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Who Were The Sea People? The Seafarers That Destroyed The Ancient World
These mysterious warriors helped accelerate the Bronze Age collapse
The Bronze Age Collapse was an event in the ancient world that saw numerous civilizations crumble and vanish seemingly overnight. Over the course of a few chaotic decades, massive cities were abandoned, and kingdoms fell, disappearing into obscurity. The scope and scale of the calamity are unlike anything seen in recent history.
One of the oddest features of this societal collapse is the fact that the causes largely remain a mystery.
Scientists, historians, and archeologists have argued for decades about the Bronze Age Collapse. Some say it was due to a string of untimely natural disasters. Others say famine stretched the communities to their breaking point. Disease has also been thrown around as a potential cause of the calamity. Underlying all of these theories is perhaps the most curious and the most interesting. The Sea Peoples.
Amidst the stories of disease, famine and earthquakes are tales of ferocious raiders that appeared from over the horizon, struck cities while they were struggling, and then vanished back out to sea.
The Sea Peoples were a group of seafaring raiders that appeared in the historical record around the time of the Bronze Age Collapse. They were militarily dominant, and they rampaged throughout the Mediterranean during this time. But no one knows who the Sea Peoples came from. Who were they? Where were their home ports? No one knew at the time. The only people to make surviving records about these people were the Egyptians, whose kingdom was one of the strongest at the time. But even they struggled under the onslaught of the Sea Peoples.
Who were these people that harried the Egyptians? Who could sack some of the largest cities in the world and vanish without leaving a record of themselves? Who were the Sea Peoples?
A Modern Designation
Ancient sources do not call these raiders Sea Peoples. That term is a modern one coined by a French Egyptologist in the 19th century. He described the people appearing in the historical record as “people from the sea,” which was later transliterated…
