Sea Peoples, Heraclids, and Ass Men
Attempting to demystify the Late Bronze Age collapse.
Despite the appearance over the past 20-some years of at least five major symposia or publications on the Sea Peoples and the “crisis” or “transition” at the end of the Late Bronze Age, together with other related monographs and articles far too numerous to cite here, there continues to be widespread disagreement over most details of what may have happened at the end of the Late Bronze Age: the main agents of change; the sequence or synchronization of all the warnings, battles, and food shortages mentioned in Akkadian, Hittite, Ugaritic, and Egyptian documents; the correlation—such as is possible—between the archaeological and documentary records; the actual causes (proximate or ultimate) of the crisis.
—A. Bernard Knapp and Sturt W. Manning (2016)
Up until a few years ago, I didn’t know much about pre-modern history. In attempting to catch up on it, I’ve repeatedly had the odd experience of learning about a phenomenon for the very first time by being told something like this: “Back in the bad old days, people thought Phenomenon X was real and important. How silly they were! Of course, now we know that Phenomenon X was an illusion or, at a minimum, was overhyped. To be fair, recent evidence has suggested that something like Phenomenon X may have been real after all — but, even then, it wasn’t really what people once believed it was. Anyway, let’s talk about something else.”
The Late Bronze Age collapse and the Sea Peoples are like that. In my innocence, I don’t think I used to have any concrete beliefs about the events of c. 1200 BCE; then I found out that, at that time, the interconnected civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean abruptly collapsed, but not really, at the hands of the mysterious, marauding “Sea Peoples,” who didn’t really exist, except they kind of did. Huh?
In this case, the murkiness doesn’t arise merely from academic fads and foibles. There are deep problems with the most basic evidence. For one thing, radiocarbon dates from around 1200 BCE happen to suffer from an unlucky “calibration plateau”: an individual radiocarbon measurement can map on to an annoyingly wide range of absolute calendar dates, making it difficult to be confident about the order in which things happened, even with solid scientific data in hand.1 For another thing, the names themselves are controversial:
To begin with, we seem to have terminological and related epistemological problems. The groups that Egyptologists call the Sea Peoples were not called that by ancient Egyptians (…contra [Egyptologist Kenneth] Kitchen 2012…).
The Egyptian sources provide the names of at least nine Sea Peoples. With these names the problems of the historian begin, for the Egyptian scripts record only consonants, whereas the contemporary cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia record syllables; from the start, it is difficult to be sure that a name in one script corresponds to a name in another. An additional problem is the lack of a sign regularly denoting the sound ‘l’ in the hieroglyphic script…New Kingdom [Egypt] writing introduces a selection of signs in combinations that appear to echo the syllabic structure of cuneiform, but there remains extensive debate over the vocalization [i.e. imputed vowels] of each name.
Nevertheless, here I will try my hand at stitching the narrative together. As usual, the result is a mix of expert consensus and my own speculations.
Was This Even a Thing?
Yes, but it wasn’t that big of a thing. It’s really a Greek and Hittite story, but I sense that, since no one today claims descent from or feels much affinity with the Hittites, popularizers tend to shy away from this angle.
There’s a great, persnickety book by Jesse Millek from 2023 that exhaustively audits claims of Sea Peoples–era “destruction” and finds most of them wanting:
I have uncovered 153 destruction events from 148 sites in the scholarly literature that have been cited as occurring ca. 1200 BCE. … Astoundingly, 94, or 61 percent, of these destructions have either been misdated, are based on loose evidence for destruction, or are simply false citations, and generally there is a fairly even spread among the three categories. … Of the fifty-nine destruction events that did take place ca. 1200 BCE, seventeen were partial destructions, while another nineteen were single-building destructions. … Many of the partial destructions may not even be destructions at all … However, there remain the twenty-three multibuilding and site-wide destructions…
So the crisis has been exaggerated — but not fabricated. (And it’s worth remembering that people can be killed, and polities destroyed, without necessarily leaving a thick layer of ash for later archaeologists to dig up.) I like Millek’s overview of the components of collapse that we can confidently believe in:
[W]ithin [the] fifty-year period [from 1225 to 1175 BCE]:
[1] Linear B, Ugaritic, and writing in much—though not all—of Anatolia and the Levant are abandoned;
[2] most of the major palaces in Greece suffered some kind of destruction, and the palatial system largely dissolved;
[3] the Hittite Empire as it was known in the Late Bronze Age collapsed;
[4] Ugarit was destroyed;
[5] various subregions suffered apparent depopulation;
[6] locally made [Late Helladic] IIIC pottery [which resembles earlier Greek/Aegean pottery] appears throughout the Levant and Cyprus; and
[7] there are of course Merenptah’s and Ramesses III’s infamous run-ins with the Sea Peoples.2
So how do these components fit together?
Spoiler Warning
This is how:
The Coming of the Greeks
But, first, let’s turn back the clock. Beginning around 3000 BCE, people of the Yamnaya culture exploded out of the western steppe and into the forests of Europe, bringing with them an Indo-European language.3 One contingent of the Yamnaya went northward into central Europe; another went south and west into the Balkan mixed forests. This Balkan clade then fragmented into the ethnolinguistic ancestors of Albanians, Armenians, and Greeks, among others.
It’s easy to gloss over — so easy, in fact, that I’m going to do it myself — but it seems to have taken a long time (more than a thousand years) for the pre-Greeks to actually make it from the Balkans into Greece proper. Ancient DNA analysis has detected people with western steppe ancestry in northern Greece by ~2000 BCE,4 but it was only around 1750 BCE5 that they began to dramatically transform culture throughout the Greek mainland and beyond. At the same time, a small (Luwic?) settlement in northwestern Anatolia was turning into the much more formidable, sui generis city that archaeologists call Troy VI, which boasted, for the first time in the site’s history, horses.6 I don’t think it was a coincidence that Greek and Trojan culture began to emerge at the same time: the Trojan elites were likely “para-Greek,” eastern siblings of the western Greeks who were part of the same migration out of the Balkans and into the Aegean.7 (This helps to explain why the Trojans seem so Greek in the Iliad,8 though of course Homer wrote much later, c. 760 BCE.9)
Over time, Greek-speakers (whose genetic ancestry was mainly early-European-farmer–ish,10 even as their warrior culture was predominantly Yamnaya-derived) formed statelets, the most powerful of which was based in Mycenae. Around 1460 BCE,11 Greek-speakers overpowered the old “Minoan” polity in Crete and established a kingdom centered on a palace at Knossos.12 But the kingdom didn’t rule the entire island, and non-Greek Cretans survived and preserved a sense of distinctiveness.13 In the “Cretan Lie” scene in the Odyssey (Book 19), Odysseus, pretending to be from Crete for whatever dumb reason, highlights its ethnic diversity:14
There’s a country called Krētē out in the wine-dark deep, fine, rich-soiled, and sea-girt; it has in it many people, so many they’re countless: they have ninety cities, and various tongues, one mixed with another—Achaians, proud native Krētans, Kydōnians, all are established there, with Dōrians in three settlements, and noble Pelasgians too!
“Pelasgians” (Pelasgoi) was a Greek term for the “indigenous” residents of Greece. There was another form of this word: Pelastoi.15 This is the origin of the Egyptian term “Pelasti” (one of the named Sea Peoples) and the later Hebrew “Pəlištīm”: Philistines.
As for the Kydonians of Crete also mentioned by Homer, their eponymous city, Kydonia, was the center of a kingdom that was probably, at first, a vassal of Knossos.16 But, after Knossos fell for unknown reasons around 1320 BCE,17 Kydonia became the most important Greek-speaking site on Crete, continuing to use the Linear B script and exporting fine pottery as far away as Egypt.18 I think that the (broadly Aegean, but otherwise unlocalized) king “Tawagalawa” mentioned in a 13th-century-BCE Hittite text was the king of Kydonia.19 Scholars have proposed several different Greek mythological names that the Hittite “Tawagalawa” might correspond to: Eteocles, Deucalion (a king of Crete20), even Teukros21 (Twa-ga-la vs. Teu-ka-ro…).
There is a certain allure to the Teukros (usually anglicized to “Teucer”) possibility, strained though it may seem. (To my ear, it’s no worse than “Eteocles,” which seems to be the most popular guess). There were two Greek mythological figures named Teukros. One was from Crete but established a settlement near Troy. The other was from the Greek island of Salamis but established a settlement on Cyprus. Ramesses III’s list of Sea Peoples includes the “Tjeker,” whom (some) scholars have, for many decades, linked to Teucer, and who, as Redford 2017 notes, are presented as closely related to the Pelasti. A synthesis suggests itself: the Tjeker were the ethnically Greek elites of Kydonian Crete, while the Pelasti were their ethnically non-Greek subordinates (perhaps tracing their origins back to mainlanders who had migrated to Crete, rather than the even “more indigenous” (but genetically very similar) “proud native Krētans” (Eteocretans)).
The Hittites and the Lands of Lukka
So that covers the Greeks (and their Cretan offshoots and frenemies). What about the Hittites? The Hittites spoke an Indo-European language from the now-extinct Anatolian family, the first branch to diverge from “Nuclear Indo-European” even before the emergence of Yamnaya culture. (Tellingly, Anatolian languages don’t have the same root word for “wheel” as the other Indo-European languages.22) Proto-Anatolian-speakers split off from their steppe brethren around 3700 BCE,23 moving into the Balkans and then, within a few centuries, crossing the Bosporus into Anatolia.24 There they broke into two main populations: one specialized in the forested interior; the other, the Mediterranean fringes. The first group gave rise to a warrior elite that, by 1650 BCE, had taken power in the central-Anatolian city of Hattusa (and the broader “land of Hatti”) and came to be known as Hittites. Their more Mediterranean-facing cousins in western and southern Anatolia spoke languages from the Luwic family.25 Though some of them built their own kingdoms, these tended to fall under the sway of the Great King of the land of Hatti.
The Hittites called the most distant southern and southwestern coastal regions of Anatolia “the lands of Lukka.” There, beyond the reach of the Hittites and their vassals, the ethnolinguistic ancestors of the later Lycians and Carians (whose languages belonged to a branch of the Luwic family) gained a reputation for lawlessness and piracy. Following Redford 2017, I think that some of the Sea Peoples identified in the inscriptions of Ramesses III were “Lukkans”: the “Washash” were from Iasos, and the “Sakalusa” (aka “Shekelesh”) originated in Sagalassos.
Over the course of the Late Bronze Age, the Hittite empire expanded to include large swathes of northern Syria, overseen by a viceroy based in Carchemish. This put the Hittites at loggerheads with Egypt, which had its own imperial possessions in the Levant. The equilibrium established by the time of the Hittites’ final collapse was that Hittite power extended only as far south as the vassal kingdom of Amurru; beyond that was the Egyptian zone of influence.
Interlude: The Trojan War
Frankly, the Trojan War doesn’t have much to do with the Late Bronze Age collapse or the Sea Peoples, but it’s in the same chronological and cultural ballpark, so I can’t resist weighing in.
Obviously the Homeric version of the Trojan War includes many fanciful events that didn’t happen (like Achilles’s horse talking to him), but I’d bet on the reality of the basic core: a successful Mycenaean-led attack on the city of Troy, resulting in the death of its king “Priam” (perhaps more like “Perramos,” as it was rendered in the Aeolic Greek dialect). And I’m very tempted to accept the astronomical case made by Göran Henriksson that a strange passage in the Iliad, set in the final year of the war, preserves a memory of a total solar eclipse that took place in 1312 BCE. This gels with archaeological analysis showing that Troy VI was destroyed around 1300 BCE, though not necessarily by human hands.26
But the Iliad exaggerates the scale of the destruction. The population of Troy VI was only five to seven thousand people!27 And the city was quickly rebuilt after ~1300 BCE, with Perramos’s son Alexandros (aka Paris) succeeding to the throne.28 In fact, Alexandros became a vassal of the Hittites, as memorialized by a treaty in which Alexandros invoked the divine name of “Appaliunaš” (aka Apollo).29
The Hittites’ relationship with Troy led to tensions with the king of Mycenaean Greece — which the Hittites called “Ahhiyawa” (related to Homer’s “Achaeans”) and people in Egypt and the Levant called “Danuna” (related to Homer’s “Danaans”). (Rostyslav Oreshko suggests that “Danuna” may originally have referred to southern Greece and “Achaea” to central Greece, though that distinction gradually disappeared.) But diplomacy kept Hattusa and Mycenae from coming to blows: a surviving Hittite letter says that “the King of Hatti has persuaded [the king of Ahhiyawa] about the matter of the land of [Troy] concerning which he and I were hostile to one another, and we have made peace.”30
Heart-warming. But, within a century of that letter, both the kingdom of Hatti and the kingdom of Ahhiyawa would be gone forever.
Return of the Heraclids
According to legend, Zeus had wanted his son Heracles to rule in southern Greece, but, through Hera’s trickery, Eurystheus (a grandson of Perseus) took Heracles’s rightful place. Eurystheus was succeeded by Atreus (his maternal uncle, at least in one version of the story), giving rise to the “House of Atreus” dynasty that included the Trojan War leader Agamemnon.
But Heracles’s descendants — the Heraclidae, or Heraclids — knew how to hold a grudge. Failing in their efforts to oust Atreus, they ran off and “made their home among the Dorians,”31 a Greek-speaking group living in the rugged northwest. After many years and several additional failed attempts, the Heraclids and their Dorian allies finally killed Tisamenus, son of Orestes, son of Agamemnon, and put an end to the (at least somewhat) unified Mycenaean kingdom.32 They divvied up the Peloponnese and drew lots to decide who would take which chunk. As a result, the originally northern Doric Greek dialect spread far southward (including into Crete), though it bypassed the mountainous central region of Arcadia, which, surrounded by a sea of Doric, nonetheless continued to use a Mycenaean-like, ancestrally southern dialect.
This is the ancient story of the “return of the Heraclids” or the “Dorian invasion,” and, as with the Trojan War, I think the basic core is true. A 2022 reference work on the Greek language notes that “the traditional concept of Dorian migrations in the twelfth and eleventh centuries is still the best way to explain the isolated position of Arcadian and the specific institutions shared by various Dorian states.”
And the timing of the mythological events — a handful of generations after the Trojan War (different sources give different figures) — roughly lines up with the archaeological record. Around the transition from Late Helladic IIIB1 to IIIB2 (c. 1230 BCE33), “there are signs of major destructions at Mycenae and other Argive sites. The ensuing LH IIIB2, the last stage of the Palatial period, was marked by the most massive building programs that had hitherto been carried out,” likely motivated in part by the need to “take precautions against warfare,” in the words of a recent overview.34 I can’t resist speculating that these are the traces of an initial period of Atreid/Heraclid dynastic struggle, ending with the incumbents weakened but not yet fully defeated. Around this same time, the Hittites seem to have removed the king of Ahhiyawa from their list of “Great Kings,”35 and imports of Mycenaean pottery into the Levant dry up.36
Then, toward the very end of the LH IIIB2 phase, around 1200 BCE, the big, final destructions took place: Midea, Tiryns, Pylos, Gla, Mycenae. Heraclid persistence paid off.
But what about the Mycenaean-affiliated kingdom of Kydonia in Crete? It may not have been destroyed outright,37 but, around this time, the city of Kydonia was “suddenly abandoned…as were most of the other settlements in Crete.”38 I propose that a group of Cretans — both ethnically Greek (“Tjeker” to the Egyptians) and not (“Pelasti”) — along with some Greek mainlanders (“Danuna”/ “Denyen”), managed to escape the Heraclid/Dorian onslaught, forming the nucleus of the Sea Peoples.
Sometimes historians paint the Sea Peoples as refugees, and, in a sense, they were — just not especially sympathetic ones. They were not so much huddled masses yearning to breathe free as thugs who found themselves on the losing side of a squalid civil war.
Where did they go? The one place besides Arcadia where, according to the linguists, a Mycenaean-like southern Greek dialect continued to be spoken after the fall of Mycenae: nearly 500 miles east, in Cyprus.
Flight to Cyprus
The following map, from Mountjoy and Mommsen 2019, had a big impact on my thinking, so I sure hope it’s correct. As a landlubber, I claim no personal knowledge of currents or winds, but I do have personal experience picking up Mountjoy’s two-volume Decorated Pottery in Cyprus and Philistia in the 12th Century BC: Cypriot IIIC and Philistine IIIC (2018), and it’s very heavy, so I trust her.
What the map suggests is that travel in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean had certain “natural” pathways, including “counterclockwise” from Egypt up the Levant and along the southern Anatolian coast, as well as west to east from Crete to Cyprus (“A direct route from Crete is important, as there is a long history of contact between the two islands”).
Around 1200 BCE,39 there appeared in southwestern Cyprus a “fortified settlement founded atop the narrow promontory at the locality of Palaeokastro in the area of Maa…[which] has intrigued scholars with its impressive wealth of architectural and moveable finds, its far-reaching external contacts, and its exceptionally limited occupation span,” lasting only a couple of generations.40 I think this highly defensible site served as the Cretan Sea Peoples’ initial base of operations. (A similar theory was once espoused by Cypriot archaeologists but is now seemingly out of fashion.41)
Cyprus, known then as Alashiya, hosted a kingdom centered on Enkomi that was, by this point, a Hittite vassal state. It was often in contact with nearby (across the Mediterranean) states in the northern Levant that were also Hittite vassals, like Ugarit and Amurru. The people of the island spoke a language that was relatively closely related to Minoan; the “Cypro-Minoan” script evolved out of Minoan Linear A.42 (Maybe the Pelasti acted as interpreters for their Greek captains when dealing with the locals.)
It’s easy to imagine the remnants of Mycenaean Crete, holed up in Maa-Palaeokastro, flouting the authority of the king of Alashiya and striking out periodically for coastal raids. Scholars over the years have tried to link a number of Late Bronze Age Ugaritic documents depicting troubles in Cyprus and the northern Levant to the Sea Peoples.43 But these fragmentary texts usually lack clear names and chronological anchors; I suspect that in many cases they come from a slightly earlier period and speak of other groups of troublemakers. At any rate, though raids were no fun, they didn’t seriously threaten state power. If things got really bad, vassals could call in the military might of the Hittite empire, which had a 500-year track record.
But then the Hittites got unlucky.
The Drought
Yes, many claims about connections between climate change and historical events have relied on sloppy reasoning. One of the sharpest critics of this sloppy reasoning has been Sturt Manning, “Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Classical Archaeology” at Cornell. So when I saw that Manning was the lead author on the 2023 Nature paper “Severe multi-year drought coincident with Hittite collapse around 1198–1196 BC,” I decided that it was probably legit. Using tree-ring data from central Anatolia as a proxy for rainfall, Manning et al. concluded:
Between around 1270 and 1135 BC there is only one interval in these 135 years—1198–1196 BC—with two or more consecutive years in the lowest 6.25% of values…Further, in the 12-year period from 1198 to 1187 BC, there were between 6 and 8 years…in the lowest 20% of values…[T]he period around this time represents either the driest or second-driest multi-year interval between 1400 and 1000 BC. This extremely dry interval stands out as a probably substantial climate challenge to food production and subsistence in central Anatolia that may have defeated normal strategies and storage provision in the Hittite administrative core. The dates—approximately 1198–1196 BC—are compatible with the historically derived timeframe of Hittite collapse and reorientation, and lend an historical specificity that is usually lacking in general low-frequency arguments suggesting linkages between climate and history.
The Hittites may have been able to weather the initial few-year shock, but as the dry spell dragged on, the heartland of Hatti must have grown weaker, less able to exercise power over its west Anatolian and north Syrian imperial periphery. The Cretans on Cyprus happened to be in the right place at the right time to exploit Hittite misfortune.
1191 ±1 B.C.
A bit shamefully, I haven’t actually read much of Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, a book that covers a lot of this same territory from the perspective of an academic writing for a popular audience. I was going to read it, but then I got far enough in my own research that I didn’t want to be unduly influenced by Cline’s interpretations. (When you’re a dilettante, they let you do it.)
And yet I can’t help noticing that I disagree with Cline on the titular date, which refers to the eighth year of Pharaoh Ramesses III’s reign, when, according to inscriptions at his mortuary temple, he vanquished the groups we now call the Sea Peoples. These inscriptions are pretty much the primary source for the whole Sea Peoples concept. I don’t think Cline makes a big deal about 1177 in particular being the exactly correct date; specialists realize, though I was initially surprised by, how confusing and uncertain the chronology of this period can be.
Where did I get my date of 1191 ±1? I went slightly overboard, downloaded a beautiful little piece of software called ChronoLog created by Eythan Levy, Frédéric Pluquet, and Gilles Geeraerts and explained in a 2021 paper, loaded it up with all the Bayesian radiocarbon chronologies and astronomically grounded Mesopotamian king lists and reliable historical synchronisms I could find, and looked at the output. I won’t bother with more of the details here, though I’d be very happy to discuss them with anyone interested. The upshot: Ramesses’s eighth year was somewhere in [1193, 1187], and Ugarit’s final year was in [1192, 1190], nested inside the eighth-regnal-year interval just as it probably should be. So: the big year was 1191 ±1. (Manning et al. 2023 supports ~1187, not far off.)
The Denouement: “Our Plans Will Succeed!”
So what actually happened in 1191 BCE? Here’s my reconstruction.
Emboldened by prolonged Hittite weakness, the Cretan refugees on Cyprus toppled the Alashiyan king, insuring, in the longer run, that the “Arcadocypriot” dialect of Greek would take hold in the island at the expense of the Eteocypriot language. Interestingly, according to legend, the city of Salamis on Cyprus — located very close to the old Alashiya capital of Enkomi and probably built as its replacement — was founded by Teucer.
Some of the Cretans then crossed over the sea to attack the northern Levantine coast, probably first taking up residence in the Hittite vassal kingdom of Amurru, then pushing north along the “counterclockwise” coastal route into Ugarit, which they destroyed, and then the southeast corner of Anatolia, later known as “Plain Cilicia,” which had once been the independent kingdom of Kizzuwatna but was by this point a province of Hatti, ruled directly by the Hittite king.44
Facing little resistance, the Cretans went even further, to the pirate coasts of southern and western Anatolia: the hazily defined lands of Lukka, which were out of reach of Hittite power even in the empire’s better days, and the land of Arzawa further west.45 There they recruited — probably by force — some of the ethnolinguistically Lycian/Carian locals. In the eastern part of this region, the city of Olba later recounted a story about itself:
According to a legend told by the Greek geographer Strabo, the original temple of Zeus Olbius had been founded by Ajax [brother of Teucer], one of the Greek heroes of the Trojan War. The priests belonged to the Teucrid dynasty: every man of this family was called either Ajax or Teucer.
Teucer again!
All of this happened very quickly, mostly along the coast. Inland Hittite vassals in Syria, including the viceroy in Carchemish, tried to repel the attack but lost.
But then the Sea Peoples got greedy. The Amurru contingent, butting up against the Egyptian sphere of influence in the southern part of the Levant, pushed a little too far and provoked an Egyptian response. It may have been the Egyptians who destroyed the physical infrastructure of Sumur (Tell Kazel), the Amurru capital turned Sea Peoples base, as a show of strength.
Perhaps in retaliation, perhaps just in hopes of acquiring booty, the Sea Peoples soon launched an attack from the Lukka coast aimed right at the eastern Nile Delta. (The Mountjoy and Mommsen map above suggests that this wasn’t intrinsically crazy: the prevailing winds would have favored sea travel along this route.) Again, the Sea Peoples, led by Ramesses III, were defeated. Egypt emerged unscathed. The end?
Here’s how (part of) the story was recorded in Ramesses III’s mortuary temple (in Donald B. Redford’s 2017 translation). The text is often confusing, and even basic elements, like how many separate battles there were and where they took place, continue to elicit scholarly disagreement. Nevertheless, I persisted.
The foreign countries made a šdt(t) [pact?] in their islands, migrating and scattering simultaneously through the war of the lands. Not one land could stand before their arms, from Khatte, Qode, Karkemish, Arzawa to Alashiya, cut off […. ] A camp was [set up] at one spot within Amurru, devastating his people and his land as though they had never existed. They came on, with fire prepared in their van, straight against Egypt. Their main strength lay in the Peleset, the Tjeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen, the Weshesh—lands united! They had laid hands on countries as far as the limit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: ‘Our plans will succeed!’
(But) lo! The will of this god, the Lord of the Gods, was ready and prepared to snare them like birds! He granted me power so that my plans succeeded…
So what do all these names refer to? We’ve covered some already, but:
Not one land could stand before their arms, from Khatte, Qode, Karkemish, Arzawa to Alashiya…
(Millek 2021 has pointed out an awkward problem with this list: it doesn’t include Ugarit, which indisputably was destroyed around this time, but it does include Carchemish, which wasn’t. I think a possible solution is that the pharaoh is speaking mainly about defeated armies. Little Ugarit didn’t have much of an army of its own, instead leaning on other allied kingdoms for defense.)
Khatte: Hatti, the country of the Hittites. This identification is uncontroversial, but I think here it might more specifically allude to the Plain Cilicia/Kizzuwatna southeastern bit of Anatolia, as opposed to the heartland of central Anatolia. Both would have been included in the “Khatte” political unit.
Qode: part of northern Syria, though there’s no clear consensus about precisely which part.46 I’d bet on Mukish, which controlled a port on the mouth of the Orontes River and was ruled by the Hittites.47
Karkemish: the seat of the Hittite viceroy in the eastern Mediterranean, who was second only to the king. He was supposed to foil attacks like the Sea Peoples’. (Even as Hatti crumbled, Carchemish lived on into the later “Neo-Hittite” era, ruled over (initially at least) by a branch of the old Hittite royal family.48)
Arzawa: western Anatolia, especially the “troublesome” southwestern coastal region, which, Oreshko 2019 suggests, hosted “a network of Hittite garrison fortresses.”
Alashiya: Cyprus, the first land to fall to the Sea Peoples (and a Hittite vassal).
What we can see is that, despite the sweeping rhetoric about “countries as far as the limit of the earth,” every place on the list was directly or indirectly under the power of the Hittites.
Their main strength lay in the Peleset, the Tjeker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen, the Weshesh—lands united!
Peleset: ethnically non-Greek people originally from Crete.
Tjeker: ethnically Greek people originally from Crete — the big bosses. (Teucer!)
Shekelesh: Lycian recruits.
Denyen: ethnically Greek people originally from mainland Greece.
Weshesh: Carian recruits.
As I said, it’s really a Greek and Hittite story.
The Aftermath: Hiyawa and the Philistines
Though Egypt kept its borders intact in ~1191, the Sea Peoples continued to inhabit pockets of the Hittite Mediterranean. In the southeast, one group established a kingdom about which not much is known beyond some very intriguing names. According to inscriptions, the ruling dynasty claimed descent from someone named Moxos/Mopsus, a name that, in later Greek legend, referred to (quoting Wikipedia) a “seer and diviner…venerated as founder in several cities of Pamphylia [part of the southern Anatolian coast] and the Cilician plain, among them Mopsuestia…At Mopsucrene, the ‘spring of Mopsus’, he had an oracular site.” The country ruled by Mopsus was called Hiyawa, derived from the old “Ahhiyawa” (or, in Phoenician, “Danuna”): basically, a New Greece in southeastern Anatolia,49 though, over time, it seems to have largely been assimilated into local Luwian culture.
Meanwhile, further west in the lands of Lukka, another group of Sea Peoples was likely responsible for the “deep structural influence of Greek on [the local Luwic language of] Lycian,” according to an argument made by Rostyslav Oreshko (who, the attentive reader will notice, is one of my favorite scholars in this area).
Like the Hiyawans, the Lycian Sea Peoples were also assimilated — with one interesting exception, which takes us back to Egypt. Egypt may have been strong enough to beat the Sea Peoples in the Levant and the Nile Delta, but, in the confusingly named “Upper” Egypt to the south, the pharaoh had many headaches. This is Millek 2018’s overview:
[R]epeated attacks by the Libyans…taxed the Egyptian army, perhaps causing them to keep troops closer to home rather that in southern Levant, which was in direction exact oppositely that from which the armed threats against Egypt were coming.
Aside from the border issues Ramesses [III] faced, he also had to contend with a number of internal administrative and economic crises. The price of grain soared, hitting its peak in the mid-20th Dynasty. The inflation in the price of grain caused difficulties in Ramesses’ ability to provide grain for the workmen at Deir el-Medina, which helped bring about the first recorded organized strike in his 29th year. He faced the shifting of power away from the state to the priesthood of Amun and financial corruption, along with a harem conspiracy led by a lesser queen, Tiy, in an attempt to put her son, Pentaweret, on the throne, perhaps resulting in the death of Ramesses III and calling into question ma’at itself. All of this was followed by dynastic struggles for the throne and internal administrative and economic crises that continued into the reigns of Ramesses IV and VI.
So the Egyptian state “quiet quit” in the southern Levant, directing its attention elsewhere and gradually letting its old imperial possessions slip through its fingers.
The Sea Peoples weren’t really to blame, but they did take advantage of the opportunity. Around 1170 BCE, according to recent radiocarbon studies,50 “Philistine” pottery began to appear in the area later known as Philistia in the southern Levant. Archaeologists and historians have long suspected that the Philistines were migrants with Aegean roots, and the Bible itself says so. (See e.g. Hitchcock 2018: “a specifically Cretan connection to the Philistines is preserved in biblical tradition and is preserved archaeologically in possible links with Linear A, particular artistic motifs and designs, plaster technology, architectural design, administrative practices, and symbolic ritual practices of offerings, destruction and curation.”)
There are also tantalizing onomastic links. Besides Pelastoi/Pelasti/Pəlištīm, there is “Achish,” the king of the Philistines who has dealings with David in the Bible. The same name has been found in an ancient inscription in the Philistine city of Ekron. I like Bible scholar Carl S. Ehrlich’s 2021 take:51
While the most popular theory regarding the derivation of this name has been that it was derived from the Greek Anchises…it is now clear that the Masoretes mispointed the name, whose correct vocalization [is] Achayush…Hence, the name is most probably to be derived from the Greek word Achaios and means Achaean. In its import, it may be compared with the name Iamani, meaning ‘the Greek’…, the usurper king of Ashdod [another Philistine city] during the reign of Sargon II in the late eighth century BCE. It is unclear whether the names Achayush/Achayus and Iamani were truly personal names or nicknames. Whichever they were, the use of these names indicates an identification with the Aegean world…
In other words, King “Achish” was basically “King Greek Guy.”
What about the most famous Philistine, Goliath? In 2012, Mariona Vernet Pons linked the name to the Carian personal name Wljat/Wliat, derived from a root that may have meant “to be strong.” (The proposed shift from initial “w” to initial “g” is reminiscent of English/French doublets like “William”/“Guillaume” and “warden”/“guardian.”) Phicol, another biblical Philistine, may also have had a Carian name. So all the Sea Peoples were represented in Philistia: Greeks, Cretans, and Lyco-Carians.
Ancient DNA from the Philistine city of Ashkelon has confirmed this basic story. The genetic ancestry of early Iron Age Philistines can be well modeled as ~43% Bronze Age Cretan and 57% pre-Philistine Levantine. One of the Philistine individuals analyzed also carried the R1 Y chromosome associated with ancient western-steppe males.52 Amazingly, a 2022 study showed that, among all ancient samples generated to date, the single most genetically Mycenean-like person known outside of Greece is an Iron Age Philistine from Ashkelon.53 Within a few generations, though, outmarriage had greatly attenuated Philistine genetic and cultural distinctiveness — similar to what happened in Hiyawa and Lycia.
From the River to the Sea…
The Philistines also seem to have established a somewhat later northern “colony,” which wasn’t fully appreciated until recently. Around 1120 BCE, at the site of Tell Tayinat (ancient Kunulua) in the northern Levant, there was a cultural shift, exemplified by the appearance of the same type of “Aegeanizing ceramics” that are linked to the Philistines.54 By the mid-11th century BCE, a state had emerged, founded by King Taita I. The name of the kingdom, notwithstanding the doubts of some scholars, was Palastina.55
It’s a bit odd that Palastina was not contiguous with Philistia but rather hundred of miles to the north. Perhaps the Phoenicians in between were too powerful or useful to mess with. I don’t think researchers have uncovered the full picture yet. Once again, though, Palastina was pretty quickly “Syro-Anatolianized”: later kings used the Luwian language and took old Hittite royal names like Suppiluliuma. And that’s all the excuse I need to include this image of a statue of Palastina’s Suppiluliuma:
Behold, then, the last son, maybe, of the Sea Peoples.
Epilogue: The Assman Cometh
To recap the narrative: with their heartland stricken by drought, the Hittites could no longer hold on to their Mediterranean periphery, leaving it open to exploitation by the Mycenaean Cretans and their entourage. But what happened to the non-Mediterranean central and northern parts of Anatolia?
The Hittite capital of Hattusa was abandoned, but the power vacuum was quickly filled by a group I haven’t mentioned yet: the Masa. (Here, again, I’m relying mostly on Oreshko.) You can think of them as “the Land People,” a counterpoint to the Sea Peoples. The Masa could trace their origins back to the Indo-European-speaking Thracians (Moesi) from the European side of the Bosporus. At some point (the mid-second millennium BCE?) a group of Thracians crossed over into Anatolia and managed to wedge themselves between the Hittites to the east and the Trojans to the west, giving birth to the Masa, whose name may have come from a word for “horse.” I think that the family tree of this ancestrally Balkan clade of Indo-European looked something like this:
To the Hittites, the Masa were an irritant, seemingly never submitting to Hittite suzerainty, unlike most other groups in western Anatolia. I suspect that, after the big drought hit, it was the Masa who took over Troy (during the later VIIb phase) and made its material culture Balkan-like (complete with “barbarian ware”).56 And, in the east, it was the Masa who swept through central Anatolia, pursuing a pastoralist lifestyle that was better suited to the newly arid climate than traditional Hittite farming.57
As these eastern Masa lost touch with their western brethren, they developed their own identity as Muška or, as the Greeks called them, Phrygians (the most famous of whom was King Midas). Oreshko argues that both names for this group derive from words for non-horse equines: “Muška” from mules, “Phrygians” from donkeys. There was even some kind of traditional Phrygian “donkey dance.” This sounds a bit goofy to the modern ear, though Oreshko tries to justify it by pointing to the wild onager, which perhaps seems more prestigious than its domesticated cousins. His piece on the Masa/Phrygian link is entitled “The Onager Kings of Anatolia.”
But when I double-checked the phylogenetic evidence, I came to doubt that “onager king” is an accurate moniker. Judging from a 2023 preprint, the onager belongs to an eastern branch of the Eurasian wild ass family, which expanded out of Africa and into Iran and East Asia, while it was the western branch (Equus hydruntinus, now extinct) that colonized Anatolia and Europe. “The Hydruntine Kings of Anatolia” would be all right, I guess, but I’d rather just call them the Ass Men.
Is There a Bigger Lesson Here?
Probably not. It’s tempting to wax poetic about “complex systems” and environmental vulnerabilities and antifragility or whatever, but I think the overriding brute fact is that, without science, engineering, and industry, civilizations were bound to hit bottlenecks and ceilings sooner or later. The Mycenaean era in Greece didn’t last that long in the scheme of things and probably wasn’t that important, except in retrospect as a cosplay backdrop for much later Greeks. (If Homer’s writings had been lost, would anyone care what “Ahhiyawa” or “Wilusa” meant?) The Hittites were dealt a bad hand, but it’s not like they were about to discover electricity or invent the printing press; they were just a bunch of jerks like every other warrior elite. If the Sea Peoples hadn’t smashed up the Hittites’ empire, Assyria or Persia or someone else would have, eventually.
But that’s okay. Sometimes there’s no lesson, and we just want to know what actually happened.
See e.g. Manning 2007, “Why Radiocarbon Dating 1200 BCE Is Difficult: A Sidelight on Dating the End of the Late Bronze Age and the Contrarian Contribution.”
I don’t have much to say about Merneptah’s run-in. Though some of the named Sea Peoples groups from his reign overlap with the Ramesses III Sea Peoples, I think that just indicates that a variety of coastal raiders hailing from the Aegean and Anatolia bothered Egypt over an extended period; there’s no direct link to e.g. Hiyawa or the Philistines. For what it’s worth, I follow Redford 2017 in identifying the “Lukka” as proto-Lyco-Carians from the southwestern Anatolian coast, the “Taruisha” as Trojans, the “Aḳ(i)ōwasha”/“Aqaywasa” as people from Chios, and the “Shekelesh” as proto-Lyco-Carians from the south-central Anatolian coast (linked to Sagalassos in Pisidia). (I say “proto-Lyco-Carian” rather than “Lycian” because, per Kloekhorst 2022, Lycian and Carian probably only diverged around 1000 BCE.) I think the “Shardana” were not just western Anatolians from the vicinity of Sardis but specifically Lydians (pre-Lydians?), which is further than Redford goes. (This idea was inspired by Rostyslav Oreshko’s work on Lydian, e.g. his 2019 paper.)
Proto–Inner Indo-European, I suppose (following Kassian et al. 2021).
See Clemente et al. 2021. Incidentally, the Log02 individual looks like a better proxy for the proto-Greeks than Log04: Skourtanioti et al. 2023, Extended Data Fig. 2, shows that Log02 (but not Log04) is cladal with many Mycenaean-era individuals from the Peloponnese, Crete, and the Cyclades.
The start of the Middle Helladic III/Late Helladic I (or “Early Mycenaean Period, per Knodell 2021). This jives with the historical-linguistic chronology: “Around 1700, South Greek-speaking tribes penetrated into Boeotia, Attica, and the Peloponnese, while North Greek was spoken roughly in Thessaly, parts of Central Greece, and further North and West” (van Beek 2022).
Jablonka in The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean (2010), p. 853.
I would bet that the Lydians (and the Bible’s “Girgashites”) were close relatives or descendants of the Trojans, the proof of which this margin is too narrow to contain, but see Oreshko 2019.
See e.g. Macurdy 1919 (!), “The North Greek Affiliations of Certain Groups of Trojan Names”: “How comes it that [the Trojans’] rulers have Greek names? The name of Priam himself is not indeed obviously Greek, but in its Aeolic form Perramos it may well be so; and Priam's father was Laomedon. Hector is Greek as Nestor, and was in later time the name of a prince of Chios. Paris has the second name of Alexandros; and the natural assumption is that ‘Paris’ was a Phrygian name given him by his Phrygian mother, Hecuba. The names of the other children of Priam who come into the story—Cassandra, Helenus, Deiphobus, etc.—are Greek. We have to choose between two inferences. Either the bards deliberately substituted Greek for foreign names, or the rulers of the Troad were Greek. The second alternative, startling as it may appear, seems to us to accord with other evidence and to afford the most satisfactory explanation of the data of the Iliad.”
I like the math in Altschuler et al. 2013, though it seems not to have gotten much much love.
“Mycenaeans can be modeled as a mixture in an ~1:10 ratio of a Yamnaya-like steppe-derived population and a Minoan- or Early Bronze Age–like Aegean population” (Lazaridis et al. 2022).
Manning, A Test of Time Revisited (2014), Table RE4, gives the LM II start-date range as 1470-1450 BCE.
See Whitley, Knossos: Myth, History and Archaeology (2023), 4.13-17.
This is also apparent in the ancient DNA: Skourtanioti et al. 2023 found that their Late Bronze Age Crete samples fell into three different clusters, with widely varying amounts of western steppe ancestry (ranging from ~40% to zero), unlike contemporary samples from the Greek mainland, which look more homogeneous.
Translated by Peter Green (2018). I was going to use the Emily Wilson translation, but, probably for metrical reasons, she silently omits the Kydonians!
Redford 2017, p. 117-8: “the introduction into the debate [over the identity of the Peleset/Pelasti] of the Pelasgians has long since provoked a bemused dismissiveness among classicists…but there is no justification for this at all (apart from the fear that someone with evidence they cannot control will solve the problem). The relationship between Mycenaean affricates…makes it highly likely that Pelasti and Pelasgi are but dialectical variants. … Pelasgoi [was] sometimes written Πελαστοι.”
Whitley 2023: “Kydonia may have been a subordinate kingdom, as this is the only other place in Crete where Linear B tablets have been found.”
Manning in The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean (2010) dates the LM IIIA2/LM IIIB transition (i.e. the end of the Final Palatial period) to somewhere between 1330 and 1315 BCE. See also discussion in Whitley 2023, 4.16.
Whitley 2023: “Kydonia…is the only other place in Crete [besides Knossos] where Linear B tablets have been found.” Fouriki and Nodarou 2023: “The settlement of Chania [Kydonia] continued to thrive and increased its influence in the later phase of the Bronze Age (LM IIIB), when other regional centres had declined … According to the material evidence, Kydonia played a central role in the long-distance trade of the southern Aegean and the east Mediterranean throughout the Late Bronze period … The main difference between Chania and other sites on Crete is the presence of the Kydonian workshop; nowhere else in Crete is there a workshop producing such characteristic fine pottery in the LM III period…In the LM III period the products of the Kydonian workshop witnessed a wide distribution not only in Crete but also in the Cyclades, the Greek mainland, Sardinia, Cyprus, Canaan, Syria and Egypt.”
I got this idea from Taracha 2015, though with the added twist of focusing on Kydonia rather than Crete overall.
I was excited to have come up with the “Tawagalawa = Deucalion” idea myself but then discovered it had already been mentioned offhand in Huxley 2001 (“For Tawagalawa the Greek name Deukalion (<* Deukaleus) also has been suggested”).
I was excited to have come up with the “Tawagalawa = Teucer” idea myself but discovered it had already been mentioned offhand in Strauss 2007, p. 35 (“This Greek [Tawagalawa] might have been Eteocles, a Theban prince of myth, or maybe Teucer, as Greater Ajax’s brother was called”). Notice a theme, footnote-reader?
See e.g. the figure from the Kroonen et al. 2023 eLetter. Come to think of it, though, I probably first encountered this claim in Kloekhorst 2023.
See Kassian et al. 2021, Figure 2.
Özdoğan 2023: “Recent rescue excavations within the urban area of İstanbul at Beşiktaş have exposed an extensive cemetery with kurgan type of burial mounds, some cremated, others as simple inhumations mostly placed in cist graves, clearly indicating massive movement originating from the northern Balkans. The coming of migrant groups must have lasted at least 200 years, but was not clearly manifested in other parts of Thrace. Nevertheless, by the very beginning of the Early Bronze Age [c. 3200 BCE], as indicated by surface surveys, there are hundreds of newly founded settlements over Western and West-central Anatolia.” This timing aligns well with Kloekhorst 2023’s argument that Proto-Anatolian first split (presumably within Anatolia) around 3000 BCE. (This is all contra the theory of the origins of the Anatolian language family that was set forth in the “southern arc” paper (Lazaridis et al. 2022), which I don’t buy.)
For what it’s worth, I suspect that Palaic is a sister clade to Hittite (on proximity/ecoregion grounds: they’re both forest-y and northern), and Lydian is a heavily Luwicized form of Trojan/para-Greek, as Rostyslav Oreshko has suggested. You should probably listen to Oscar Billing and Erik Elgh instead of me, but they don’t have enough data to be certain.
See e.g. Jablonka in The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean (2010), p. 855: “It is not clear whether an earthquake, a war, or an internal uprising caused a partial destruction of the city at the end of Troy VI.”
Hogue 2023, p. 459.
De Jong 1987 notes that “the Iliadic character known almost exclusively as Paris in post-Homeric tradition is called Alexandros four times as often as Paris in the Iliad itself.” But why does Alexandros/Paris have two names? None of the answers I’ve seen fully satisfy me, but my favorite one is from Macurdy 1919, which I already quoted above: “Paris” was a nickname given to Alexandros by his “Phrygian” mother Hecuba. It might be relevant that Νάπαρις “Naparis” is attested as the name of a river in Thracian (see Yanakieva 2018), and Thracian was closely related to Phrygian.
See Oreshko 2021, p. 309, n. 81. But why did “Troy” have two names: 1) Wilusa/Wiluya (Hittite), (W)ilion (Greek) (see Oreshko 2019, p. 163); 2) Taruwisa/Taruwiya (Hittite, but only attested once, as far as I know), Troíē/Troíā (Greek), something like “Taruisha” (Egyptian) (see Redford 2017, p. 116-7)? I’m most convinced by Jona Lendering’s suggestion: “these double names…may originally have referred to the citadel and the lower city." The citadel site (Wilusa?) predated the para-Greek “Trojans” who showed up with Troy VI, but the more sprawling, directly adjacent “lower city” (Taruwisa?) was a “Trojan” creation. So perhaps when the old citadel was finally destroyed, “Wilusa” stopped being relevant, and “Taruwisa” and its derivatives took over.
From the Tawagalawa letter, AhT 4 in Beckman et al., The Ahhiyawa Texts (2011), p. 115.
Diodorus Siculus 4.58.6.
Robin Hard, The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology, 8th ed. (2020), chapter 12, is probably a better source than what I originally used (the Wikipedia page for “Dorian invasion”).
See e.g. Lane 2023, Table 1. This date is a little later than what some other sources say, but it accords with some remarks from Fantalkin et al. 2015, which seems trustworthy, so I’m going with it.
Maran and Papadimitriou, “Mycenae and the Argolid,” in A Companion to the Archaeology of Early Greece and the Mediterranean (2020), p. 698.
During the reign of Tudhaliya IV, which Bryce 2019 dates from 1237-1209 BCE. Also Bryce 2019, p. 237, sic: “The most interesting feature of this clause [of a vassal treaty] is its initial inclusion of the Ahhiyawan king amongst Tudhaliya’s peers, and then the erasure of his name, by having a line drawn through it while the treaty was still in draft form and the clay on which it was written still damp and soft. This suggests to me that the scribe who had drafted the treaty had simply copied the list of Great Kings from an earlier, perhaps quite recent document, but that the Ahhiyawan had suddenly lost this status; he therefore no longer warranted the designation ‘Great King’, at least in a Near Eastern context.”
Bechar et al. 2021: “the deep shift in Levantine interaction with Aegean-type pottery…probably happened ca. mid-13th century BCE, namely at the transition from LH IIIB1 to LH IIIB2. Before this shift, the mass importation of very standardized, high-quality products from the palatial workshops of the Argolid characterized the interaction of the southern Levant with the Aegean. … This horizon found a sudden end in the 13th century, when it was replaced by ‘Horizon Nami’. The transition between the two horizons is characterized by the end of mass imports from the Argolid.”
See Millek 2023, Appendix (“This was likely a contained accidental fire”).
Andreadaki-Vlazaki, “Khania (Kydonia,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean (2010), p. 527.
This seems to be the consensus figure, though Mountjoy 2018 (vol. 2, II.12) notes that “the date of the foundation of the settlement cannot be defined more closely than late LCIIC” (though elsewhere she says “at the end of LCIIC”), which, per Knapp 2013 (Table A2), ended around 1200 BCE.
See Cline’s 1177 B.C., p. 127-30.
See Valério 2016.
See Knapp and Manning 2016 for a summary.
Trameri 2020: “First appearing in late 16th and 15th c. BCE sources as a self-standing kingdom, [Kizzuwatna] was later incorporated into the Hittite kingdom, becoming a province of the Empire created by Suppiluliuma I (ca. mid-14th c.).”
See Oreshko 2019 (“Geography of the Western Fringes”), which argues that “Arzawa proper” was “a ‘league’ of the once independent coastal cities of Caria and, at least partly, Ionia,” although it appears that the term “Arzawa” came to be used for western Anatolia more broadly.
Simon 2011: “Its precise localisation is still not possible, but North Syria, and, more precisely, the territory of Naharina / Mittani, is certain."
See Singer, “Alalaḫ/Mukiš under Hittite Rule and Thereafter,” in Overturning Certainties in Near Eastern Archaeology (2017).
Bryce, The World of the Neo-Hittite Kingdoms (2012), p. 195-6 and 201.
Oreshko 2018 (he goes with “New Danuna” and “New Ahhiyawa,” but I couldn’t resist jazzing it up even more).
Asscher et al. 2021: in Ashkelon, Philistine 1 pottery first appears in Phase 20, which began 1190-1155 BCE (68.3% hpd, midpoint 1173). See also Webster et al. 2023: the arrival of Philistine 2 pottery in Gezer (outside Philistia proper) is dated to 1183–1136 BCE (68.3% hpd, midpoint 1160).
In “David and Achish: Remembrance of Things Past, Present, or Future?” David in the Desert (2021) (Google Books).
Other models fit adequately too, but Yüncü et al. 2023 indicates that just picking the qpAdm model with the highest p-value is actually a decent heuristic.
Lazaridis et al. 2022, supplement, p. 10-14.
See Manning et al. 2020, Table 4 (“Phase 6b Date Estimate”).
See Oreshko 2018, section 7.
Jablonka in The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean (2010), p. 856.
This is amazing thank you!!!
Great read! Can you please clarify a little the Greeks' lineage? You say the 'Greeks' descended from the steppes via Europe - so where did the 'native' Minoans and pelastoi come from?