Sea Peoples - Wiley Online Library

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Sea Peoples
CHRISTOPH BACHHUBER
The primary corpus of evidence for the
Sea Peoples includes wall reliefs on the mortuary temple of Rameses III at Medinet Habu
in LUXOR, Egypt. The wall reliefs (normally
referred to as the “Year 8 reliefs”) and associated
hieroglyphic inscriptions record an invasion of
Egypt by a coalition of six groups during
the reign of Rameses III (ca. 1187–1156 BCE).
The Year 8 reliefs and inscriptions record
Rameses III repelling the invasion in two
battles, one naval and one on land.
An associated Year 8 inscription records:
“Their confederation consisting of the Peleset,
Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, and Weshesh, lands
united.” Another group, the Sherden, is indicated by a caption above a captive invader in
the Year 8 reliefs that reads: “Sherden of the
Sea.” Three additional groups, the Ekwesh,
Teresh, and Lukka, were allied with Libya in
a war against Egypt during the reign of
Merneptah (ca. 1224–1214), recorded in the
“Year 5” inscription on a stela commemorating
his victories. The Ekwesh, Teresh, and Lukka
are generally included in the collective of the
Sea Peoples, though they are not recorded in
the Year 8 inscriptions of Rameses III.
The land battle of the Medinet Habu reliefs
includes scenes of dependents of the invaders
who were hauled in ox-carts, supporting the
interpretation that these events do not just
represent a military invasion but a wholesale
migration (Dothan and Dothan 1992).
The migration has been understood to relate
to the general social and political climate of
the end of the Late Bronze Age in western Asia
and the eastern Mediterranean. Excavations
across the eastern Mediterranean have
recorded the violent destruction of palaces in
the Mycenaean Aegean, Hittite Anatolia, and
along the Syro-Palestinian littoral, as well as on
CYPRUS (Sanders 1985). In the traditional interpretation of the Sea Peoples, the climate of
instability was exacerbated by these stateless
peoples, and populations were dispersed in
the collapse of the Late Bronze Age,
manifesting in part in the invasion of Egypt.
The geographic origins of the various
Sea Peoples have been the focus of considerable
speculation and debate. Cognates between the
names of the Sea Peoples groups and toponyms in the regions of Anatolia and the Aegean
have been observed since the late nineteenth
century; and the very evident disruptions in
these regions observed in more recent archaeology has supported Sea Peoples’ origins in the
Aegean and Anatolia. So, for example, it is now
generally acknowledged that the Lukka Lands
recorded in Hittite texts are to be placed in
LYCIA in southwestern Anatolia. Much shakier
Aegean origins have been suggested in the
Ekwesh¼Achaian (Homeric) cognate and in
equating Weshesh with a kingdom called
Wilussa recorded in Hittite texts. Wilussa is
now widely understood to be the site of Ilion
(TROY) (see Silberman in Gitin, Mazar, and
Stern 1998). The best-known Sea Peoples cognate, however, is a biblical one, equating the
Peleset with the Canaanite neighbors and
adversaries of the Israelites, the PHILISTINES.
Here again the Aegean has been invoked as
a region of origin for a Sea Peoples group,
but based on archaeological interpretations
rather than linguistic ones. The Aegeanizing
trends of material culture in the land of
the Philistines in early Iron Age Canaan in
the centuries following the end of the Late
Bronze Age have lent further support to
the reconstruction of west-to-east migrations
during this period (Meehl, Dothan, and
Gitin 2006).
Since the 1980s, alternative interpretations
of the Sea Peoples and the transition from the
Bronze to Iron Ages in the eastern Mediterranean have challenged this historical narrative
of collapse, dispersal, and migration/invasion.
Generally, the Sea Peoples phenomenon is now
understood to be a consequence rather
than a cause of the destabilizing conditions of
this period (Liverani 1987). Similarly, archaeologists are much more cautious about, if
not critical of, drawing upon migrations and
invasions of definable groups of people to
The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, First Edition. Edited by Roger S. Bagnall, Kai Brodersen, Craige B. Champion, Andrew Erskine,
and Sabine R. Huebner.
© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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account for changes in material culture
(Sherratt in Gitin, Mazar, and Stern 1998). To
what extent scholarship can reconstruct
a historical reality for the Sea Peoples (including their origins and movements) based
largely on the politicized narratives of an
Egyptian pharaoh is also gaining increasing
academic attention (Roberts in Bachhuber
and Roberts 2009).
SEE ALSO: Hittite, Hittites; Israel and Judah; Libya
and Libyans; Medinet Habu (Djeme); Mycenaean
archaeology; Rameses I–XI.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Bachhuber, C. and Roberts, R. G., eds. (2009) Forces
of transformation: the end of the Bronze Age in the
Mediterranean. Oxford.
Dothan, T. and Dothan, M. (1992) People of the sea:
the search for the Philistines. New York.
Gitin, S., Mazar, A., and Stern, E., eds. (1998) Mediterranean peoples in transition: thirteenth to early
tenth centuries BCE. Jerusalem.
Liverani, M. (1987) “The collapse of the Near Eastern regional system at the end of the Bronze Age:
the case of Syria.” In M. Rowlands, M. T. Larsen,
and K. Kristiansen, eds., Centre and periphery in
the ancient world: 66–73. Cambridge.
Meehl, M., Dothan, T., and Gitin, S. (2006) Tel
Miqne-Ekron excavations, 1995–1996. Field INE
east slope, Iron Age I (early Philistine period).
Jerusalem.
Oren, E. D., ed. (2000) The Sea Peoples and their
world: a reassessment. Philadelphia.
Sandars, N. K. (1985) The Sea Peoples: warriors of the
ancient Mediterranean. London.