Who were the Sea Peoples? | The Bronze Age Collapse

Thanks to Wondrium for sponsoring this video. This is the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramses III, located at Medinet Habu near the modern day city of Luxor. Walk inside one of its courtyards and you will see this incredible inscription. The king himself is shown presenting war captives to the divine couple, the gods Amun-Re and Mut. The captives look kind of different, they're wearing nifty feathered headdresses quite unlike what the Egyptians are wearing. What's going on in this scene? A nearby inscription explains how Ramses III fended off a major foreign invasion of Egypt. It says The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms. They were coming, forward toward Egypt. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tejekru, Shekelesh, Denyan, and Weshesh. Lands united. Their hearts, confident and trusting, our plans will succeed. This is describing an alliance of peoples who attacked the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age. The Bronze Age of the Eastern Mediterranean lasted about 2,000 years. It began around 3300 BCE and saw the development of writing, the rise of urban living, and the construction of huge monuments still standing to this day. It was also an era of ancient superpowers. By the Late Bronze Age, these included the Assyrian Empire, the Egyptians and their vassal states in Canaan, and the Hittites and their Assyrian vassal states at Ugarit and Carchemish. Wealthy empires ruling over vast regions of land. But then, in around 1175 BCE, things fell apart. What we now call the Bronze Age Collapse. Long-distance trade imploded, cities were abandoned, political institutions fragmented, and in the midst of this turmoil, reports like this started popping up of invaders sweeping across the Mediterranean. From the Hittite heartland to the coast of the Egyptian delta, they destroyed cities and overthrew kings. Finally, in a heroic last stand, Ramses III defeated them. They're now called the Sea Peoples. But who were they? And did they cause the Late Bronze Age Collapse? Egyptian sources first describe a major invasion involving the Sea People around 1208 BCE during the reign of the pharaoh Merneptah, the son of Ramses the Great. Apparently they were allies of the Libyans, possibly even hired mercenaries that joined the Libyan invasion of the Egyptian delta. This battle is described in a text called the Great Karnak Inscription, inscribed on a wall of the Amun Temple at Karnak, a huge temple complex in modern-day Luxor. Details of the battle are also described on a large victory stela, sometimes called the Israel Stela because it contains the first mention of Israel in ancient Egyptian texts. In this battle, the major enemy is the Libyan force, called Meshwesh, but several other groups that joined their army are also identified. The Luka, Shardana, and Shekelesh are all described as northerners coming from all lands. Merneptah defeated them, but they would appear yet again in greater force just over 30 years later, as described in the Temple of Ramses III. Both in this temple and in the Great Karnak Inscriptions, we get a sense that the Sea Peoples were an alliance of different people groups from different places. We'll explore where they may have come from in the next section, but it's important to know that they did not appear out of nowhere. The Egyptians knew of these people groups already. Some individual Sea Peoples were mentioned over 100 years before Ramses III, sometimes as mercenaries serving the Egyptians or Hittites. But now they were on a rampage. The evidence from Medinet Habu indicates how their attacks unfolded. First they attacked the coast of Anatolia and moved inland to attack the center of the Hittite Empire. Archaeology indicates that around 1200 BCE or shortly after, the Royal Fortress and other administrative buildings in the Hittite capital Hattusha were burned to the ground, presumably by the Sea Peoples. Together with the pre-existing problems of chronic food shortages, military campaigns, and unstable leadership, the Sea Peoples' attack was one disaster in a string of disasters that entirely dissolved the Hittite Empire. Their vassal states enjoyed short-lived independence before they too were destroyed. The Sea Peoples also hammered the coasts of Cyprus, Syria, and Canaan, though we shouldn't think of this as a single campaign. This seems to have taken place over the duration of about two decades in the Late Bronze Age, with frequent attacks against various cities and settlements along the southern Anatolian coast and multiple clashes with Cyprus. Toward the end of these two decades, Ugarit and Cyprus were hit hard, and in an amazing stroke of archaeological luck, correspondences between these two kingdoms survive that give us a glimpse into the Sea Peoples' attacks. Apparently before the final destruction of both kingdoms, they exchanged panicked letters about the invasion. King Amarapi of Ugarit seems to have been the first to see the Sea Peoples' fleet and The King of Cyprus responded with advice on how Amarapi might save his city. Concerning that which you wrote me, enemy ships have been sighted at sea. If it is true that ships have been sighted, then make yourself very strong. Now where are your infantry and your chariot force stationed? Surround your cities with walls, bring your infantry and chariot force into them, be on the lookout for the enemy, and make yourself very strong. However, the Cypriot King's advice came too late. By the time Amarapi received this reply, the Sea Peoples were already destroying his cities and were rapidly approaching his capital. Amarapi responded, the ships of the enemy have been coming. They have been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land. Doesn't my father know that all my infantry and chariot force are stationed in Hatti, and that all of my ships are stationed in the land of Luka? They have not arrived back yet, so the land is thus prostrate. Now the seven ships of the enemy which have been coming have done harm to us. We can glean a lot of information from this letter. Amarapi says that his armies and ships are stationed in Hatti and Luka, and they haven't returned back yet, but it's possible they were already destroyed after the collapse of Hattusha. Furthermore, he says that his ships are stationed in the land of Luka, which if you remember from our Egyptian sources, the people of Luka were among those identified as one of the Sea Peoples. It's very possible that his navy was already destroyed or tied up in a protracted battle. In any case, his kingdom was defenseless. Another letter was sent to Amarapi from an official in Cyprus following one of the Sea Peoples' attacks, warning Amarapi that the Sea Peoples might be approaching Ugarit. Regarding the things that the enemies have done to the people of your country and your ships. They have done these transgressions against the people of the country. Now the twenty ships that the enemies earlier left in the mountainous areas have not stayed behind. They left suddenly and we do not know where they are. I wrote to you to inform you so that you can guard yourself. But ultimately, their warnings did not help. The archaeological record reveals that Ugarit fell. And here we return to where we started, at the Mortuary Temple of Ramses III. The Sea Peoples continued south toward Egypt, and in around 1176 BCE, the Egyptian army engaged the Sea Peoples in a land battle near Ashkelon, a Canaanite city that had been destroyed. He also placed a naval force nearby along the Sinai coast, blockading the Sea Peoples and cutting off any attempt to escape by sea. The land battle is described in the walls of the temple. Now the heart of this god, the lord of the gods, was prepared and ready to ensnare them like birds. Those who reached my frontier, their seed is not. Their heart and soul are finished forever and ever. They were dragged in and closed and prostrated on the beach, killed and made into heaps from tail to head. The Sea Peoples then attacked a site somewhere on the coast of the Egyptian delta. A scene carved on the exterior north wall of the temple displays a violent naval battle, with capsized ships and drowning Sea Peoples, characterized by their nifty feathered headgear. The inscription says, Now the northern countries, which were in their isles, were quivering in their bodies. His majesty has gone forth like a whirlwind against them, fighting on the battlefield like a runner. The dread of him and the terror of him have entered into their bodies. They are capsized and overwhelmed in their places. Many historians believe that these two battles occurred at about the same time, either two battles in close succession or one continuous battle over some space of time. Regardless, the Sea Peoples apparently were defeated. As we saw, the artwork at the temple depicts captives marching forward to be displayed before the king, along with piles of severed hands that represent the body count of slain enemies. So who were these Sea Peoples and where did they come from? Well, the details are hazy and historians have offered a bunch of different theories. Let's start with what they were not. Ironically, they were not all Sea Peoples in the first place. Only some of these peoples are called of the sea or coming from islands. And basically all of the scholars I've read on the subject begrudgingly use the name only because it's so popular and it's been indiscriminately applied to all these invaders mentioned in Egyptian sources. In fact, one major book on the topic only refers to Sea Peoples in quotations. We also shouldn't think of the Sea Peoples as wave after wave of organized armies, like what you might see in a Sword and Sandal movie, nor were they simply an aggressive force of pirates. The Egyptian sources show that these groups apparently had women, children, household goods, and even livestock with them. So while some of these attacks may have been military actions in the conventional sense of armies and navies, or even could be classified as piracy, many if not most of these waves of Sea People can be described as migrations of larger populations that included people intent on settling lands in the Eastern Mediterranean. It's also more accurate to think of them as loosely or poorly organized groups of migrants composed of different peoples from many different places. The available evidence mentions several names, but not all have been matched with ancient places of origin. The prominent names given are the Luka, Denyan, Shekelesh, Shardana, Ekwesh, Tejekru, Teresh, and Peleset. Luka most certainly refers to southwestern Anatolia and the area of Lycia, and had long been an enemy of Cyprus and Egypt. Peleset almost certainly refers to the Philistines of southern Canaan, famously mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as one of the rivals of the Israelites. The other groups are more difficult to identify, and some of these identifications are educated guesses. The Denyan have been matched to the Denuna of southern Anatolia and the area of Cilicia. The Tejekru and Weshesh possibly were also from this region. The Shardana may have come from around Byblos, but many historians think their name indicates they could have come from as far away as Sardinia, since Shardana and Sardinia share almost the same consonants, kind of like how the name Peleset shares the same consonants as Philistine. The Shekelesh have been suggested to have come from Sicily, also based on linguistic grounds. The Teresh and Ekwesh have been proposed to have come from areas in and around Greece. But the archaeological record doesn't corroborate virtually any of these theories. Like I said, it's educated guesswork. It's even possible that these peoples settled the proposed areas only after Ramses III defeated them, rather than having originated from there. For example, maybe the Shardana didn't originate from Sardinia, but rather moved there after Ramses III defeated them and dispersed them. So as you can probably guess from my constant use of the words probably, maybe, and possibly, there simply is not much data to work with. We have their names, but we don't have physical evidence of who they were, where they came from, and where they went after their defeat. With the exception of the Philistines, who are fairly well understood from archaeological evidence. Both the Hebrew Bible and Egyptian sources describe the Philistines living in several cities in southern Canaan, such as Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gaza, Gath, and Ekron. And based on archaeological evidence found at some of these cities, it's very likely that the Philistines originated from peoples with roots around the Aegean Sea. For example, compare this Mycenaean three-sea pottery discovered on the island of Kalymnos, with this pottery discovered from the Philistine city of Ekron. Virtually indistinguishable. And this Philistine pottery is locally produced, which would make sense if they were migrants from the Aegean world taking with them pottery manufacturing techniques. Also compare Philistine and Mycenaean religious figurines. Again, possible evidence of migrants taking with them religious and technical know-how from the Aegean world to southern Canaan. The slam dunk came in 2019 when genetic analysis of Philistine skeletons found similar DNA markers that we see in people from southern Europe and the Aegean Sea. Archaeologists now largely agree that Philistine culture has Aegean roots, but quickly became entangled with Canaanite culture sometime after 1200. However, although we know a lot about the Philistines, the rest of the Sea Peoples largely remain a mystery. The archaeologist Eric Klein offers a good summary when he says the Sea Peoples probably started as waves of migrants from the western Mediterranean to the eastern Mediterranean, but by the time they were attacking Ramses III in the 1170s, they were a mixed bag, having picked up survivors from the collapsing Mycenaean, Minoan, and Hittite cities along the way. So did they cause the Bronze Age collapse? This was an older theory proposed in the late 19th century, basically arguing that Sea Peoples were marauders who brought about the collapse of the Bronze Age and ushered in a so-called Dark Age. But this romanticizes the effect of the Sea Peoples' invasion. The simple fact of the matter is, things are never that simple. Kingdoms, especially several kingdoms at once, rarely, if ever, collapse because of a single factor. By 1200 BCE, when Merneptah engaged the Sea Peoples in battle according to the Great Karnak Inscription, things were already collapsing. The Mycenaean civilization of Greece was experiencing a gradual decline. The Hittites were struggling to maintain their power, plagued by all sorts of factors, including, well, a plague that destroyed much of their labor force and killed their king in the 1300s, one hundred years before that battle with Merneptah. But the Hittite kingdom was also struggling with unrest within the royal court, battles with nearby rivals, as well as habitual disappointing grain harvests. Similar internal strife was affecting the Egyptians and Assyrians too, though they wouldn't fall into heavy decline until some decades later. In other words, the Sea Peoples arrived on an already collapsing scene, and this was a slow-motion, civilizational train wreck. Cities like Mycenae, Hattusha, Troy, Ugarit, and others were destroyed, but these destructions were separated by decades and even by as much as one hundred years, and it's very difficult to identify the Sea Peoples as the singular cause of any particular destruction. Sure, some probably were destroyed by the Sea Peoples, but the archaeologist Eric Klein says they get more blame than they deserve. It's just as likely that many of these cities fell because of local uprisings or natural disasters. The collapse itself was also a patchwork, since apparently several cities survived the turmoil relatively intact. So all this to say, a lot of factors catalyzed the Bronze Age collapse. Some of these factors involved changes in the climate that triggered drought and famine. Other factors involved social and political unrest that led to the collapse of administrative institutions that were holding these cities and empires together. The Sea People invasions probably contributed by upsetting trade and resource production. After all, the cities along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea were the gateways between Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, and the Aegean. So destroying several of these cities undoubtedly put incredible strain on economic and diplomatic relationships. But the Sea Peoples might have been one of the products of the Bronze Age collapse themselves, escaping their homelands as refugees. This is the conclusion of the archaeologist Eric Klein who I cited earlier, who thinks they were victims as much as they were oppressors, and have been set up as ancient scapegoats by 20th century historians who were swayed by the dramatic Egyptian sources that depict them as relentless invaders. Nevertheless, the surviving texts illustrate the terrors that kingdoms and cities faced during the Bronze Age collapse. It's perhaps this emotional relatability that drives our modern fascination with the mysterious Sea Peoples, and the cities they left burning behind them as they sailed south to attack Egypt. I'd like to thank today's sponsor, Wondrium. Wondrium is an online platform with a ton of educational video content on basically any topic you can imagine. Just to demonstrate this, while I was making this video on the Bronze Age collapse, I wanted to see what Wondrium had to offer on the subject. And sure enough, a quick search for the Bronze Age revealed an entire series on ancient cities taught by an actual ancient historian. And watching through the series, I find myself learning about some of the same cities we like Jericho. They also feature a series on the ancient architecture of palaces, which were a defining feature of the Bronze Age as city-states built up huge palatial administrative centers. So all this to say, are you nerdy about a particular subject? 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