The term Sea Peoples has been used for a number of peoples on the move in the Mediterranean Sea, especially in the 13th century b. c.e. The Sea Peoples may originally have been small-scale raiders on the trade network of the Mycenaeans who joined forces into armies when the latter attacked them. (They may have been similar in this way to the multiethnic confederacies of Germanics, who banded together to fight the Romans in the first half of the first millennium C. E.) The theory that a wave of migrations occurred before and around 1200 b. c.e. results from archaeological evidence of a pattern of destruction in the eastern Mediterranean, on mainland Greece, and on Crete, that led to the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations of the Mycenaeans and Minoans. These attacks are associated with small war bands who may have been ancestors of a general grouping of Hellenic peoples known as the Dorians in ancient texts. These proto-Dorians, who probably came from north of the Balkans, may have joined with the Sea Peoples in their raids.
The Hittites, who controlled much of Asia Minor and the Near East at the time, also lost cities to Sea Peoples, as did the Egyptians, who documented the attacks with inscriptions and reliefs in the reigns of the pharaohs Merneptah and Ramses III.
The names of some of the peoples cited relate to known place-names of the ancient world; for example, the Shardana have been associated with the Italics on the island of Sardinia west of the Italian Peninsula, and the Shekelesh with the island of Sicily, and the Elymi, Sicani, and Siculi. Bronze figurines made in Sardinia in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages have horned helmets much like those of the sea raiders depicted by the Egyptians. one theory maintains that after being repelled by the Egyptians, the Shardana eventually settled on Sardinia. The Shardana may have been mercenaries from Sardinia.
Other peoples classified by some as Sea Peoples are the Danya, who are identified with the Danaoi mentioned in the Iliad (presumably written by Homer in the ninth or eighth century B. C.E.); the Ekwesh; the Lukka, who may have originated in Lycia in Asia Minor; the Peleshet; the Tjeker, identified with Teucri of northwestern Asia Minor, who, after raiding Egypt, finally settled in northern Palestine; the Tyrsennoi; and the Weshesh. Some scholars have maintained that these groups possibly sailed out of the northern Aegean. What is not in contention among scholars is that the period in question was one of upheaval.
Further Reading_
Alessandra Nibbi. The Sea Peoples and Egypt. (Park Ridge, N. J.: Noyes, 1975).
Nancy K. Sanders. The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the Ancient Mediterranean, 1250-1150 b. c. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985).
World History
