Sea Peoples

For other uses, see Sea People (disambiguation).

This scene from the north wall of Medinet Habu is often used to illustrate the Egyptian campaign against the Sea Peoples, in what has come to be known as the Battle of the Delta (c. 1175 BC),[1] during the reign of Ramesses III. While accompanying hieroglyphs do not name Egypt's enemies, describing them simply as being from "northern countries", early scholars noted the similarities between the hairstyles and accessories worn by the combatants and other reliefs in which such groups are named.

The Sea Peoples were a group of tribes hypothesized to have attacked Egypt and other Eastern Mediterranean regions around 1200 BC during the Late Bronze Age.[2] The hypothesis was first proposed by the 19th century Egyptologists Emmanuel de Rougé and Gaston Maspero, on the basis of primary sources such as the reliefs on the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu. Subsequent research developed the hypothesis further, attempting to link these sources to other Late Bronze Age evidence of migration, piracy, and destruction. While initial versions of the hypothesis regarded the Sea Peoples as a primary cause of the Late Bronze Age collapse, more recent versions generally regard them as a symptom of events which were already in motion before their purported attacks.

The Sea Peoples included well-attested groups such as the Lukka, as well as others such as the Weshesh whose origins are unknown. Hypotheses regarding the origin of the various groups are the source of much speculation. Several of them appear to have been Aegean tribes, while others may have originated in Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, and Western Anatolia.

  1. ^ Paine, Lincoln (27 October 2015). The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 76. ISBN 978-1-101-97035-5.
  2. ^ Drews 1995, pp. 48–61: "The thesis that a great 'migration of the Sea Peoples' occurred ca. 1200 B.C. is supposedly based on Egyptian inscriptions, one from the reign of Merneptah and another from the reign of Ramesses III. Yet in the inscriptions themselves, such a migration nowhere appears... Thus the migration hypothesis is based not on the inscriptions themselves but on their interpretation"