The Sea Peoples

Nobody expects…the Sea Peoples.

If “Sea Peoples” has you flashing on a guy in a rubber suit with scales, a dorsal fin, and a face that looks suspiciously like a war surplus gas mask, you’re at the wrong movie but I’m right there with you…that suit worked a lot of pictures. And frankly that image is half the fun, although the real Sea Peoples were an authentically big deal and remain an authentically big mystery.

Starting around 1180 B.C. and running for a century or so, the Sea Peoples arrived in southern Europe and the adjoining eastern Mediterranean in waves, and by the time they were through they had overrun and destroyed most of what would later be called the Greco-Roman world. They wiped out the Myceneans (modern Greece), then moved on to Asia Minor and the powerful Hittite empire (modern Turkey), to whom they laid waste. They moved down the east coast of the Mediterranean, conquering all in their path before turning back east on the Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptians finally stopped the Sea Peoples, although arguably it was a pyrrhic victory. By the end they had destroyed most of the original ancient civilizations of the West, so although most of us have never heard of it, the invasion of the Sea Peoples ranks right up there with the fall of Rome as a major event in world history.

Why, then, don’t we know more about them? Mainly, they left no written record, they built no monuments, and unlike other groups that would conquer a place and stay, the Sea Peoples just seem to have kept moving until they were finally defeated. We know about the Sea Peoples by the civilizations they conquered, which further frustrates us: those empires did have written language, but nobody likes to write about battles they lost, so they didn’t. What little we know comes from the archeology of places they passed through, plus scraps like a Hittite letter that may or may not have been sent and passages on Ramesses III’s tomb detailing the Sea Peoples’ final defeat.

Not much to go on, and where little is known, little is written.

Our titular work, The Sea Peoples by Charles River Editors, is actually a 30 or 40-page monograph. The work is not paginated, but it is supported by a brief bibliography. Its scope and intent are clearly different from a more commercial book-length treatment. I did look for something longer and more comprehensive, but among titles readily available on the internet there was not much to love. One volume tried to substitute endless embroidery of detail for facts, and another promised “actual photographs of the battles!” which seemed improbable for the second millennium B.C. Sheesh. In the end, the “just the facts, Ma’am” tract wins. Augmented to some extent by Ancient Greece and The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, both reviewed elsewhere on this site, and which provided confirmation of select material in this month’s work.

Even figuring out what these guys were named involves a mystery.

We call them the Sea People-s, with an “s,” because they were made up of several different groups, presumably from distinct geographic regions. They had names like the Shekelesh and the Tjeken…which I admit doesn’t clarify much for either ourselves or for professional scholars. The only group we can locate geographically are the Peleset, whom the Bible calls the Philistines…if you’ve ever called somebody a philistine, you were talking about the Sea Peoples. (And for the record, you are my kind of reader.) We call them the Sea Peoples today because of the Egyptians: they actually invaded Egypt twice, once under pharaoh Merenptah and then again under pharaoh Ramesses III. The first invasion seems to have come by land, traveling as previously noted along the eastern Mediterranean (and presumably picking up the Philistines along the way). The Egyptians got the worse of that battle, so they didn’t write about it, and we know little. The second time, the invaders seem to have come from Crete across the Mediterranean, from across the sea. That war the Egyptians won, so that’s the one they wrote about, and that, Gentle Reader, is why we call them the Sea Peoples.

Q.E.D., as they say.

Just why they were on the move is anybody’s guess. They had to be a large and highly motivated group to take out people like the Mycenaeans and the Hittites, neither bunch a pushover; speculations have come into and out of favor, among them things like famine and earthquake. None are fully satisfying, particularly given the vast distances and sustained nature of the migration. Our current volume gives some favor to the idea that the Myceneans started out raiding the Minoans, got to liking the work, and moved on to world domination. Maybe, but the Sea Peoples are the ones we believe conquered the Myceneans, so it would have been an odd case of gutting one’s own empire. Profound and extended drought is another explanation, although we have almost no supporting evidence for it, and it does seem (to the Curmudgeon, anyway) to fit a little too neatly into popular enthusiasm.

We also don’t know much about what ultimately happened to the Sea Peoples. They kept moving, some seemingly from Macedonia to the border of Upper Egypt. We know that some of those who invaded under Merenptah stayed around Egypt and Libya, became mercenaries, and were fighting on Egypt’s side when the next batch of Sea People arrived under Ramesses III. We have to assume that a similar pattern happened elsewhere, specifically in the former Mycenae, later Greece…Classical Greece, so much studied, was at least partly a result of the Sea Peoples invasion.

Blah, blah, blah…we don’t know, we don’t know. So why trouble you with all this, anyway? Because something happened. Something happened that wiped out, pretty much in one go, a majority of the ancient civilizations we know about or have found any evidence of in the West. And because short of a Sea Peoples rapture, all of us who are physical or intellectual descendants of the West carry them in our genes and minds. Mysteries don’t get bigger than that.

Yeah, but were they GAY? Maddeningly, we’ll never know. Absent written language, gay lives are invisible, one of the best reasons the Curmudgeon can think of to ensure literacy in the young and to encourage the old to write.

But you gotta admit: Sea Peoples: The Gay Experience! is a hell of an idea for a musical. I talked to the boys over at Paramount, and they’re prepared to license the fish suit.