Highly recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast episode on the Bronze Age Collapse to learn more about the Sea-Peoples (<a href="https://youtu.be/B965f8AcNbw?list=PLR7yrLMHm11XAuYuZMPHPn9HznxQ40y_f" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/B965f8AcNbw?list=PLR7yrLMHm11XAuYuZMPHPn9Hz...</a>) . They discuss how the Sea-Peoples may be a symptom and a cause of the bronze age collapse, and the whole episode is extremely engaging and educational. (As all the episodes of this podcast are, cannot recommend it enough)
If anyone's interested in the Sea Peoples and the Late Bronze Age, I recommend <i>1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed</i> by Eric H. Cline. It gives a great overview of the primary sources and evidences for the factors leading to the Late Bronze Age collapse, including the role the Sea Peoples may have played as both a cause and symptom of larger societal issues.
>> For the thirteenth century BC, we have no evidence at all of metal body-armour or shields. These are features of the earlier Mycenaean epoch – for example, the bronze lobster cuirass from a tomb at Dendra – or of the period after the fall of the Mycenaean palaces, especially the middle of the twelfth century BC.<p>I've seen that suit of armour up-close. I think it was in the War Museum, in Athens, but it might have been the Archeological Museum (I loved all museums as a child; also, as an adult). Wikipedia references imply it's in the Argos museum, where I haven't been, so when I saw it, it must have been on a loan:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendra_panoply" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendra_panoply</a><p>Or maybe the one I saw was a copy. In any case, an impressive piece of kit and a bit steampunk in aesthetic. There's a clear picture of a beautiful boar's tusk helmet like the one found with the armour, here:<p><a href="https://www.hellenicaworld.com/Greece/Military/en/Armor.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.hellenicaworld.com/Greece/Military/en/Armor.html</a>
The Sea People are mysterious because, as my older brother who's teaching history said, they were not only multiethnic but groups of warriors from different geographic areas all around the Mediterranean sea.<p>They were behind the fall of some civilizations as they were moving around to plunder. Their attacks coincided with climate change (drought) and the scarcity of food in actual Iraq, Egypt, Syria, turkey, North Africa and so on.
I never realized how the late Bronze Age collapse still plays out today. As Steve Jobs said, A players hire other A players, but B players hire Sea People and it doesn’t take long for things to get a lot worse.<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/391717-steve-jobs-has-a-saying-that-a-players-hire-a" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/391717-steve-jobs-has-a-say...</a>
One of the rabbit holes I've gone down over the past few years has been the sea peoples.<p>Specifically, the fact that while a bunch of the claims of the Exodus for the Israelites are anachronistic and dismissed as being true at all, that's not exactly the case if the stories had been absorbed into the local tradition and appropriated following the forced relocation of the sea peoples into the Southern Levant.<p>Following Kadesh there's twelve tribes of Anatolian peoples brought into Egyptian captivity (one group of captives for each of Ramses II's 12 sons with him).<p>At least one of these tribes is later allied with Libya fighting against Ramses II's successor. At this battle the sea peoples are described as being without foreskins.<p>The Greeks themselves have a number of stories of someone coming from North Africa and being appointed king or prophet over themselves or the Thracians, whether Eumolpus (put in the water as a babe and raised by a different family), Danaus (leader of Libya and sibling to the Pharoh with 50 sons, like Ramses II who is described in his forensic report as appearing to be a Lybian Berber and who had 50 sons), or Zalmoxis (ex-slave who learned prophecy and predicting celestial events in Egypt).<p>In the Argonautica there's even a story of how their prophet Mopsus died by a snakebite as their normally sea-faring adventure was instead wandering back through the desert from North Africa by foot. Shortly after this they even tell a story about how a shepherd killed one of their elite warriors with the cast of a stone.<p>In Homer Odysseus seems to mention this one day battle against Egypt that was historically the sea peoples battle where they didn't have foreskins. In that story he's captive in Egypt for 7 years until "a certain Phrygian" shows up. Seven years after the actual historical one day battle is when a guy nicknamed 'Mose' conquered Egypt as an usurper which the following dynasty claimed involved outside help. Events the bear a striking resemblance to Manetho's story of the Exodus preserved in Josephus.<p>In fact, the Greek and Egyptian accounts of the Exodus all involved a mixture of people with the Greek historians claiming it involved their own ancestors too, contrary to the Biblical claims of ethnocentrism.<p>We're now finding things like Aegean style pottery made with local clay in early Iron Age Tel Dan, which lends itself to the theory that that Denyen sea peoples were the lost tribe of Dan and why the Song of Deborah refers to them "staying on their ships" or how Ezekiel 27 has them trading in what seem Anatolian goods with Tyre alongside the Greeks.<p>Perhaps the most mind blowing is that Tacitus's claims of Jews having been people from Crete hiding out in Libya is pretty much spot on a description of certain non-Semitic features in the Ashkenazi genome, from the prevalence of G2019S LRRK2 mutation which originated in the Berbers and seem to have been acquired around 4,500 ybp +/- 1k years, or the similarities between Ashkenazi genome and Cretean DNA, with one individual on Athrogenica finding their closest genetic match was 3,700 year old remains from a Minoan graveyard that had just been added from a 2017 study. I've now been wondering if the matrilineal endogamy present in the Ashkenazi went back much further than we currently think, and reflected an endogamous subpopulation tracing back to the sea peoples even in Judea, which might explain oddities like 2 Kings 5:27 explaining the existence of a group ancestrally white as snow as a curse.<p>Even things like the book of Joshua, completely anachronistic in describing a recapture of ancestral homelands may have been instead an appropriated story of Jason (one of the hellenizations of Yeshua). So while there were no walls to Jericho at the time that came crashing down, maybe those stories originally related to the destruction of Mycenaean sites where we're now finding it wasn't earthquakes: <a href="https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/bssa/article-abstract/108/3A/1046/529882/Reassessing-the-Mycenaean-Earthquake-Hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/bssa/article-abstract/1...</a><p>Been a fun rabbit hole.
The sea people sounds alot like "ship"-residing refugees sailing along the coasts to me. They would be armed, they would be desperate and pillage like the vikings. And they would end wherever there boats ended up falling apart. Either fighting the locals or mixing with them. I guess this is what you do, when your city is besieged, runs out of food and you still have an open harbor.