BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Exploring references in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Captured “Sea Peoples” depicted on the wall of Ramesses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. Photo by Glenn Corbett, BAS.

In Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem about Odysseus’s struggle to return to his kingdom in Ithaca after the Trojan War, the “People of the Sea” hang over the plot like a dark cloud—a rumor of coming destroyers and harbingers of a dark age mentioned by multiple characters along the way. But who are these “People of the Sea”? Well, they’re not just a plot device or a way of adding dramatic tension. The “Sea Peoples” were a very real phenomenon of the Mediterranean world in the tumultuous days at end of the Late Bronze Age.

In fact, if you’ve heard of the Sea Peoples, it’s probably because they are often considered one of the prime suspects for the collapse of the Late Bronze Age world, which saw the fall of kingdoms, the withering of empires, and the end to a once-thriving system of trade and diplomacy. The Sea Peoples are a topic that scholars have debated for decades. This debate is both fascinating and frustrating, for the more we have learned about the Sea Peoples and the more we have studied them, the slipperier and more complicated they have become.

Let’s clear up one thing first: No ancient text refers to this group by the name “Sea Peoples.” This is a scholarly term popularized by the 18th-century Egyptologist Gaston Maspero to refer to a collection of groups that threatened New Kingdom Egypt at the end of the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE). Some texts mention a (frankly rather vague) origin in the sea or on “islands.” Pharaoh Merneptah claims to have already defeated some of these “Sea Peoples” groups at the end of the 13th century BCE (in the same inscription—the Merneptah Stele—that contains the earliest agreed-upon mention of Israel outside the Bible). But their most famous appearance is certainly in an inscription left by Ramesses III, the last significant New Kingdom ruler, on the walls of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu in Egypt. There, we read this oft-cited passage:

(As for) the foreign countries, they made conspiracy in their isles. Removed and dispersed in conflict were the lands (all) at one time. No country could resist their arms, beginning from Hatti (= Hittites), Qode (= Cilicia), Carchemish, Arzawa (= western Anatolia), Alasia (= Cyprus), cut off [all at once], in one place. Camp was set up(?) in one place, in Amurru; they cut off its people, and its land was as if it had never existed. They (= the invaders) came onward—a fire being (made) ready before them!—on towards Nile-land. (Translation by Kenneth Kitchen, The Context of Scripture, vol. 4)

Like any proper pharaoh, Ramesses smote these enemies thoroughly, turned them back from the frontiers of Egypt, and took some as prisoners of war. This took place in his eighth year, most likely dating to 1177 BCE. A set of reliefs that accompany the inscription show the pharaoh defeating these Sea Peoples on land and in the Nile Delta.

The best-known group of “Sea Peoples” named and defeated by Ramesses III is certainly the Peleset, none other than the Philistines. These are the notorious (but many would now say misunderstood) Iron Age neighbors of the Israelites, mostly known from the Hebrew Bible, where they are portrayed as Israel’s longtime enemies. The linguistic match between the name Peleset and “Philistines” was, in fact, already noted by Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs. We know that the Philistines eventually took up residence on the southern coastal plain of the Levant, but they may have already begun settling there before the confrontation with Ramesses III.

FREE ebook: Ancient Israel in Egypt and the Exodus.

join BAS Bible History Daily mailing list

REQUEST FREE BOOK

DOWNLOAD E-BOOK

 

For the other groups, we are largely limited to reasonable suggestions about how their names might relate to their origins or where they ended up. The Danuna, for example, might have ended up on Cyprus and in Cilicia in southern Turkey, since similar names occur in both during the Iron Age. The Shardanu have been linked to the name of the island of Sardinia.

If there is another thing we know about the Sea Peoples, it is that they did not entirely come out of nowhere, and the lists of groups that Merneptah and Ramesses III claim to have defeated don’t completely overlap. The Peleset appear in the records we have today only in conjunction with Ramesses III, but some of the other groups (including the Danuna) occur in texts from the 14th and 13th centuries, and occasionally show up in texts from places such as Ugarit in what is now Syria. They were also not always seen as hostile to Egypt or other kingdoms of the region; many Shardanu served in the Egyptian military.

Recreation of wall relief at Medinet Habu depicting Ramses III defeating the Sea Peoples. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Still, weren’t the Sea Peoples seen at the scene of the crime that was the Late Bronze Age collapse? It’s a bit more complicated than that. It was once common to read that the Sea Peoples were responsible for destroying towns and cities around the eastern Mediterranean at this time, especially in texts associated with Ramesses III. While there is clear evidence that some destruction happened, more recent analyses suggest that widespread devastation was far less extensive than once thought.

Ramesses III names the Hittite kingdom among the Sea Peoples’ victims; the great Hittite capital Hattusha was indeed burned, but archaeologists now believe this was only after it had been abandoned. The city of Ugarit in modern Syria, capital of the kingdom of the same name, is not directly named by Ramesses III but actually was violently attacked and burned, with excavations finding weapons from the battle left in its streets. Yet at neither Ugarit nor practically any other site that was destroyed do we find clear evidence that the Sea Peoples were responsible.

Even in the coastal plains where the Philistines would eventually settle, there is little evidence for a violent takeover. It is equally plausible that the hordes of invading warriors described by Merneptah and especially Ramesses III were based on real peoples and historical events but were recast into ideologically charged narratives emphasizing the pharaoh’s role as Egypt’s defender against foreign forces of chaos. While the causes of the Late Bronze collapse continue to be debated, current scholarship points toward a combination of factors—including climate change, famine, natural disasters, population displacement, and internal political instability—that unfolded not all at once but over several decades.

So, what does all of this have to do with Odysseus, the Greeks, and the Trojan War? The end of the Late Bronze Age also saw the fall of the kingdoms of the Mycenaean civilization of Greece and the Aegean islands, with destructions occurring at palace centers including Mycenae itself. We don’t know what the people of the Mycenaean civilization called themselves, but it’s generally agreed that they were what Hittites called “Ahhiyawans,” and letters found in the excavation of Hattusha seem to indicate that there had been conflict between the Hittites and Ahhiyawans regarding a specific place in the west of Anatolia with names very similar to the names that Homer uses for Troy.

The ruins of Troy (modern Hisarlik in Turkey) are found in this very area. Not only that, but the name of the Ahhiyawans is rather similar to “Achaeans,” the name that Homer often uses to refer to those who sailed from Greece to besiege Troy. It has long been understood that even though it was written down much later, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were originally oral compositions set in a vaguely recalled Late Bronze Age world. Indeed, the leader of the coalition of kings besieging Troy is Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae itself.

Philistine pottery showing clear connection to Mycenaean material culture. Credit: Hanay, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

It has also been suggested that there is an echo of this same group in the name of the Ekwesh, one of the Sea Peoples defeated by Merneptah. While Ramesses III does not mention the Ekwesh, in the reliefs that accompany his inscription at Medinet Habu, the military gear worn by some of the Sea Peoples has some noticeable similarities to gear known from the Mycenaean world, as do their ships. But the strongest archaeological association between the Mycenaean civilization and the Sea Peoples has to do with material culture: It has long been observed that the pottery and other forms of material culture of the Philistines in the early stages of the Iron Age is so similar to that of Mycenaean sites that there must be a connection, namely that many of the Philistines were people who had migrated out of their collapsing civilization.

While our best data comes from Philistine sites, we see a similar phenomenon in other places that have been linked to the Sea Peoples. It’s important to note, however, that the material culture of the Philistines actually had influence over other places in the Late Bronze world, including Cyprus and Crete. The term “seren,” the title of rulers of the Philistine cities recorded in the Hebrew Bible, seems to have linguistic origins in Anatolia. This has led some scholars to suggest that the Philistines (and perhaps other groups identified as Sea Peoples) were not just migrants but actually a tribe of pirates, who both contributed to the collapse with their raiding and absorbed the people displaced along the way.

While Homer doesn’t mention “Sea Peoples” in the Iliad or the Odyssey, these epics and the world they remember certainly bear on what we now call the “Sea Peoples.” The epics seem to contain some echo of the Sea Peoples’ role at the end of the Late Bronze Age.

Reviews of the film The Odyssey (such as in Rolling Stone) have already observed that Nolan might have learned about the Sea Peoples from works such as Eric Cline’s book 1177 B.C., one the most successful recent efforts to bring archaeology and ancient history to a broad public audience. The inclusion of the Sea Peoples in this film is anachronistic insofar as that term arises from modern scholarship (watching the film as an archaeologist, hearing the characters reference the “People of the Sea” was a little weird). But The Odyssey itself has always mixed different eras and perspectives. With that in mind, Nolan’s use of modern historical language partakes in a similar tradition of reimagining the ancient world through the lens of the present.

Zachary Thomas is a lecturer in the archaeology of ancient Israel at Australian Catholic University with expertise in the early Iron Age/early monarchy, anthropological and theoretical approaches, and ceramics.

Become a BAS All-Access Member Now!

Read Biblical Archaeology Review online, explore 50 years of BAR, watch videos, attend talks, and more

Related reading in Bible History Daily

The Fabulous World of Agamemnon

Site-Seeing: Face to Face with Ancient Greek Warriors

Collapse and Rebirth

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library

1177 B.C.—The Collapse of Bronze Age Civilization

When Civilization Collapsed

Fragment of Homer’s Odyssey Unearthed at Olympia