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24-03-2015, 15:41

The Shikalaeans

Ramses III mentions several peoples who attempted to invade Egypt. The name of one of them is written in the Egyptian consonantal script (so-called hieroglyphs) as tkr. The t represents the sound "ch" as in "church." The Egyptian script does not write vowels consistently or reliably, but fortunately in this case the vowels are known, thanks to a remarkable Akkadian-language text discovered in Ugarit, a Phoenician city-state which at the time was a (sub)vassal of the Hittites:



Thus (speaks) My Sun, the Great King [i. e., the Hittite king, Suppiluliumas II]; Speak to the City Prefect! The King (who's with you), your Lord, is young. He knows nothing. But I, My Sun, have given him an assignment with regard to (the man) Lunadusu, whom the Shikalaeans captured, (the ones) that dwell on ships. Now, Nisahili - (he's been) with me -, the groom, I've sent to you. You, however, shall send me Lunadushu, whom the Shikalaeans captured. I will interrogate him concerning the matter with (the Land) Shikalaea. (M. Dietrich and O. Leretz [1979], Ugaritforschungen X, p. 55)



The author of the letter is Suppiluliumas II, the king of the Hittites; "My Sun" is an honorific title roughly equivalent to "My Majesty" or the like. "Speak to the City Prefect!" corresponds roughly to a modern salutation at the start of a letter; literally it is a command to the clay tablet to deliver the message inscribed on it to the addressee. The letter, incidentally, shows how little confidence Suppiluliumas II reposed in this particular vassal king - actually a vassal directly of the King of Cyprus who was himself a vassal of the Hittite king.



Suppiluliumas II thinks that Lunadushu, whom the Shikalaeans had captured, but who has since gone free, has information on these people. For this reason he wishes to question Lunadushu. As soon as the text was published, it was immediately seen that the "Shikalaeans" were identical with the tkr of Ramses III's text. There is no way to write the sound "ch" in Akkadian cuneiform, so the Hittite scribes took the nearest equivalent, the sound "sh." Finally, the Egyptian script does not distinguish between the sounds "r" and "l" - the "r" in tkr can represent either sound.



Now Suppiluliumas describes the Shikalaeans as living "on ships" - i. e., as seaborne. Moreover, their capture of Lunadushu shows that they were raiders of some sort; and Suppiluliumas' desire to have Lunadushu sent to him for debriefing in the Hittite capital shows how seriously Suppiluliumas was taking the threat which the Shikalaeans posed.



The Shikalaeans later settled in the town of Dor, just south of Mt. Carmel on the Palestinian coast. An Egyptian official, Wen-Amun, whom Ramses XII had sent on a mission to Phoenicia in the eleventh century bc, traveled through Dor and mentioned them in his later report to the Pharaoh (Breasted, Vol. IV, Nr. 565).



Mentions (even if he himself does not put them in order), then one sees a path which begins in the west with Arzawa, moves eastwards till Carchemish in Syria, and then southwards to the borders of Egypt. One could extrapolate backwards from this trajectory and posit that the Sea Peoples came from some place farther to the west of Arzawa.



Next there is the evidence from the names of the individual Sea Peoples. Ramses III goes on to name five invading peoples, three of whom can convincingly be identified: the Philistines who eventually settled in the southwestern corner of Palestine (which the Greeks later named after them); the Shikalaeans who settled in the town of Dor just south of Mt. Carmel on the Palestinian Coast (see Box 3.1); and the Dananaeans who settled in Adana in what later became Cilicia. The name of the Philistines alone can be analysed. In Greek they are called Palaistinoi. This is a so-called ethnicon or noun derived from a place-name - like “NewYorkers” from the place called “NewYork.” In Greek Palaistinoi means (and can only mean) “the people from the place called Palaist-.” Such a town (Palaiste) lies in Illyria, on the Adriatic Sea to the northwest of Greece. If the Palaistinoi were to get by sea from Illyria to Palestine, then they must have passed by the Aegean. The other Sea Peoples may have had different points of origin from that of the Palaistinoi - it commonly happened that peoples on the move like this joined up with others also on the move at the same time (e. g., the Cimbri and the Teutones in the second century BC.)



Third, according to five texts from the Linear B archive at Pylos (An 519, 654, 656, 657, and 661 - on this “series,” see Box 2.1), the Pylian kingdom in its final year assigned military units to watch its coastline - as though the kingdom viewed a sea-borne attack as a possibility. Fourth, according to several passages in the Old Testament (e. g., Amos IX 7 and Jer. XLVII 4), the Philistines, before they arrived in Palestine, had dwelt on Crete, an island home to another Mycenaean kingdom destroyed around 1200 BC. That is to say, evidence places the Philistines at the scene of the crime, as it were. Additionally, according to Ramses III, the Philistines aided in the destruction of one state in the eastern Aegean (Arzawa) as well as in that of Cyprus before attacking Egypt and settling in Palestine. So in nearby regions they engaged in the very same activity of which they stand accused on Crete and in mainland Greece.



The evidence supporting the theory that the Sea Peoples caused the destruction of the Mycenaean kingdoms may be circumstantial, but cumulatively is not easily refutable. So, in brief, around 1200 BC violent sea-borne raiders, some of whom came from Illyria, caused the destruction of many states and cities in the northeastern Mediterranean; and they also destroyed the Mycenaean kingdoms.



 

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