Ep. 020 – The Sea Peoples Sail South: Vol. II

Today we wrap up our look at the Late Bronze Age Collapse. We focus heavily on Egypt's naval clash with the Sea Peoples in 1177 BCE. Our main sources are the inscriptions and relief at the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu. The relief in particular is very enlightening, revealing for the first time the use of a new sail type by both the Sea Peoples and the Egyptians. We talk about this technological development and finish up by looking a bit at where the Sea Peoples ended up and how the stage was set for the dawn of the Iron Age.

Listen to the Episode

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Today we’re going to take our closest look at the Sea Peoples and their most well-documented encounter with Egypt. It’s going to involve some reading between the lines, as most history does, because the Egyptians left us more documentary evidence about these people than we find anywhere else, but the accuracy of the Egyptian view on things isn’t always, well, accurate. One Egyptian inscription says of these foreigners and their origins that “The islands shook, and vomited forth their nations all at once.” As we have seen over the past few episodes now, it wasn’t quite so instantaneous. It certainly escalated toward the end, and maybe that is what the Egyptians were referring to, but the ultimate collapse of the Bronze Age powers and the appearance of the Sea Peoples at various locations around the Mediterranean was the conclusion of a process that had begun at least a century prior to 1177 BCE.

We wrapped up last time in 1180 BCE. The Bronze Age world was literally in flames. The Mycenaean people had been devastated, most of their palaces destroyed and abandoned. It’s basically now thought that portions of the Mycenaean populace were among the Sea Peoples, but we’ll get to that further in this episode. The Hittites had been completely destroyed, and although they probably weren’t among the Sea Peoples, the Lukka were, a people located in southern central Anatolia, a people who’d been called sea raiders and pirates since at least 1400 BCE. Ugarit and many other Levantine merchant cities had also been annihilated. A few major cities there survived and would become the backbone of the Phoenician trading empire, but the rest never recovered, leaving the region relatively weak and open to migrants.

1177 BCE

From this place of destruction and the rapid culmination of societal collapse we now move forward to 1177 BCE. It’s necessary to note at the outset of this look at the Sea Peoples’ invasion of Egypt that the entirety of the Egyptian account was written by the man who claimed to have won a glorious victory, Ramesses III. As such, we can’t necessarily take everything he says at face value. Egyptian accounts of battles and other successes are generally thought to be “elaborate propaganda” at worst, and self-aggrandizing exaggeration at best. As you might expect though, trying to parse fact from fiction leaves us in a tough spot, because this account is the only account we have concerning the invasion. As usual, we’ll simply have to do the best we can.

The Medinet Habu Inscription

Let’s start with the text of the inscription to see what Ramesses said took place. The text at Medinet Habu 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, from Khatte, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on, being cut off at [one time]. A camp was set up in one place in Amurru. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjekker, Shekelesh, Danuna, and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting.”

A lot of this inscription rings true, based on the evidence that’s been uncovered elsewhere. First, the lands that Ramesses said were “cut off” were all actually destroyed in the decades around 1200 BCE. Khatte is the Egyptian term for Hatti, the Hittites, a once-great civilization that had been laid low by 1180 and was completely gone. Qode was also probably a region in southeastern Turkey, a place that also suffered destruction. Carchemish was part of the Hittite Empire at one point, but lying a bit further east, it also bordered northern Syria. As you might expect, it also was invaded though not completely destroyed. Arzawa is a region we’ve discussed, lying in southwestern Anatolia and the site of both Mycenaean raids and later destruction during the collapse. Finally, Alasiya also saw invasion and destruction in the period. Alasiya was the island of Cyprus, which we discussed last time. Cyprus gives us the most problems in terms of knowing when exactly the destruction occurred and what caused it, though the occurrence of invasion and destruction is evident on the island and in the textual record.

The bottom line, then, is that the geography listed by Ramesses III here isn’t in too much dispute. The more difficult task comes with the examination of the groups who supposedly made up the confederation of invaders, the Sea Peoples.

The Sea Peoples in the Medinet Habu Inscription

In the Medinet Habu inscription we see the five groups I listed a second ago: Peleset, Tjekker, Shekelesh, Danuna, and Weshesh. There is another supplementary inscription that lists the Sharadana as well, a name we’ve grown familiar with by now. Six groups of people then, and I feel the need to reiterate something that I hope I’ve made clear enough by now. The term ‘Sea Peoples’ wasn’t really affixed to this group until it was used in 1855 and began to stick within academic circles. Before then, the Egyptian terms like “foreign countries” or “countries of the sea” were generally used. I bring this up just to emphasize the fact that the Sea Peoples were not a homogenous group. They were made up of different ethnic groups and peoples from various locations, all prodded to migration because of famine, drought, societal collapse, and so on.

So, what exactly does Ramesses tell about his battle with this confederation of invaders? For starters, I should clarify the fact that Ramesses actually encountered the Sea Peoples on several different occasions. In conjunction with the depiction of the naval battle we’re about to discuss, there is also mention of a land battle. The relief connected to this land battle shows warriors of the Sea Peoples, but is also shows “ox-carts, women, and children.” This depiction is why the Sea Peoples are now seen as migrant peoples and not simply as wandering warriors like they were once depicted. Beyond this land battle that’s mentioned, the main depiction and account tells us of a great naval battle where Ramesses defeated the Sea Peoples, although there may have been two naval encounters depending on how you interpret the inscriptions.

What follows is Ramesses’ version of the conflict, but again keep in mind the Egyptian state propaganda angle to everything (listen to how Ramesses describes himself, for instance), and we’ll try to look into the underlying meaning later on. Following the paragraph from earlier about the countries the Sea Peoples destroyed on their way to Egypt, Ramesses then recounts the following:

“Now, it happened through this god, the lord of gods, that I was prepared and armed to trap them like wild fowl. He furnished my strength and caused my plans to prosper. I went forth, directing these marvelous things. I equipped my frontier in Zahi, prepared before them. The chiefs, the captains of infantry, the nobles, I caused to equip the river-mouths, like a strong wall, with warships, galleys, and barges. They were manned completely from bow to stern with valiant warriors bearing their arms, soldiers of all the choicest of Egypt, being like lions roaring upon the mountain-tops. The charioteers were warriors, and all good officers, ready of hand. Their horses were quivering in their every limb, ready to crush the countries under their feet. I was the valiant Montu, stationed before them, that they might behold the hand-to- hand fighting of my arms. I, king Ramesses III, was made a far-striding hero, conscious of his might, valiant to lead his army in the day of battle. Those who reached my frontier, their seed is not, their heart and soul are finished forever and ever. Those who came forward together on the sea, the full flame was in front of them at the river-mouths, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore. They were dragged in, enclosed, and prostrated on the beach, killed, and made into heaps from tail to head. Their ships and their goods were as if fallen into the water. I have made the lands turn back from even mentioning Egypt: for when they pronounce my name in their land, then they are burned up.”

Analyzing the Naval Battle between Ramesses III and the Sea Peoples

This is the text which is generally identified as describing the naval battle. Apparently Egypt knew that the Sea Peoples were en route, because they used their ships to block entrance to the Nile, using at least three types of ships which were called warships, galleys, and barges. From this description of Egyptian preparation and organized naval power, it seems that any victory they won was obtained thanks to their organization. The Sea Peoples were made up of various groups of migrant peoples, and although they obviously had some advanced maritime technology (we’ll get to that later on also), they were used to surprise raids against cities and peoples that didn’t have the military power to effectively defend themselves. At one time they received credit for destroying all of the Bronze Age city-centers that fell around 1200, but we’ve now seen how the Sea Peoples only account for a fraction of the destruction. The Sea Peoples were displaced peoples in combination with the sea raiders of smaller locales, so when they came up against Egypt, although in decline from her former glory days, they found her a force still to be reckoned with. If you remember back to our Egypt- centric episodes, although we generally think of Egypt as a desert country, which it is, the Nile allowed Egyptian to also become adept sailors. This shipbuilding and naval experience helped them fend off the waves of foreign invaders that tried to hit Egyptian shores during the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

Egypt was organized and able to fend off the invasion, so let’s now look at just how a naval battle was fought way back here at the close of the Bronze Age. The essence of most naval conflict before the age of sail was hand-to-hand combat. I like how Paine puts it: he says that before the age of sail, ships “served as little more than floating battlefields,” and when it comes to the actual combat, that is true. Obviously ships saw heavy use as as transport in campaigns throughout history, but in the case at hand, we have no mention of transport, simply of the conflict at sea. In conjunction with the relief image of the battle, we see that the Sea Peoples relied on spears as their weapon of choice, while the Egyptians used the bow and arrow, thus giving Egypt the advantage of range. If Ramesses can be believed, then their use of the bow and arrow allowed Egypt to pick off the Sea Peoples before coming within range of their spears. The depiction also indicates that Egypt used a grapnel to grab ahold of the Sea Peoples’ ships once the danger had been stemmed. From there, the Egyptians then maneuvered their ships perpendicular to the the enemy ship, paddled backward, and thus capsized the ships of the Sea Peoples. This is precisely what we see in the relief of the naval battle, the Egyptian ships upright while the ships of the Sea Peoples list at various angles, one ship completely capsized with its crew flailing about in the water while the nearby Egyptian continue to pelt them with deadly arrows.

The Egyptians, then, used their ships as platforms to carry out battle as they would have done on land. Their added use of the grapnel to destroy the floating platforms of the enemy is ingenious, and it’s quite rare to see this used as a battle tactic so early in history. The ram hadn’t yet been added to the galley so as to transform the ship itself into a weapon, so at this point in history you could even say that the grapnel used against the Sea Peoples was the first true nautical weapon. Or, maybe fire could be said to be the first nautical weapon, but that’s a somewhat needless debate. It does seem that the Egyptians used fire in their battle as well, but there’s no indication of how they employed the fury of flame against the Sea Peoples. Possibly fire arrows to light the ships of the enemy from a distance, but as history has shown, fire is rather indiscriminate, so one naval force utilizing fire always ran the risk of that fire turning back against their own wooden vessels.

That is the main account of the battle from Ramesses’ point of view, so let’s now talk a bit about the ships that are depicted at Medinet Habu. We’ve already talked about the depiction a little, so before we keep going, please do yourself a favor and visit the website to take a look at this famous relief from the temple in Egypt. It’ll really help you get a better idea of what I’m talking about in this discussion, especially when we get to sail and rigging set-ups on these ships. As for the depiction of the battle, we’re shown nine ships in total, four Egyptian ships and five ships controlled by the Sea Peoples. We know the difference between the two because the Sea Peoples are depicted wearing unique headdress in comparison to the Egyptians.

This whole look at the headdress worn by the different groups within the Sea Peoples is a main focus of scholars who trace the origin of those groups. It would be a very long rabbit-trail for us, I think, so I’ll keep it short. Maybe you can try to pick out the various styles of headdress on the Sea Peoples in the Medinet Habu relief if you’re curious. The Shardana are thought to be the ones with the helmets that have two small horns, they’re also shown wearing these helmets back in their depiction at the Battle of Qadesh. The Peleset are in the ship in the top row, the second ship over. They are wearing the feathered-headdress style helmets, and no, not a Native American style headdress. It’s a bit hard to describe, so take a look to see just what I mean. The Peleset warriors also seem to be wearing a very stylized cuirass, the torso and chest armor piece. The only other group that’s easy to identify is the Tjeker. There is a Tjeker warrior wearing a short rounded type of helmet, bent over the side of his ship which is right under the hieroglyphics in the center of the main Medinet Habu relief. The other groups are identifiable in other depictions from around Egypt, but that’d take us much too far down the rabbit hole.

Back to the ships at hand. As far as hull shape goes, the Egyptian ships have a much more graceful curve from bottom to end. The ships of the Sea Peoples have a curved hull, but each end of the ship has a nearly vertical extension, capped by a figurehead that looks very much like a bird. The Sea People’s ships are very similar to the depiction from Kynos that we talked about in Episode 15, and it’s intriguing to note the parallel between the ‘feathered-headdress’ of the Peleset and the ‘feathery-looking’ headdress of the warriors on the Kynos ship. Hard to draw any conclusions from that, but they do seem to resemble one another, and this is one reason why it’s widely believed that displaced Mycenaeans comprised part of the Sea Peoples.

Another major difference between the ships of the two sides is that the Egyptian ships are shown with oars, and the Sea Peoples’ ships do not have visible oars. The main thought about this difference is that the purposeful depiction of the Sea Peoples’ ships without rowers and oars was meant to indicate that the Egyptians had successfully pulled off a surprise attack against their enemies who’d been lured into the river mouth and put away the oars and brailed up their sails. This interpretation is buttressed by another part of the inscription where Ramesses says: “Now then, the northern countries which were in their islands were quivering in their bodies. They penetrated the channels of the river-mouths. Their nostrils have ceased (to function, so) their desire to breathe the breath. . . . They are capsized and overwhelmed where they are. . . . Their weapons are scattered upon the sea. His arrow pierces whom of them he may have wished, and the fugitive is become one fallen into the water.” It’s logical to assume that the relief at Medinet Habu and the accompanying inscriptions were meant to describe the same event, but whether it actually happened that way or not is impossible to say. This, as we know, was the pharaoh’s version of the story.

The Evolution of Sail Technology in Depictions of the Sea Peoples

Getting back to the depiction, one of the most important pieces of information we can pull out concerns the sails being used on the ships of both sides of this conflict. The sails are merely a physical aspect of the ships and are apolitical in nature, thankfully; I don’t know how Ramesses would even go about spinning propaganda based on the sails of the ships. Therefore, we can put a little more confidence in the view that these were indeed the sail types being used at the time, both by Egyptian warships and by the ships that the Sea Peoples had either built or gotten their hands on.

The sails are so significant to the development of sailing technology because this is one of the first clear indications that the brailed-rig and loose footed sail had been adopted on a widespread basis. I’ll try to explain the significance here in a moment, but let’s start by noting that up until this point in history, sails were certainly in use, but almost every depiction before 1177 shows a square sail. A square sail was certainly better than no sail, we’ll concede that. It’s obvious benefit lies in the ability it provides to harness the force of the wind, that almost goes without saying I think. A square sail as it was used before 1777 BCE and even after that in many places around the world, was generally spread between two spars on the mast, an upper and lower yard to which the square sail was held fast. This set-up got the job done as a starting point in sailing technology, but because the bottom edge of the sail was rigidly boom-footed, it wasn’t loose-footed, the sail couldn’t be trimmed very well in order to catch the maximum amount of wind and fill the sail completely.

That was one major step forward with the introduction of this loose-footed sail during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. It took the already sleek and low-lying galley hull and gave it the ability to take a more full advantage of the wind. The loose- footed sail resulted in better maneuverability, “as well as the ability to sail much closer to the wind.” This was when the sails were raised, though, so the introduction of the brailed rig allowed the sails to be hoisted much more quickly and controlled much more easily. In essence, instead of having the sail rigidly fastened to the upper and lower yards, the sail had lines, ropes, attached to the bottom of a sail and the lines were then run vertically up the sail through rings that had been sewn into the front of the sail. At the top of the sail, where it met the upper yard, the ropes were run over the top of the yard and back toward the stern where they could be hauled to easily raise and lower the sail. In his amazing paper about this innovation in sailing technology, Jeff Emanuel likens the brailed- rig system to raising and lowering Venetian blinds.

The combination of this brailed-rig and loose-footed sail with the already existing galley resulted in a ship that was, in gamer terms, leveled up. As I said, the long, narrow profile of the galley hull was engineered for speed, so this innovation took that speed and gave it better maneuverability and a way to get under sail more quickly. For the Sea Peoples, and perhaps even the Mycenaeans at one point, this set-up gave them an edge in their raids on coastal towns and cities. I believe I made this comparison in a previous episode, but the Egyptian depiction confirms that the Sea Peoples and other seaborne raiders of the time had a speed and maneuverability advantage akin to that held by the Vikings of their future. Given that the the Late Bronze Age Collapse was a period where maritime raids and piratical-style groups increased at the expense of the centralized powers with their trade routes, it’s entirely likely that this new technology was developed by the raiders.

Emanuel points out that merchants and pirates shared some common struggles in terms of their technological needs, namely, “the struggle to place as many rowers as possible into as small a hull as practical.” The sail solved this problem when the wind was advantageous, but the boom-footed square sail wasn’t very versatile. Introduce the more versatile sail we’ve just mentioned and suddenly the raiders have more speed, more maneuverability, and these on a more consistent basis, so they can even sacrifice a few rowers to open up some space for that precious pirate booty before they make their getaway.

The development of sail technology depicted in the Medinet Habu relief is extremely important to maritime history, but it’s obvious that any advantage the Sea Peoples or their composite people-groups enjoyed in that respect wasn’t very long-lived. The Egyptians in this depiction had the same type of sails on their ships, so this technology must have reached them as well by 1177. It’s hard to say for sure where this improvement to the sail originated. There is a depiction found at Saqqara that appears to show this set up of a yard and brail-rigging, even what appears to be a crow’s nest atop the mast. The depiction was found in Egypt, but it shows a ship of Syro-Canaanite origin and it’s thought to be around a century older than the Medinet Habu depiction. Even with a conservative date, say 1250 BCE, this shows us that the brailed-rig, loose-footed sail was probably in use by merchants from the Levant before the Bronze Age Collapse really accelerated, and it must have been known to the Egyptians as well since it was depicted in Egypt. We’ve also seen that even prior to 1250 BCE, the Egyptians had been the subject of an attempted sea invasion, even if it was small in comparison to 1177.

It’s actually that first invasion, the one mentioned by Ramesses II back in 1280, that may have been a catalyst for the Egyptian adoption of the more advanced technology of the early Sea Peoples. Remember that he took some of the Shardana captive, he used them in his bodyguard at Qadesh, but we also have evidence that he may have reverse-engineered the ships used by the Shardana in their unsuccessful invasion. The Hittites were still kicking back in 1280, and there is a letter written from Ramesses II to Hattusili III where Ramesses says that he is sending a pair of ships up to the Hittites, so that his shipwrights can “draw a copy” of it in order to build a similar ship. We’ve seen how the Hittites weren’t really a seafaring empire, but how they made a go of invading Cyprus toward 1200 BCE because it had become a hotbed for sea raiders, proto-Sea Peoples perhaps. Egypt’s early successes in repelling the Sea Peoples and this letter from Ramesses that he’s sending up ships to be reverse engineered lead us to a very intriguing thought: is it possible that Egypt had captured a ship or two from the Sea Peoples, had studied it to discern the technological advantages borne by the ships of these raiders from the north, and had then adopted that technology for itself and its allies? The Egyptian ships in the Medinet Habu relief are not Helladic galleys, but they aren’t simply the Egyptian ships of tradition either: they appear to be a hybrid combination of the two. There’s no hogging truss on the Egyptian ship’s either, so they must have developed a sturdier hull, as well. When it’s all said and done, this theory requires a bit of reading between the lines, and maybe we’re reading something that’s not really there. The possible cross-cultural transference of this new sailing technology during the Late Bronze Age Collapse is fascinating though.

The Bronze Age Finally Collapses

We’ve now spent a good chunk of time on looking the Sea Peoples’ invasion of Egypt during Ramesses III’s reign and at the ships involved. I’m quite pleased that we had some ships to talk about this time. We are still a podcast about maritime history and I felt like we’d gotten a bit much onto broader history in our recent spate of episodes. It’s all relevant though, and now we’re to the point where I will attempt to wrap up the Bronze Age. I hate to, a bit, because just as in discussions concerning the Middle Ages and the transition into or out of that time period, nothing here is quite as bright-lined as most histories tend to portray. Okay, complaint about the restrictions of narrative history and the finite nature of any medium of conversation over. Now to wrap things up.

I’ll begin here by going backwards to clean up something about Ramesses III’s portrayal of the 1177 invasion. In most discussion of the account at Medinet Habu the Egyptian version of events is taken at face value: the evil Sea Peoples descended on Egypt in their fleet only to be repelled by the “mighty, valiant, and far-striding hero,” Ramesses. It’s fairly undisputed that Egypt did indeed repel an invasion of the Sea Peoples and that there was a naval battle at some point. The representations of maritime technology are also instructive. Beyond these two things become more opaque. Egyptian accounts are notoriously propagandized. Just look at the crap that’s thrown around by the relatively young nation-states of today, and then think about how much an empire could refine its official image painting after over 1,000 years of practice. Maybe I’m on a soap-box here, and if so, I apologize. What I’m trying to say is merely that Egypt was under just as much pressure as the other Bronze Age powers were at this late point in the age. Ramesses repelled the Sea Peoples, sure, but I think that his account of those clashes was highly idealized. He needed to boost his image as a ruler: the world was falling apart and his political footing was pretty flimsy, as well. I would not be at all surprised if Ramesses inflated the danger posed by the Sea Peoples so that he could claim to be the ruler who restored order to Egypt amidst a world in chaos.

The inscription at Medinet Habu bears many echoes to the earlier inscriptions about the earliest incursions of the Sea Peoples into Egypt, the inscriptions left by Ramesses II and Merneptah. However, by 1177, the disorder of the Bronze Age had reached new heights. We saw how it appears that the Sea Peoples were also migrating into the Levant and down into Egypt, the oxcarts and families depicted in contemporary reliefs. At the same time, there is evidence that the famine and drought of the time was also affecting Egypt and that some of the foreign populations of workers were also showing signs of unrest. In sum, Ramesses III must have appeared as a ruler with little control over his land. The depiction of his glorious victory over the Sea Peoples appears to have been his bid to show that he really was in control, that the chaos of the outside world would be held at bay when it hit the borders of Egypt. A more in-depth examination of the political, ideological, even the religious elements motivating the Medinet Habu account can be found in a very insightful Senior Thesis by a one-time history student named Scott Peters. The thesis is titled “Decoding the Medinet Habu Inscriptions: The Ideological Subtext of Ramesses III’s War Accounts.” For an undergraduate thesis, it’s exceptional and I hope you’ll skim it, at least. The nutshell version of this whole bullet point is simply that the Medinet Habu account is immensely important, but that we must keep it in proper perspective. The Sea Peoples were migrants teamed up with experienced sea-raiders, displaced by forces outside both their control and the control of the pharaoh of Egypt.

The issues of control over the chaos and what exactly drove the Late Bronze Age Collapse were issues we discussed last time. I don’t want to beat the dead horse by wandering into more complexity regarding the same topic, so why not jump right to a theory about the result of the collapse. The Late Bronze Age world was complex, we agree on that, highly complex even. When a complex system ultimately does collapse, it naturally fragments into smaller pieces. That’s precisely what happened in this case with the reduction of trade and the survival of culture on a more piecemeal level. Some of those pieces, the ones who’d escaped the collapse largely unscathed, were in prime position to become the powers of the early Iron Age. Before we get to that point, though, we need to return for the last time to the Sea Peoples, the last time we’ll meet them under that moniker.

Over the gradual decline that was the Late Bronze Age Collapse, the various people-groups that made up the Sea Peoples migrated. I would venture a general observation that much as some things tend to follow the ‘path of least resistance,’ some of the Sea Peoples may have chosen their final destination because it was open for the taking, there was little resistance to their appearance on the scene. That’s a gross oversimplification, obviously, but I think it can still serve our discussion to a point.

The paramount example to back up this idea is that of the Philistines, a people that until recently were only present in the Hebrew Torah and Deuteronimic history. Recent scholarship has increasingly equated the biblical Philistines with the Peleset people mentioned in the Egyptian records of the Sea Peoples. This is all outside of the scope of our podcast really, so suffice it to say that there is evidence in the written Egyptian record to the effect that Ramesses III, after defeating the Sea Peoples, resettled them in fortified town in Canaan. It’s around this period that we see the earliest evidence of the Philistines in that same region, a few decades after the region’s destruction. Combine that with Ramesses III’s claim to have resettled the Peleset in ‘stronghold cities’ and taxed them, then it’s quite possible that the Peleset were present in Egypt for a period after their defeat and then eventually moved north into Canaan by Egypt. That would certainly be taking Ramesses accounts at face value, but there does seem to be corroborating evidence in the fact that the Peleset bore similarities to Mycenaean culture, perhaps also Cyprus, and the fact that the Philistine people that later pop up in Canaan also bear these traits.

So the Philistines that emerge in Canaan were likely the remnants of one part of the Sea Peoples. That’s fairly agreed upon nowadays, but as for the other groups, much less is known. A few other Egyptian documents mention the Shardana and Tjekker in conjunction with the area of Canaan as well, but beyond that we have no supplementary evidence. Because a large resettling appears to have occurred in much of the southern Levant in the decades following 1177, many scholars have suggested that the various Sea Peoples groups participated in the resettling of the area and we just haven’t found the evidence to connect the dots yet. It’s certainly a possibility, as we know that the Ancient Israelites were also able to take advantage of the regional flux and settle the lands not already occupied by the Philistines and other Canaanites, setting the stage for the Iron Age battles that comprise large chunks of the Hebrew Old Testament.

This resettling of the southern Levant was a gradual process, just like the Bronze Age Collapse was in the whole. The well known theory of Israel Finkelstein is that the migration of the Sea Peoples occurred over a period of decades, and the evidence we’ve seen bears that out by and large. It wasn’t until 1130 BCE or so that the Sea Peoples had well and truly settled in Canaan and the surrounding region. The gap in temporal proximity between the destruction of Mycenaean cities and the resettling of these peoples in Canaan that bore some elements of Mycenaean culture likely tells us that the Sea Peoples who ended up in the Levant by way of Cyprus and Anatolia were not the one-time rulers of Mycenae, they weren’t the upper class. They seem to have been a generation removed from Mycenae’s fall, the humbler culture left in the wake of the palace destructions, forced to find a new home in the world. This was likely the case with the other groups that made up the Sea Peoples, so the ultimate conclusion is one we’ve skirted quite a bit now.

The Sea Peoples were not the main driving force of the Late Bronze. In places they were a heavy contributing factor, but the Collapse as a whole was the result of a confluence of many factors. The Sea Peoples seem to have been both victims of these other factors and opportunists, ready to and maybe even forced to seek a new home amidst the chaos. That’s really where I come down on this period, as if you haven’t figured that out by now. I’m not sure what more I can add, we’ve seen quite a bit of material by now, material that I hope has been informative.

The chaos that engulfed the Bronze Age World seems to have, rather inexplicably, spared a specific area that comes into our story in a large way beginning in Episode 021. For some reason, the region we now know as Phoenicia, modern-day Lebanon, emerged from the chaos largely unscathed, setting up the Phoenicians to become the early maritime power of the Iron Age. As Cline notes, maybe they only seem to have gotten off easily because the area has seen a relative lack of excavation work in comparison to some other areas where we see evidence of destruction, but that disparity can only be remedied in time. What we know for now is that Phoenicia did indeed emerge from the Collapse to become a power, but that’s all for later.

Conclusion

In conclusion here, I’ll share with you one final thought on the way the Bronze Age Collapse ultimately shook out. Several times the phrase ‘ordo ab chao’ entered my mind in contemplating the Sea Peoples and how the Bronze Age to Iron Age transition progressed. The Bronze Age Collapse really does seem like chaos when seen as a whole: highly developed, centralized palace economies and trade networks are destroyed in a relatively short span and mass migration ensues. Mighty civilizations are decimated, some to the point of annihilation, yet smaller pieces survive and adapt, setting the stage for a new age. This last quote, taken from Cline’s book again but quoting historian James Muhly, is a nutshell summary of it all. Muhly saw the “twelfth century BC not as a world dominated by ‘sea raiders, pirates, and freebooting mercenaries,’ but rather as a world of enterprising merchants and traders, exploiting new economic opportunities, new markets, and new sources of raw materials.”

This idea is the hidden reality of “Dark Age” that is generally placed between the Bronze Age Collapse and the start of the Iron Age proper. The Greek Dark Age is more identifiable by the lack of any palace structure such as existed with the Mycenaeans, but beyond that, the term Dark Age for the entirety of the near east is a bit misleading. The world wasn’t as complex as were the Bronze Age cultural relations that had disintegrated, but the two centuries or so immediately following 1150 BCE were a time of rebuilding, reorganization, and germination for the seeds that would later sprout into some of the cultures and civilizations that still undergird western civilization today. The Phoenicians, the Greeks, and even though they weren’t really a maritime culture, the Israelites: they all emerged as a result of and because of the Collapse. Cline calls the ‘Dark Age’ “the catalyst of a new age,” and in our next season, that new age will be our new focus.

Sources

• Braudel, Fernand, Memory and the Mediterranean (2001).
• Casson, Lionel, The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of the Mediterranean in Ancient Times (1959).
• Cline, Eric H., 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014).
• Emanuel, Jeffrey, Sea Peoples, Egypt, and the Aegean: Transference of Maritime Technology in the Late Bronze–Early Iron Transition, in Aegean Studies, pp. 21–56 (2014).
• Emanuel, Jeffrey, Sherden from the Sea: The Arrival, Integration, and Acculturation of a 'Sea People', in J. of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, Vol. 5, pp. 14–27 (2013).
• Emanuel, Jeffrey, War at Sea: The Advent of Naval Combat in the Late Bronze-Early Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean, Int'l Ancient Warfare Conference 2013, Nat'l Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, September 18-20.
• Killebrew, Ann E., The Philistines and Other “Sea Peoples” in Text and Archaeology (2013).
• McGrail, Seán, Early Ships and Seafaring: European Water Transport (2014).
• Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013).
• Peters, Scott M., Decoding the Medinet Habu Inscriptions: The Ideological Subtext of Ramesses III's War Accounts, Columbia University Academic Commons (2011).
• Steiner, Margreet L., & Ann E. Killebrew, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant: c. 8000-332 BCE (2014).
• Wachsmann, Shelley, Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant (2008).
• Yasur-Landau, Assaf, The Philistines and Aegean Migration at the End of the Late Bronze Age (2014).