Sea Peoples

The Sea Peoples were a group of tribes who raided Egypt and other Eastern Mediterranean regions around 1200 BC during the Late Bronze Age. They included well-attested groups such as the Lukka and Peleset, as well as others such as the Weshesh whose origins are unknown. The term "Sea People" is a modern coinage, and is often regarded as a misnomer since most of them appear to have travelled by land. The modern concept of the Sea People originates in the work of the 19th-century Egyptologists Emmanuel de Rougé and Gaston Maspero, who drew on primary texts such as the reliefs on the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu. Subsequent research developed their interpretation further, attempting to link these sources to other Late Bronze Age evidence of migration, piracy, and destruction. In early scholarship, the Sea Peoples were often regarded as a primary cause of the Bronze Age Collapse but recent work tends to view them as refugees fleeing a crisis which was already in motion.

History of the concept

The concept of the Sea Peoples was proposed by Emmanuel de Rougé, curator of the Louvre, in his 1855 work Note on Some Hieroglyphic Texts Recently Published by Mr. Greene, as an interpretation of the battles of Ramesses III described on the Second Pylon at Medinet Habu, based upon recent photographs of the temple by John Beasley Greene. De Rougé noted that "in the crests of the conquered peoples the Sherden and the Teresh bear the designation of the peuples de la mer (Sea Peoples)", in a reference to the prisoners depicted at the base of the Fortified East Gate. In 1867, de Rougé published his Excerpts of a dissertation on the attacks directed against Egypt by the peoples of the Mediterranean in the 14th century BC, which focused primarily on the battles of Ramesses II and Merneptah and which proposed translations for many of the geographic names included in the hieroglyphic inscriptions. De Rougé later became chair of Egyptology at the Collège de France and was succeeded by Gaston Maspero. Maspero built upon de Rougé's work and published The Struggle of the Nations, in which he described the theory of the seaborne migrations in detail in 1895–96 for a wider audience, at a time when the idea of population migrations would have felt familiar to the general population. The migration theory was taken up by other scholars such as Eduard Meyer and became the generally accepted theory amongst Egyptologists and Orientalists. Since the early 1990s, however, it has been brought into question by a number of scholars. The historical narrative stems primarily from seven Ancient Egyptian sources and although in these inscriptions the designation "of the sea" does not appear in relation to all of these peoples, the term "Sea Peoples" is commonly used in modern publications to refer to the nine peoples.

Primary documentary records The Medinet Habu inscriptions, from which the Sea Peoples concept was first described, remain the primary source and "the basis of virtually all significant discussions of them".

List of Sea Peoples Three separate narratives from Egyptian records refer to more than one of the nine peoples, found in a total of six sources. The seventh and most recent source referring to more than one of the nine peoples is a list (Onomasticon) of 610 entities, rather than a narrative. These sources are summarized in the table below.

Ramesses II narrative

Possible records of sea peoples generally or in particular date to two campaigns of Ramesses II, a pharaoh of the militant 19th Dynasty: operations in or near the delta in the second year of his reign and the major confrontation with the Hittite Empire and allies at the Battle of Kadesh in his fifth. The years of this long-lived pharaoh's reign are not known exactly, but they must have comprised nearly all of the first half of the 13th century BC. In his Second Year, an attack of the Sherden, or Shardana, on the Nile Delta was repulsed and defeated by Ramesses, who captured some of the pirates. The event is recorded on Tanis Stele II. An inscription by Ramesses II on the stela from Tanis which recorded the Sherden raiders' raid and subsequent capture speaks of the continuous threat they posed to Egypt's Mediterranean coasts:

the unruly Sherden whom no one had ever known how to combat, they came boldly sailing in their warships from the midst of the sea, none being able to withstand them. The Sherden prisoners were subsequently incorporated into the Egyptian army for service on the Hittite frontier by Ramesses and fought as Egyptian soldiers in the Battle of Kadesh. Another stele source is the "Aswan Stele" (one of several stelae at Aswan), which mentions the king's operations to defeat a number of peoples including those of the "Great Green" (the Egyptian name for the Mediterranean). The Battle of Kadesh was the climax of a campaign against the rival Hittite Empire and their allies in the Levant in the pharaoh's Year 5. Ramesses divided his Egyptian forces, which were then ambushed piecemeal by the Hittite army and nearly defeated, but Ramesses managed to recover and fight to a stalemate. Ramesses left inscriptions and depictions of his victory which survive on temples at Abydos, Karnak, Luxor and Abu Simbel. The "Poem of Pentaur", describing the battle, has also survived. The poem relates that the previously captured Sherden were not only fighting for the Pharaoh but also involved in stategy: it was their idea to divide Egyptian forces into four columns. There is no evidence in Ramesses' inscriptions of any Sherden disloyalty or collaboration with the Hittites. The poem also lists the Hittite allies who fought at Kadesh, among them some of the sea peoples spoken of in other Egyptian inscriptions who would later take part in the great migrations of the 12th century BC (see Appendix A to the Battle of Kadesh).

Merneptah narrative

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.