Egypt and the Bronze Age Collapse

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for checking out my YouTube channel today, The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As always, I'm your host, Nick Barksdale, and today we are joined once again by a very special guest and a very awesome YouTube channel that I'm happy to be affiliated with, and that is World History by a Jew, none other than Seth Fleischman. Seth, thank you so much for coming on today. Thanks, Nick. It's a pleasure to be back again. And now, what I'm really excited about is that this upcoming episode, I have yet to do a video on this channel specifically about this subject. Anyone familiar with the Bronze Age and especially the Bronze Age Collapse knows that Ancient Egypt pops up quite a bit in many of the episodes that I have on here, but none of them focus on it specifically, and Seth is here to change that, and so he is going to take us into Ancient Egypt and the Bronze Age Collapse, and of course, those ever-so-annoying Sea Peoples. Seth, thank you so much for coming on today, and now I've got a couple of questions for you to really take us into this. So, for my audience, what can they expect you to hit on in this episode? Well, I happen to be a fan of your channel as well as a contributor, and I noticed as I've been watching your videos on the Bronze Age Collapse, which are comprehensive and quite entertaining, and I've learned a lot from them, but I noticed that the Egyptian point of view has seemed to gotten left on the side here, and I felt bad for the Egyptians. Maybe my Israelite forebears will be horrified that I would say such a thing, but I thought perhaps a different take on the Bronze Age Collapse would be to look at it from the Egyptian point of view. So, that led to a little bit of brainstorming and seeing how we can come about, but I think I put together a lecture that those of your fan base of the Egyptology persuasion will be happy to see. Since you've last been here, my question is, how's your channel doing? How's it growing? What have you experienced so far? So, when I was first on, I had about 80 subscribers, and I really was just starting when you and I met. After you posted my Exodus lecture, my subscriber base doubled within a week. It was around 160, pretty much an even doubling because of you. Since then, it's over doubled again. It's now about 400 or so. This is tiny compared to you professionals, right? I'm not even minor leagues. I'm like rec league, but nonetheless, for my little boutique operation, it's been great to see the growth. I'd love to have more subscribers. I'm not doing this for the money. In fact, you don't even see a Patreon account. There's no place to donate to my efforts. I just want people to watch, enjoy, have a good time, learn a little bit, and that's it. I'm not asking for more than that. And with that being said, definitely check out the links in the video description below, where I'm going to actually provide a link to his YouTube channel. Click on it, subscribe to it, help him hit 1,000, and let's keep it going from there. So before we begin, we're going to get into a little gritty topic, and that is primary sources. One thing that I like is that you tend to list your sources with every episode. Why do you do that? First of all, I'll talk with a Southern accent, which means no one out of the Deep South is going to believe me anyway. So that's number one. But really, I just decided I wanted to set my lectures apart academically. And I realized that even when you have very respected individuals speaking on YouTube, with a lot of lectures I enjoy, you don't know where they're getting the information. And it seemed that something I could do very simple that would set my lectures apart would be providing sources. So as you watch my lectures, you'll see every single slide, I have my main sources that I use. And I may not have all the sources on there, but I list enough sources on every slide to recreate that slide. If you look up those sources, you'll be able to find the exact same information to recreate the data that I'm providing. And that's very important to me because, I mean, most people don't know me from Adam, right? Or I should say most people don't know me from Moses. But point is, no one knows who I am. So if I then show that, hey, you know, this information doesn't come from me, it really came from Dr. Eric Klein, I'm just the messenger, you know, don't shoot the messenger. And I believe it adds a lot of legitimacy. And I get, in fact, that's probably one of the most complimented things that I get a lot of people that, you know, people love the etymology that I do. And people love the way that I'll blend in the biblical aspect with the secular, but right up there with those two would be just people commenting about how happy they are that they can see where my information comes from. And so another important part, since we just discussed why you provide references and sources for your viewers to explore on their own, let's actually talk about how do you determine what is a good or reliable source? Well, first I'll look to see if Chris Rock said it, then I know it's true. And then I'll see if Jim Carrey said it. And then once I have those two sorted, so I'm just kidding, but the basic answer is cross-referencing. All right, so I'm always paying attention to sources. In fact, if a book doesn't have a bibliography, I don't even pay attention to it. I don't even pick it up. I mean, well, I pick it up and I sit down and I put it back down again. And because I'm always looking at where information came from, I start recognizing certain people, certain books. And when I see that the same book or the same person comes up several times in things that I'm enjoying reading, but when I see some source keeps coming up, then I know that this is someone I should be paying attention to. And it's the cross-referencing that is the key for me. Now I do fine tune that, like I will look up on Amazon and see what the reviews are. I mean, I hate to say Amazon is an authority, but I tend to find if something's 4.0 or better, then that gives you some leg to stand on versus something that's like a 2.0 and everyone's tearing it up. But cross-referencing is key. Now, and after a long time, you just build up a pool of reliable sources. So take Egypt, and I've spent an unbelievable amount of time studying Egypt. And any known Egyptologist I now know, I mean, and I don't mean that as bragging, I just mean I've read so much. And eventually, no matter how stupid you are, you're going to start recognizing names. So I can just, if I see writing from someone that I've read before, then I immediately go to them and read whatever their latest research is. So the more you do this, the more you're able to build up a pool from which to trust and a pool from which to research. Good evening. This is Seth Fleischman of World History by Jew. Welcome back. We are continuing our series on the Bronze Age Collapse. And to introduce the Sea Peoples, the best way to do it is to actually introduce them to the eyes of the Egyptians. So if you will, sit back and enjoy this lecture and learn about the Sea Peoples through the eyewitness accounts of the Egyptian people themselves. We first are going to, I'm going to do a summary of the Bronze Age Collapse. Don't worry, it's going to be very short, but I like my lecture to be enjoyable, regardless of how much knowledge someone may have coming in. So if you don't know anything about the Bronze Age Collapse, this will at least just give you some very, very basic information. If you're already an expert in the Bronze Age Collapse, just give me like two minutes to get everyone else up to speed as best as I can in two minutes. Then we're going to move into the Sea Peoples. I'm going to talk about the invasion of the Sea Peoples in general, and then move into the specificity. So we're going to break down the first three invasions of the Sea Peoples as it pertains to Egypt. We'll first talk about Akhenaten, then we'll talk about Ramses II, Ramses the Great, and then Merneptah. And after that, we're going to move into the larger section of this lecture, where we're going to look at Ramses III, because it's really in the reign of Ramses III that everything comes to the head. They have this big climactic battle between the Egyptians and the Sea Peoples, and only one can survive, right? There can be only one, to quote a famous movie. So we'll be talking about Ramses III. We're also going to be introducing the Peleshet in Hebrew, Peleset in Egyptian, or Palestinians in English. So these people are now going to come to the forefront, and they'll be very important for our next couple lectures. And after that, I am going to talk about the climactic battle, specifically where Ramses III is facing down these Sea Peoples. And at the end, we're going to put it all together. We're going to talk about what the fallout is of these events, and how it will set the stage for our future lectures, because our future lectures are really going to be more focused on our theme, is the Bronze Age Collapse in the Bible? All right, so without further ado, let's get started. All right, Bronze Age Collapse. So this is part of the review from last time, but if you didn't see the last lecture, I think I can give you the basics in a couple minutes here. So if you look at the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1300s, this was a high point in the history of civilization, all right? You had these powerful empires. So you had the Mycenaean Empire, which is the Greeks before the Greeks. Then you have the Hittites, which at one point covered most of Turkey. This map was taken a little bit before their full expansion, but they ended up covering most of modern Turkey and some of modern Syria. And then you had the Mitanni, which was also Syria. And then you have Egypt. And you see Egypt here is taking up all the way, the land of Canaan, which is modern Israel, and well into what's now modern Lebanon. So on top of that, you had great city-states like Ugarit here was one of them. And then in addition, Byblos and Sidon and Tyre. And we're going to talk about some of these as well. So all these nations had this great interlinked trade network. And not only did they trade in, say, necessities like grain, which is quite important, but also luxury items, gold, jewelry, and everything in between. Pottery. In fact, pottery is extremely important, as I've talked about in a few lectures, in terms of identifying people and even more so in dating cities and dating layers of discoveries. So all this was being, it's like the world was flat, to borrow Tom Friedman's line. This entire world were trading with each other. They were involved with each other. They had international diplomacy. They had Cuneiform as an accepted writing. And then you had Akkadian as the lingua franca that all the diplomats spoke. And then you had a huge technological revolution as the Bronze Age was coming to an end and the Iron Age was starting. So you had a bunch of great stuff going on, if I had to summarize it in one sentence. And then after that, we ended up with the Bronze Age collapse. So what caused the Bronze Age collapse? And again, I went through this in a lot of detail in the last lecture, so I'm not going to do it now. But to mention it briefly, first of all, there appeared to be an extended drought period. So a long, long hundred-year drought period in really an extraordinarily high level of drought from a historical point of view. I pointed out last time that out of a 5,000-year period, this is one of the worst. Then you had what's been termed earthquake storms. There was about a 50-year period with repeated earthquakes that were tearing down city walls, destroying major cities, which then, if you figure all these port towns with all this international trade, tidal waves then follow to destroy the ports and demolish the boats. You have a technological imbalance. So the technological improvements is great. A technological revolution is great if it improves lives, but it also can create an imbalance between people, an imbalance between nations, and this can then have a negative impact as well. Overly dependent trade. So it's great that grain was going all over the Mediterranean, but when you take a country like the Hittites, a very influential country, and they are surviving on the grain provided by Egypt, it's a problem if Egypt then can't supply them the grain. Then we have bad leadership. So the great leaders are gone. During the extended reigns of the previous generation and the generation before that, the bureaucracies grew and grew and grew. So we have a larger bureaucracy, but much weaker leaders, which is a bad combination. But really, the uppercut, the KO, came from the Sea Peoples. So this is our focus. This evening, we're really talking about the Sea Peoples and the after effect of the Sea Peoples, and then zeroing in on the Philistines specifically. Here's an overview of the Sea Peoples before we dig in. So number one, they were a confederation of peoples. They actually were not all seafaring peoples. They're called Sea Peoples. Some of them were probably more land-based, but they've come down to us being termed the Sea Peoples. There were at least nine distinct groups of Sea Peoples, and they arrived at various times. Although you'll see when Ramesses III comes around, most of them all came at once, too, under his reign. But we'll see them mentioned in the archaeology over an extended period of time. The most famous Sea Peoples were the Philistines. I don't think I'm giving anything away to say that the Philistines were one of the Sea Peoples, but there's still a lot that goes into that. About half of the Sea Peoples are found in the Bible. Now, at first glance, if you Google this, you're going to be like, Seth, the only one in there is the Philistines. I've looked, and I'm going to tell you that's not true. They're there. You just haven't looked right, and I'm going to explain what that means and where the statement comes from over not just this lecture, but it's really going to take me through a couple more lectures because it's not just the Philistines. In fact, one of the biggest surprises is one of the tribes of Israel may have been married into the Sea Peoples, and there's actually evidence to support that. So we got a lot of fun stuff coming over the next couple lectures. Now, the origins of the Sea Peoples are in dispute, but some of them you have a pretty good feel for, and the ones that we know where they're from, the Shardana coming from Sardinia, the ones that we know for sure I will identify, but just know that they all really were from, in general, from this Mediterranean world. They were from what's now Greece. They were from the islands in the Aegean Sea. Some of them were either from Crete or used Crete as a stopover. Maybe some were from Cyprus. Certainly some were from Anatolia, like the Lucca. So I'll cover off of those as it continues, but just know that they are, in general, from this world. They didn't come from outer space. Now, they wreaked havoc all over the Mediterranean, and I wanted to name the countries that were attacked in modern terms. So look at the span of real estate these people attacked. Modern Egypt, modern Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, Sicily, Greece, and that's actually not a full list. They could have also had an impact in Italy. There was tons of islands here in the Aegean that they would have landed on. So we're talking about an invasion of a massive scale. Who were these people? What did they do? Well, they did have a navy, but the navy was mainly troop transports, and that's going to be very important for our Ramses III discussion. A lot of them were pirates. In fact, even when they wiped out all these sea lanes, all these sea lanes were guarded by the great powers. When the sea peoples wiped them out, it gave piracy a huge push. You didn't have anyone to police it anymore. These people, these sea peoples were also mercenaries, but some of them were family. Some of them were land-based people. They were immigrants looking for a better place for their family. If I have to say, I don't want to defend people wreaking havoc, but I will say there is a defense to them that they probably started getting on the move because they were suffering from drought. They couldn't feed their family, and it caused them to have to move to look elsewhere. It may have been a domino effect. It may not have been that people. That people may have been displaced from another people, but there is an argument to why so many people would be moving at the same time. That would be a defendable position. The earliest Egyptian records of the sea peoples are during the reign of Akhenaten. There's actually earlier records than that, but like I said, we're sticking with Egypt tonight because Egypt gives us the most details. That's going to be our next slide. We're going to talk about Akhenaten's experience with the sea peoples. The peak of the invasions, though, were after Akhenaten. This would be really Merneptah through Ramses III, and more on that later. The reason I'm spending so much time on the sea peoples, as you can see in blue below, is that they're not our only connection to biblical archaeology, but they're certainly the most significant link between the Bronze Age Collapse and biblical archaeology. Now, with pun intended, let's dive into the sea peoples. The first one, again, we're talking from the Egyptian point of view because we're all experts on Egypt now. The first sea peoples that we see Egypt had any dealings whatsoever with the Luka or Luki. By the way, you see me go back and forth in pronunciations on all these people because the different peoples recorded them, say the Hittites versus the Egyptians versus Ugarit versus Cyprus. They all may have said their names slightly different. I tend to use either the one or two ways that they're most commonly referred to. The Luka or the Luki, they were first mentioned in Egyptian records circa 1350 BC under Akhenaten. This is thanks to the Armarna Letters. The Armarna Letters, I did a rather lengthy program on, and that was actually King Tut Part 1, which discussed Amenhotep III and then went into the Armarna Letters, and then I continued it in King Tut Part 2, which then covers Akhenaten. So we know Akhenaten's a very, very, very interesting pharaoh. I'm not talking about him tonight other than to tell you to go back and look at that lecture if you do want to know more about Akhenaten. The Armarna Letters were a document archive of several hundred diplomatic letters written in Cuneiform, and the language is Akkadian, and they were discovered in an archive in Akhetaten. Akhetaten was the capital built by Akhenaten. So there are, like I said, several hundred letters, and they've all been individually numbered. So Armarna Letter 38 is our mention of the Luka people. So what happened under Akhenaten? He got a letter from the king of Alisaia, which is now Cyprus, and you see these two underlying points. This is the most important, the two most important points of the text. So we're saying we have this letter, this Armarna Letter from the king of Cyprus, and we have a story that the king of Cyprus is writing to tell Akhenaten that his country, Cyprus, is being attacked by the men of Luki year by year. They seize the villages in my own country. So this tells you that this is a multiyear raid taking place in villages in Cyprus, and we have a named invader, and the name of these people are the Luka. All right, we're going to come back to them later in a future lecture, but you've now met the Luka. Let's move on to the next. Now let's talk about the Shardana. Now, other than the Philistines, one may argue the Shardana are the most interesting to us, and you'll see why as tonight goes on, but the Shardana actually met the Egyptians under Ramses the Great, Ramses II. Now, the Shardana, circa 1278 BCE, were leading pirate raids on the coast of Egypt. They kept swooping in, they'd tear up a village, they'd take anything of value, take people for slaves, and then disappear again. So Ramses is not going to put up with this. He is, after all, Ramses the Great, and Ramses has a plan. He decides to use his own towns as bait, and basically he leaves his towns made to look like they're undefended. Meanwhile, he has set traps of both troops and ships hidden out of sight, waiting really probably for weeks, maybe months, for the Shardana to appear, and they patiently wait, and they patiently wait, patiently wait, and all of a sudden the Shardana appear, looking at what they think are these undefended towns along the coast, and they swoop in in a big wave for another invasion, and what do you know? The Egyptians are there waiting for them, and they have this one very large naval engagement in which the Shardana are defeated. The Shardana are captured, but instead of executing them, Ramses actually hires them. So these Shardana would actually become part of Ramses' personal bodyguard. They also would form units within the Egyptian army, which is going to come back later in this lecture, but you can always see the Shardana because they have these horned helmets, and I'm going to show it again later, but I just want to point out these horned helmets, which is our symbol for the Shardana. Makes them stand out. They seem to have also accepted an idea of being soldiers for land, so some of these people in probably weren't mercenaries so much as they were serving their time as a soldier for Egypt, and in return they'd eventually get land of their own to farm. This is most famously known from the legionnaires in Rome, right? If you were a legionnaire for 20 years in the Roman Empire, after your service was done, you could get a land to farm of your own, and so this was obviously already a very ancient practice even when Rome was at its peak. So now we're going to look at three years later, and three years later we had the Battle of Kadesh. Now those of you who have seen my Exodus lecture know I go into a lot of detail about the Battle of Kadesh. We look at those reliefs in detail. We compare them to what we learn in the Torah about the Mishkan, and I'm not going to go into that tonight. If you want to know what I'm saying, go back and look at that, but I want to make a couple points about the Battle of Kadesh. Number one, the Shardana fought on Egypt's side, so that's significant. The Shardana were part of Ramesses' personal bodyguard. If you remember the story where the Ramesses is caught practically by himself, and the Hittites are rushing in to attack him, and he stands tall against all these guys. Part of his personal bodyguard at that point in time were these Shardana guys with these horned helmets, and then the Egyptians were facing the Hittites, and the Hittites had the Luca. Remember the Luca from the last slide? Along with some of these other Sea Peoples as well. So it's more moral as a Karnak, and go back and look at the Exodus lecture if you want to know more. I just want you to see that here we have the Sea Peoples again, and we have the Shardana. I'm going to introduce you to the Shardana because they're going to stick with us for a while. Then we have Merneptah. Now Merneptah not only was talked about in our Exodus lecture, he had basically an entire lecture dedicated to his work when we talked about the oldest image of Jews. So if you want to see the oldest image of Jews, oldest known image of Jews, then go back and look at that lecture. You'll also learn a lot about Merneptah. I'm not talking anything about that tonight. I want to talk about Merneptah's experience with the Sea Peoples. So around 1208 BCE, the Libyans invaded with five different Sea Peoples. So they invade the Nile Delta, and they're referred to in Merneptah's reliefs as foreign invaders from the sea or northerners. There are two terms. So foreign invaders of the sea obviously helps us get the term Sea Peoples, and northerners is just a matter of perspective because Egypt is in the southern Mediterranean. Most anyone is going to be north of Egypt, hence the term northerners. I know a couple of you are probably thinking of the comparison of the Vikings. I'm going to come back and talk about the Vikings later tonight, I promise. So something else that's interesting about these people is it was not just soldiers. They brought women and children with them, more about that as well. So our source for Merneptah's battle against the Sea Peoples comes from the Great Karnak Inscription, which may surprise you, but it's actually at Karnak, hence the name. But we have other references to it. In our last lecture, we talked about the Israel-Stella, the Merneptah-Stella, and the whole first section of the Merneptah-Stella is talking about this battle with the Libyans and their Sea People allies. It's only the last three lines that's talking about Israel and the land of Canaan. Now let's talk about Merneptah's battle to save Egypt. So first, and by the way, this is all coming from the Karnak Inscription right here if you want to see it. But Merneptah gives this rousing speech. It's recorded he gives a rousing speech to his soldiers, which a la Braveheart is very important before a battle, Mel Gibson can tell you. Now, after this rousing speech, though, he actually has a good strategy. It's not just a speech. So what he does is he draws the opposing forces into a trap. This would be similar to what the Mongolians would use in steppe warfare, where they would take what looks like a small force and start moving them back. So when the Mongolians' enemies would approach what they think is a smaller force, the Mongolians could then come in from the side and attack. And this is kind of like that. So Merneptah has a small force, and he's having this enemy invasion of these Libyans and these Sea Peoples coming in to oppose this small force. Little do they know, on both sides are hundreds of Egyptian archers. So basically, the Libyans and Sea Peoples walk into a trap. They walk in, on both sides of them are archers, the archers jump up and they're firing at them with crossfire. The Libyans can't run fast enough. And then right when they're at their weakest point and they turn their backs, in ancient warfare, you never want to turn your back. If there's anything I've learned, you never turn your back. As soon as they hit the weakest point, and they turn their back, the Egyptians come in with this powerful chariot charge and wipe them from the battlefield. Now this took me about a minute or so to describe. It was actually a six hour battle. So I'm sure it didn't go as smoothly as that. But in the end, Egypt wins. No one's going to dispute that. The Egyptian records count 6,000 dead Libyans and Sea Peoples and another 9,000 taken prisoner. But Merneptah is not done when the battle ends. And what he does, which one can appreciate, is he decides to strengthen his allies to make it less likely this would come in the future. So I'm taking the Hittites as an example. If you remember, the Hittites were this mortal enemy, excuse me, a half a century ago, and now they're allies. So Egypt is sending grain to feed the Hittites. They actually even made Hittite weapons in Egypt, Hittite style weapons. And they integrated Hittite soldiers into their army, which was probably some sort of cross training as well. So they were good allies after being such vicious enemies for so long. Now that's Merneptah. We've talked a lot about him. And then I'm going to move on to our star pharaoh for tonight, and that's Ramses III. Okay, so Ramses III, he came on after we stopped talking about the pharaohs. Why? Because the last pharaoh I spoke about in the Exodus lecture was Tawasseret. Now, Tawasseret was a female pharaoh, so she was the last pharaoh of the 19th dynasty. And then when she died, there was some sort of power vacuum, and an official by the name of Sethnach seizes power. Okay, Sethnach is considered to have been some sort of royal official. He may have been a minor noble. We're not 100% sure his real status was before being pharaoh. But whether he was a royal official or a minor noble, or maybe he was both, the guy was able to grab the throne and become the pharaoh, right? So that's not a bad deal. Now, he probably married Merneptah's daughter, which is common practice. If you don't really have a strong claim to the throne, the best thing to do is marry the previous pharaoh's daughter. But that is not confirmed, and that would be disputed by some. It's not for sure. But regardless, whoever he does marry, and we'll pretend it's Merneptah's daughter for lack of anyone else, Sethnach and Merneptah's daughter have a son, and this is Ramses III. So this is not to be confused with Ramses the Great. That's Ramses II. This is Ramses III. But Ramses III is the last great king of the New Kingdom. He really was a great king, as well as his idol and predecessor, Ramses II. So Ramses III actually reigned 31 years, and he got started by copying what Ramses the Great did. He named his sons the same thing. Ramses the Great named his sons. He used the same titles as his officials and for himself that Ramses the Great had. He copied the temple building that Ramses the Great did. And so he did a lot of good stuff, okay? He had these massive building projects, not like Ramses the Great, but still big building projects. He gave a lot to the temples. He strengthened their religion. He sent faraway trade missions, which was, since the original foundation of Egypt was a great way of trying to show off your success by sending foreign trade missions, he opened up new mines or reopened mines. He was doing a lot. Busy guy. What he would be most known for today, like if you take a tour of Egypt, would be his mortuary temple, which is right here. This is Medinet Habu, and Medinet Habu is going to be where we look at our reliefs tonight. If it was a previous lecture, and I was focused more on Egypt, I would have done one of my virtual tours of Medinet Habu like I did the other ones, but I'm going to just do the reliefs tonight for lack of time. So in addition to his building, Ramses III was also a wartime leader. He fought the Sea Peoples. He had to fight the Libyans twice. He fought the Nubians, and this last one should surprise you. He also fought Edom, as in biblical Edom. So the Edom is now entering the picture for us for the first time. But not all was good. So let's talk about the bad. So first of all, these repeated wars are straining the economy. For the most part, these wars are defensive wars. They're not wars to enrich Egypt, so they're expensive, and they're for survival. Now, there's also a grain shortage. This is, I'm sure, related to this long-term famine we talked about in our last lecture. Regardless of the reason, the fact of the matter is Egypt had a surprisingly large grain shortage that in their recent history, they were unfamiliar with how to deal. Now, that would lead to, if I have any union people on, this would lead to the first recorded labor strike in human history, and this would be at Deir el-Medina. Now, Deir el-Medina, you've got to think way back to the Joseph Lecture. If you look at my Joseph Lecture, I have that 3D model of Deir el-Medina. What was it? It was a city founded by Amenhotep I, so that was circa 1500 BCE, a long time ago now. He built this village, favored laborers, whose job was to build all the temples for the pharaohs. They get paid better than the other workers. They get more luxury items than the other workers. They work on the pharaoh's temples, and in return for that, in return for this privilege, they have to live in the city all by themselves, way away from everything else. So, you have a major issue when the most privileged laborers in Egypt are striking because they haven't been paid. That would be an indication of something corrupt within the system, right? Now, Ramses III would die after 31 years on the throne. More on that in just a second. He would be succeeded by three sons in a row. So, Ramses IV, Ramses V, and Ramses VI were all his sons, but they all had short reigns. All three combined did not total 20 years of reign. Now, I want to talk about the harem conspiracy. This gets back to what I've told you, that there's still new things being discovered, and this is really a mystery that's been solved in the last 10 years. So, was Ramses III assassinated? What would make me ask something like that? Well, there is this very detailed judicial papyrus that can be found in Italy in Turin, and it actually is trial proceedings of an assassination attempt on Ramses III, and it seems that someone tried to kill him at a celebration at Medinet Habu, and when the documents were translated, it turns out it wasn't just someone. It was one of his secondary wives, so a minor queen called Taiyi. This is not the same Taiyi from those previous lectures that I talked all in all about. I'm sure she was named in her honor, but a different person, and another person named was Pentawarik, who was a son of Ramses III with Queen Taiyi. The documents also implicated some high-ranking officials, and in the end, they were found guilty and executed or forced to commit suicide or whatever. Well, the mystery up until eight years ago or so was, did it succeed? Because you have this long, detailed trial, and it never stated whether the pharaoh, whether Ramses III was actually killed or not. Only with the CT scan in 2012 were they able to see that his throat, and look at the bandaging here, that his throat was slashed and not some sort of accidental tear when they mummified him, like really seriously slashed. And then on top of that, in 2016, so just four years ago, it was seen that there were actually multiple attackers because there were multiple weapon wounds on his body. So not only was he discovered and assassinated, there was actually multiple people in the room to assassinate him. Now, so you see there's new things being discovered. Okay, so the Sea Peoples. Let's talk about the invasion of the Sea Peoples and what that meant for Ramses III. There we go. So this was the big one. Circa 1180 BCE, everything was on fire. So we have an invasion of multiple Sea People. If you see here, we have six named Sea People. Notice one of them are the Shardana. The Shardana fought on both sides. They were defending Egypt, and they were also the attackers. But what I really want you to see here is the Peleshet. That's underlined because the Peleshet are the Philistines. More on that on the next slide. So we had this mass migration of people, not only fighting them, but people bringing their wives, their kids, their possessions. You can even see the oxcarts and the relief, and I'll show you the oxcarts in a minute. And these are heavily armored. If you remember from our lecture, we talked about the improvement of the weapons, the improvements of the strategies, the improvements of the body armor. All this is coming together on this invasion force that is setting the eastern Mediterranean on fire. Now, I'm not going to say in the exact order, but just for the sake of those following with the map, we're going to have Greece and Crete fall, and they're gone. And then we move to Anatolia, to modern Turkey, and the Hittites fall. And Miletus and Troy fall. Cyprus is gone. Ugarit destroyed. Remember Ugarit is the one I talked about being like a Venice in the last lecture. So Ugarit, gone. And so we move down to what's now Lebanon. And then from Lebanon, we move into what's now modern Israel. Akko, gone. Ashdod, gone. Ashkelon, gone. And you see they're moving down the coast. They're coming for Egypt. The last stop is Egypt. So Ramses not only has this huge invasion force coming by land, he then finds out through his intelligentsia that there's also an amphibious force coming by sea at the same time. So let's take a break for that. And before I go further, I need to explain how the Peleset are the Palestinians. And for that, we're going to take a little etymology break. So we have two tracks of how Peleset became Palestinian and how it became Philistine. So Peleset in Egyptian, we find in the Torah as Peleshet in Hebrew. All right. And the Greeks, when the Greeks rewrote it, they decided to call it Palestina, similar to Latin, which is in Palestina. And then finally, we have English, which gives us Palestine. All right. And so our modern term is Palestine. Let's look at Philistine. Well, also the Hebrew, in Hebrew, they call them Philistine, which is plural. And then from the Greeks, that became Philistia. And then in that, from Latin, it became Philistinus. The Arabs, after they conquered, we call it Philistine. And then finally, in English, we call it Philistines. So why is it both Palestine and Philistines? How can it be both? Well, for that, we have to look at the Hebrew. We actually can blame the Hebrew for this confusion. So a very quick Hebrew lesson is if you see this little dot in these letters, that's a Dagesh. And the Dagesh changes the pronunciation of a letter. So this is the letter Bet, which is like B for Hebrew. And if it has the Dagesh, if it has the dot, it's B sound, like bun. But if it doesn't have that dot, it's a B sound, like van. You see a couple other examples, right? We have Shin and Sin, which actually can help explain the Peleset and Peleshet as well. But I really want to look at the letter Pe. The letter Pe, if it has the Dagesh, it has a P sound, like pass. If it doesn't, it has an F sound, like fine. Now, of course, the Israelis would not be crazy enough to write it both ways, right? Well, wrong. In fact, I grabbed one chapter of Samuel, one Samuel chapter 17. These are the first four verses. I don't have to look very far. If you look in yellow, it doesn't have the Dagesh. So this is Phileashtim, and then Phileashtim, and then here you have the Pe, so that's Phileashtim. So in pink here, you have it with the P sound, and in yellow here, you have it with the F sound. And these are four consecutive verses in the Bible. So you can see where the writers translating the Hebrew to Greek may get confused and use both pronunciations. Of course, in common practice today, we typically say Philistines when we're talking about ancient Palestinians, and we talk about Palestinians when we're talking about modern Palestinians. More on that in the next lecture. We're going to talk about how the land of Canaan got the name Palestine. Okay, so what is Ramses III going to do? This is it. This is do or die. It's the end of a civilization. Egypt has been a power for 2,000 years, and it looks like it's coming to an end as this force comes in from both land and sea. By the way, let me just mention, some people think it was a larger period of time between the land and the sea, but my main sources, both Klein up here and Wilkinson, make it back-to-back, so I'm following the back-to-back argument. Some people may say it's got a little bit of distance apart. Anyway, I just wanted to cover off because I'm afraid someone's going to complain if I don't say that. Okay, so let's talk about what Ramses III is going to do to save his 2,000-year-old civilization. First, he calls an emergency conscription of all able-bodied men, but he already has a number of active soldiers, okay? So he's going to take his active soldiers and move them all to hold their delta forts. So you have them coming down the land of Canaan, heading towards the Sinai, and there's a whole string of forts up there along the delta heading up into the land of Canaan. So all active soldiers report immediately to the delta forts. That's step one. Step two, the navy, and there is a sizable navy, the Egyptians care. I talked about it with Ramses II. So Ramses III is going to send all of his navy to the Nile Delta to protect Egypt by sea. Meanwhile, as soon as the conscripts get trained, they're also going to join the navy by sea, and now the powers are going to clash. Now, we have two battles. We have the land battle and we have the sea battle. The land battle, there's unfortunately not many details. We do have a great relief, which I'll show you in a minute, but the story's just not there. The general consensus was the Egyptians obviously won, but they probably wanted heavy losses. It was a story that, say, there were so many losses, so many people lost a friend or a child or a sibling in this defense. It's a story that Ramses III really couldn't brag about other than to say the Egyptians won, which is why we don't have a story about it. But clearly the Egyptians won or else the Sea Peoples would have invaded Egypt. The more interesting one is the sea battle because we have some great details. So Ramses III knows there's two weaknesses of this amphibious invasion force. So first of all, they're only troop transports. They don't really have warships. They only are transporting troops in all these boats. Number two, they do not have long range weapons. So Ramses' plan is set in motion. So first of all, not unlike we saw in his predecessor, he's going to give easy access to the mouth of the Nile. So imagine this big bay and all these Sea Peoples' troop transports are going to sail into this big bay. But as they come into the bay, all these archers pop up and start firing long range weapons at them. So they have all these arrows hitting them. Now remember, one of the weaknesses, they don't have any long range weapons, so they can't fire back. They're just getting pummeled by Egyptian arrows. Second, remember their other weakness is they don't have any warships. So when they turn around to try to get out of this bay, shooting arrows at them, they can't because the Egyptians have lined up all of their warships to block the exit way. And before you know it, the Sea People, they can't escape. They can't fire back. They can't break out, and Egypt triumphs. So the Sea People have been defeated in this ultimate climatic battle, and Egypt is the only one to defeat the Sea People. So I promise we'll look at a couple of reliefs tonight. So let's we're going to look at two. We're going to look at this one first. So let me zoom in on this one. All right. Now, this top left panel is showing you the sea battle, obviously, hence the boats. This right here is Ramses III. These are the prisoners taken afterwards. But I'm going to zoom in on a couple interesting points for you. So similar to our previous lectures, this red box here is this zoomed in. And then right here, this green box is here zoomed in. What does this tell me? So look at these. I want you to look at these arrows. So here you have an arrow pointing out. Well, an arrow. So here's an archer at work. So we know that the archers were critical to defeating the Sea Peoples. This shield is interesting because this tombstone shape was typical of an Egyptian shield. It means when you look at a relief, if it has this shape, it's Egyptian. If it's round, it's a Sea Peoples shield. Look here. Who is that? Y'all should all know by now. That guy with the horned helmet is one of the Shardana. And notice he's fighting with the Egyptians. But look at this. Here's another Shardana. What is this? He's fighting the Egyptians and killed in the process. So you see him on both sides. Here's one of these long swords. I talked about these improved swords towards the late Bronze Age. There's one of them. Now look, I want to show you a couple things on this close-up. This is probably not a hairstyle, although some have claimed that it is. It's probably some sort of feather cap. But this is the sign of a Peleshet. This is the sign of a Palestinian. This is what the Philistines look like in the Egyptian reliefs. Now let me say there are a couple other Sea Peoples that may have used this as well. Not our problem. For our purposes, for our lectures, if you see these guys, here's your Palestinians. Now also notice that they're in bondage. You can see the arms tied here and the necks are tied. Just interesting detail. Okay, so that was the sea battle. Now I'm going to go backwards one battle and show you the land battle. So here's the land battle. You can see, I said that the land battle, the Egyptians probably took much heavier losses. You kind of can see that in the chaos of the battle, even though it's not explicitly said. And I want to zoom in on some details. First of all, if you look here on the top left, you have another Shardana, and he's fighting the Peleshet. So this is a Shardana fighting for the Egyptians. And then if you look over here and here, see these are round shields. That's what I want to show you. So the round shields tell you the Philistines are their Sea Peoples. I told you about ox carts and oxen. So if you look at this picture, in this picture, we have oxen pulling ox carts, right? And then look at this detail. You know what those are? Those are the wives of the Sea Peoples. These are the Peleshet wives. So all their possessions are in the ox cart, including their wives. And then if you look here, here's a wife dropping one of their kids out of the cart. So she's probably trying to save her child and getting him out of the cart. So this shows you these were families on the move. These were not all warriors. And if you like this, I pointed out a couple other lectures that I did this similar type of look for, but I want to move on and talk about what happens after all this is over. So the Egyptians win. Ramses III wins. And that's it. The war is over. Egypt is saved. So this section right here is a quote from the Papyrus Harris. And I actually read this quote during the Merneptah lecture. But I told you not to worry about the people at the time. I'd cover it later. Well, now is that later. So it's saying that this is basically telling us without reading it to you, you see the Shardana I mentioned, the Peleshet I mentioned, the Zhekar we're going to talk about in the next lecture. So these Sea People were defeated, right? They were made ashes. They do not exist anymore. They were taken captive. I love how they don't exist anymore, but then they were taken captive. That's a neat trick. Oh, and they don't exist anymore and they were taxed. But all joking aside, basically, the Sea Peoples who were taken captive were not executed by and large. They were settled. They were used to form a buffer state. They were settled in the Canaan. They were settled in Syria. They were to form buffer states to protect Egypt from further invasions. And, you know, they were taxed too, so they gave a revenue source. Okay. I want to compare this with the Viking invasions in Europe. And I know I'm jumping ahead a couple thousand years. There's nothing wrong with that. But what I want you to see about the end result of the Sea Peoples versus the Vikings in Europe are as follows. So the Vikings were these fierce warriors invading by sea, attacking much of Europe, right? Traveling by bodies of water. In that sense, it was similar to the Sea Peoples. And I'm not going to go through the entire Viking invasions. That probably deserves a whole series of lectures in and of itself, such as little facts like the Vikings founded Russia and this sort of thing that's probably not common knowledge. But I really want to talk about just England and France, because they have two very similar stories to what happens to the Sea Peoples. One is, how did Normandy become Normandy? Because the Vikings kept invading at this same northwestern point of France over and over again. The Vikings kept coming into France, invading, killing, pillaging, wreaking havoc. So Charles the Simple, the ruler of France, struck a deal with the Vikings. He'd give them a bunch of land in northwestern France if they would form a buffer state to prevent further Viking incursions. And the Vikings were referred to as the Northmen. So this Duchy that they got got the name Normandy. So with this buffer state of Normandy formed, France was able to largely prevent further Viking invasions. And of course, Normandy is such a great place to invade France. Eisenhower 100% agreed with the Vikings 1,000 years later. Now, with England, England is also comparable, because when you talk about the English, they're not really from the island anymore, right? They mixed with Anglo-Saxons who were Germans. They mixed with Danes. And then they mixed, after the Normans in 1066 invaded, they mixed with the Normans. So they then became part, the modern British, native British person today is a conglomeration of all these people, including the invaders, both the Normans and the Danes, who came as Viking invaders and mixed. And that's really what happened to the land of Canaan afterwards. The Sea Peoples then married into the people in Canaan and became part of those people. Wow. So let's go back to our issue at hand. Now, the end result for Egypt after all these invasions are you have peace. So Egypt's enemies are defeated, but their world is collapsed, right? Egypt is still surviving, but their allies are gone. Egypt's trade is decimated. They don't know where they're shipping all that grain anymore, their economy is in shambles after these defensive wars. And although Egypt survives, they were never the superpower again. And I don't mean never. I mean, literally, they were never the superpower again after the Bronze Age collapse. But they do have new subjects. They have new people moving in the land of Canaan, including the Philistines. So what's the end result for the region? What does this do to the entire Eastern Mediterranean? So as I've already said, the great powers were gone and Egypt's power was reduced permanently. But a lot of these city-states are gone or destroyed. Ugarit, Kadesh, Aleppo, Troy, the Hittites. Hattusa is the capital of the Hittites. Mycenae. These great civilizations are lost. Some would rise again a couple hundred years later, some never would. And then if you look at what's now modern Israel, Ashkod, Ashkelon, Akko, Hazor. By the way, and Megiddo. And by the way, some of this is related to the Israelite conquest as well, but that's later. So about half of these sea peoples are going to be or would settle in the land of Canaan. So in the end, the Philistines and these other sea peoples will play a prominent role in the Bible. All right. I think I gave you enough info for tonight. So I hope you enjoyed this lecture. Come back next time for a lot more controversy. In fact, the next two lectures, I've got plenty of controversy for you. We're going to be talking about is the Bronze Age Collapse in the Bible. And yeah, I know I've been talking about the whole series, but we're going to be very specific in the next lecture. You will be able to emphatically say, yes, it is. We will also explore how you can use the Bronze Age Collapse to add details to the biblical tradition and to date the tradition of both the Jews exodus from Egypt and the Israelite conquest of Canaan. So I hope you'll join me for the next lecture. If in the meantime, I do have a weekly email if you'd like to be on that list. And as always, it's greatly appreciated if you would like this video and subscribe to my channel.