing these groups for two hundred years before 1177, but at Medinet Habu they're framed as a single coordinated existential threat.
And the Egyptians win. That's the thing the inscription is for. It's a victory monument. Ramesses defeats the assembled hordes at the Delta, captures or kills enormous numbers, settles the survivors as military colonists in Egyptian-controlled Canaan, and saves civilization. The reliefs show him personally shooting arrows from his chariot at people falling out of capsizing boats. It's pharaonic propaganda of an extremely standard kind.
Now. The way Egyptology, and then Mediterranean archaeology generally, ended up reading this for most of the twentieth century, was to take the Medinet Habu inscription at something like face value, and to treat the Sea Peoples as the cause of the Bronze Age collapse — a coordinated barbarian migration, possibly originating in the central Mediterranean or the Aegean, that swept through the eastern Mediterranean destroying the palace civilizations until Egypt finally stopped them, and the names listed at Medinet Habu were taken to identify specific ethnic groups whose movements could be tracked: the Peleset became the Philistines (settling on the southern Levantine coast, giving us the name Palestine), the Sherden became the Sardinians, the Shekelesh became the Sicels (giving us Sicily), the Denyen became either the Greeks (Danaoi) or possibly the Tribe of Dan, the Tjeker maybe the Teucrians, etc. This is the version that ends up in textbooks, the version Robert Drews wrote a famous book about in 1993 (The End of the Bronze Age), the version Eric Cline made into a New York Times bestseller in 2014 with 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which is a perfectly good book for what it is but which has the structural problem that it's named after and organized around an event for which we have one (1) actual source, and that source is a piece of pharaonic war propaganda.
This is the part that secretly explains everything about the Sea Peoples problem, which is that the Sea Peoples are an Egyptian source bias. We can name them and group them and tell stories about them because the Egyptians named them and grouped them and told stories about them. But the Egyptians are doing this for Egyptian reasons — Ramesses III needs a unified barbarian threat for the same reason every imperial monument needs a unified barbarian threat, which is that "I personally repelled the assembled forces of chaos" is a better claim than "I dealt with several uncoordinated raiding parties over a couple of decades and also some of them ended up settling in territory I didn't really control anymore but we'll call that a victory." The "lands united" formula is doing the same work that "axis of evil" did in 2002 — it's coalition-building rhetoric for the audience back home, applied retroactively to a set of distinct phenomena that the speaker has political reasons to bundle.
What the actual archaeology shows, when you look at it without the Egyptian frame on top, is that the late-thirteenth-and-twelfth-century eastern Mediterranean is undergoing what a systems theorist would call a cascading failure — multiple independent stresses (climate shift toward aridity, documented by lake cores and pollen sequences across the region; disruption to the highly specialized bronze-trade network that required tin from Afghanistan and copper from Cyprus and finished products moving through six or seven intermediary kingdoms to reach end users; possibly a decades-long drought in Anatolia that we have textual references to in late Hittite letters complaining about famine; internal political fractures in pretty much every palace system; and yes, increased raiding and small-scale population movement around the periphery) that together produced collapse cascades that none of the individual stresses would have caused on their own. The "Sea Peoples" as the Egyptians described them are one of the symptoms of this — when palace economies start failing, the people who had been the periphery (mercenary populations, pirate-traders, displaced refugees, second-sons-of-collapsed-aristocracies looking for somewhere to go) become more visible and more aggressive and more mobile, because the systems that had been keeping them peripheral are no longer keeping them peripheral. Calling these movements "the cause of the collapse" is like calling looters the cause of a hurricane. They're real, they're doing damage, but they showed up because the load-bearing structure was already failing.
The Philistine case is the one that actually shows you what's going on, because the Philistines are the only "Sea Peoples" group we can track archaeologically with any confidence. The Peleset of Medinet Habu show up in the southern coastal Levant — the Philistine pentapolis, Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gath — in the early twelfth century, and the material culture they bring is Aegean. Specifically, it's late Mycenaean: Mycenaean IIIC pottery (locally produced in Philistia, but in the Aegean style, which means actual Aegean potters or potters trained by Aegean potters), Aegean-style hearths, Aegean-style loomweights, pig and cattle bone ratios that match Greek mainland sites rather than Levantine ones, even Aegean-style cooking. So these are real people from somewhere in the Aegean world (probably not all from one place — the assemblages suggest mixed origins, Cyprus and the Greek mainland and possibly western Anatolia) who actually did move to the Levantine coast and set up shop in the wreckage of the Egyptian-controlled Canaanite city-states.
But here's the part that messes up the migration narrative. Within about two hundred years, the Philistines are archaeologically indistinguishable from the surrounding Canaanite/Israelite population. The Aegean pottery tradition fades into local Levantine forms by the tenth century. The pig consumption drops. The hearths get rebuilt in local style. The language shifts (we don't know what the Philistines spoke when they arrived — maybe a form of Greek, maybe something else — but by the eighth century they're writing in a Northwest Semitic dialect related to Phoenician). By the time the Hebrew Bible is talking about Goliath and David, the Philistines are functionally Levantine; they have a god named Dagon who is an old Canaanite grain god, they live in Canaanite-style cities, the only thing that makes them "Philistines" rather than just another Canaanite group is that they remember they came from somewhere else and the people writing about them remember they came from somewhere else. They've been absorbed.
Which means the story isn't "barbarian invaders destroy civilization." The story is: "during a generalized collapse, some refugee/raider populations from the Aegean ended up controlling chunks of the southern Levantine coast for a couple of generations, and then they integrated into the local population, and the only reason we still talk about them as a distinct group is that the Egyptians wrote them down on a temple wall and the Hebrews wrote them down in a national epic, and the names stuck." Their genuine cultural distinctness lasts maybe two centuries. The "Sea Peoples migration" in any meaningful sense is over by 1000 BC, which is to say it took less time for the Sea Peoples to disappear into the populations they "conquered" than it took for the Norman conquest of England to produce a Norman-English aristocracy that could write the Magna Carta.
And the other groups on the Medinet Habu list are even worse, in terms of how much we actually know about them. The Sherden — we have references to them as Egyptian mercenaries from a hundred years before the supposed great migration; some of them probably did end up in Sardinia, but the connection is mostly onomastic (the name sounds like Sardinia) and the archaeological case is thin. The Shekelesh-Sicily connection is similar — name resemblance, archaeological case much weaker than the Philistine one. The Denyen could be the Danaoi (Greeks) or the Tribe of Dan or the Adana of Cilicia. The Tjeker show up briefly in one Egyptian text (the Tale of Wenamun, ~1075 BC) as occupying the port of Dor on the Levantine coast, and then they vanish from the record. The Weshesh nobody has any idea about. So out of the Medinet Habu coalition, exactly one group (the Peleset/Philistines) can be confidently identified archaeologically, and the rest are essentially names attached to speculation, all stitched together by the Egyptian inscription's coalition-rhetoric into a single "Sea Peoples invasion" that may or may not have been a single anything.
The reason this matters, beyond the local pleasure of getting the historiography right, is that the Sea Peoples have been doing structural work in our thinking about civilization-and-its-discontents for about a century now — they're the original "barbarian hordes destroyed the prosperous interconnected world," they're the prototype for the migration-period framing of late antiquity, they show up in every popular treatment of "fragile globalization" as the cautionary tale, and the version of them that's doing this work is the Medinet Habu version, the unified-coalition version, the "1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed" version. The actual messy systems-cascade version, where the Sea Peoples are a symptom and not a cause, and where they mostly turn out to have been a couple of refugee populations that integrated into local cultures within a few generations, is much less useful as a metaphor for whatever you want to say about the modern world, which is probably why it's not the version that gets cited.
The Bronze Age collapse was real and it was bad — it produced the genuine Greek Dark Age, four centuries of post-collapse archaeology with no writing, dramatically reduced settlement size, genuine knowledge loss (the Mycenaean Greeks could build domed stone tombs, the Iron Age Greeks who replaced them could not, and didn't again until the Romans showed up); the eastern Mediterranean trade networks took something like three or four hundred years to rebuild; and the political map that emerged on the other side (Phoenician city-states, Aramaean kingdoms, Iron Age Israel and Judah, archaic Greek poleis, Neo-Assyrian Empire, eventually the Persians) was completely different from the one that went in. Something big happened. But the Egyptians, sitting at the southern edge of it, watching the wave hit and barely surviving, wrote the version we inherited, and the version they wrote was the version where the wave had a name and a face and Pharaoh personally repelled it.
We've been reading their press release ever since, and treating it as the report.
tagged: bronze age sea peoples medinet habu philistines historiography
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