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2 • • • Prologue

came in waves over a considerable period o time. Sometimes the war-

riors came alone, and sometimes their amilies accompanied them.

According to Ramses’s inscriptions, no country was able to oppose thisinvading mass o humanity. Resistance was utile. Te great powers othe day—the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Canaanites, the Cypriots,and others— ell one by one. Some o the survivors ed the carnage;others huddled in the ruins o their once- proud cities; still others joined

the invaders, swelling their ranks and adding to the apparent complexi-ties o the mob o invaders. Each group o the Sea Peoples was on themove, each apparently motivated by individual reasons. Perhaps it wasthe desire or spoils or slaves that spurred some; others may have beencompelled by population pressures to migrate eastward rom their ownlands in the West.

On the walls o his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, near the Valleyo the Kings, Ramses said concisely:

Te oreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once thelands were removed and scattered in the ray. No land could stand be oretheir arms, rom Khatte, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on,

Fig. 1. Sea Peoples portrayed as captives at Medinet Habu (afer Medinet Habu , vol. 1,pl. 44; courtesy o the Oriental Institute o the University o Chicago).

© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may bedistributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanicalmeans without prior written permission of the publisher.

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Te Collapse o Civilizations • • • 3

being cut off at [one time]. A camp [was set up] in one place in Amurru.Tey desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come

into being. Tey were coming orward toward Egypt, while the amewas prepared be ore them. Teir con ederation was the Peleset, jekker,Shekelesh, Danuna, and Weshesh, lands united. Tey laid their handsupon the lands as ar as the circuit o the earth, their hearts condentand trusting. 5

We know these places that were reportedly overrun by the invaders,or they were amous in antiquity. Khatte is the land o the Hittites, with

its heartland located on the inland plateau o Anatolia (the ancient nameor urkey) near modern Ankara and its empire stretching rom the

Aegean coast in the west to the lands o northern Syria in the east. Qodeis probably located in what is now southeastern urkey (possibly the re-gion o ancient Kizzuwadna). Carchemish is a well-known archaeologi-cal site rst excavated almost a century ago by a team o archaeologiststhat included Sir Leonard Woolley, perhaps better known or his excava-tion o Abraham’s “Ur o the Chaldees” in Iraq, and . E. Lawrence, whowas trained as a classical archaeologist at Ox ord be ore his exploits inWorld War I ultimately trans ormed him into Hollywood’s “Lawrence oArabia.” Arzawa was a land amiliar to the Hittites, located within theirgrasp in western Anatolia. Alashiya may have been what we know todayas the island o Cyprus, a metal-rich island amous or its copper ore.Amurru was located on the coast o northern Syria. We shall visit all othese places again, in the pages and stories that ollow.

Te six individual groups who made up the Sea Peoples during thiswave o invasion—the ve mentioned above by Ramses in the MedinetHabu inscription and a sixth group, named the Shardana, mentioned inanother relevant inscription— are ar more shadowy than the lands thatthey reportedly overran. Tey lef no inscriptions o their own and arethere ore known textually almost entirely rom Egyptian inscriptions. 6

Most o these groups are also difficult to detect in the archaeologi-cal record, although archaeologists and philologists have been makinga valiant attempt or much o the past century, rst by playing linguistic

games and then, more recently, by looking at pottery and other archaeo-logical remains. For instance, the Danuna were long ago identied withHomer’s Danaans, rom the Bronze Age Aegean. Te Shekelesh are ofenhypothesized to have come rom what is now Sicily and the Shardana


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rom Sardinia, based in part on the consonantal similarities in each caseand the act that Ramses re ers to these “ oreign countries” as making a

conspiracy “in their islands,” or the Shardana in particular were labeledin Ramses’s inscriptions as being “o the sea.”7

However, not all scholars accept these suggestions, and there is anentire school o thought which suggests that the Shekelesh and the Shar-dana did not come rom the Western Mediterranean, but rather were

rom areas in the Eastern Mediterranean and only ed to the regions oSicily and Sardinia, and gave their name to these regions, afer havingbeen de eated by the Egyptians. In avor o such a possibility is the act

that the Shardana are known to have been ghting both or and againstthe Egyptians long be ore the advent o the Sea Peoples. Against the pos-sibility is the act that we are later told, by Ramses III, that he settled thesurvivors o the attacking orces in Egypt itsel .8

O all the oreign groups active in this arena at this time, only one hasbeen rmly identied. Te Peleset o the Sea Peoples are generally ac-cepted as none other than the Philistines, who are identied in the Bibleas coming rom Crete.9 Te linguistic identication was apparently so

obvious that Jean- François Champollion, the decipherer o Egyptian hi-eroglyphics, had already suggested it be ore 1836, and the identicationo specic pottery styles, architecture, and other material remains as“Philistine” was begun as early as 1899 by biblical archaeologists work-ing at ell es-Sa, identied as biblical Gath.10

While we do not know with any precision either the origins or the moti- vation o the invaders, we do know what they look like— we can view theirnames and aces carved on the walls o Ramses III’s mortuary temple at

Medinet Habu. Tis ancient site is rich in both pictures and stately rows ohieroglyphic text. Te invaders’ armor, weapons, clothing, boats, and ox-carts loaded with possessions are all clearly visible in the representations,so detailed that scholars have published analyses o the individual peopleand even the different boats shown in the scenes. 11 Other panoramas aremore graphic. One o these shows oreigners and Egyptians engaged in achaotic naval battle; some are oating upside down and are clearly dead,while others are still ghting ercely rom their boats.

Since the 1920s, the inscriptions and scenes at Medinet Habu havebeen studied and exactingly copied by Egyptologists rom the OrientalInstitute at the University o Chicago. Te institute was and still is one o


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the preeminent centers in the world or the study o ancient civilizationsin Egypt and the Near East. James Henry Breasted ounded it upon hisreturn rom an epic journey through the Near East in 1919 and 1920,with fy thousand dollars in seed money rom John D. Rocke eller, Jr.

Archaeologists rom the OI (as it is generally called) have excavated allover the Near East, rom Iran to Egypt and beyond.

Much has been written about Breasted and the OI projects that beganunder his direction, including the excavations at Megiddo (biblical Ar-mageddon) in Israel, which lasted rom 1925 1939. 12 Among the mostimportant were the epigraphic surveys that were conducted in Egypt,during which the Egyptologists painstakingly copied the hieroglyphictexts and scenes lef by the pharaohs on their temples and palaces

throughout Egypt. It is a tremendously tedious job to copy the hiero-glyphics carved into stone walls and monuments. It involves hours owork, and transcribers are usually perched on ladders or scaffolding inthe hot sun, peering at deteriorated symbols inscribed on gates, tem-ples, and columns. Suffice it to say, the results are invaluable, especiallysince many o the inscriptions have suffered greatly as a result o ero-sion, damage by tourists, or other injuries. Were these inscriptions nottranscribed, they would eventually become undecipherable to uturegenerations. Te results o the transcriptions rom Medinet Habu werepublished in a series o volumes, the rst o which appeared in 1930,with subsequent and related volumes appearing in the 1940s and 1950s.

Fig. 2. Naval battle with Sea Peoples at Medinet Habu (afer Medinet Habu , vol. 1, pl. 37; courtesy o the Oriental Institute o the University o Chicago).


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Although scholarly debate continues, most experts agree that theland and sea battles depicted on the walls at Medinet Habu were prob-

ably ought nearly simultaneously in the Egyptian delta or nearby. It ispossible that they represent a single extended battle that occurred bothon land and at sea, and some scholars have suggested that both repre-sent ambushes o the Sea Peoples’ orces, in which the Egyptians caughtthem by surprise. 13 In any event, the end result is not in question, or atMedinet Habu the Egyptian pharaoh quite clearly states:

Tose who reached my rontier, their seed is not, their heart and soul arenished orever and ever. Tose who came orward together on the sea,the ull ame was in ront o them at the river-mouths, while a stockadeo lances surrounded them on the shore. Tey were dragged in, enclosed,and prostrated on the beach, killed, and made into heaps rom tail tohead. Teir ships and their goods were as i allen into the water. I havemade the lands turn back rom (even) mentioning Egypt: or when theypronounce my name in their land, then they are burned up. 14

Ramses then continues, in a amous document known as the Papyrus

Harris, again naming his de eated enemies:I overthrew those who invaded them rom their lands. I slew the Danuna[who are] in their isles, the jekker and the Peleset were made ashes. TeShardana and the Weshesh o the sea, they were made as those that existnot, taken captive at one time, brought as captives to Egypt, like the sando the shore. I settled them in strongholds bound in my name. Numerouswere their classes like hundred- thousands. I taxed them all, in clothingand grain rom the store-houses and granaries each year. 15

Tis was not the rst time that the Egyptians ought against a collectiveorce o “Sea Peoples.” Tirty years earlier, in 1207 BC, during the fh

year o Pharaoh Merneptah’s reign, a similar coalition o these shadowygroups had attacked Egypt.

Merneptah is perhaps best known to students o the ancient Near

East as the Egyptian pharaoh who rst uses the term “Israel,” in an in-scription dating to this same year (1207 BC). Tis inscription is the ear-liest occurrence o the name Israel outside the Bible. In the Pharaonicinscription, the name— written with a special sign to indicate that it is a


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people rather than just a place— appears in a brie description o a cam-paign to the region o Canaan, where the people whom he calls “Israel”

were located.16

Te sentences are ound within the context o a long in-scription that is otherwise concerned with Merneptah’s ongoing battleswith the Libyans, located just to the west o Egypt proper. It is the Liby-ans and the Sea Peoples who occupied most o Merneptah’s attentionduring this year, rather than the Israelites.

For example, in a text ound at the site o Heliopolis, dated to “Year 5, sec-ond month o the third season (tenth month),” we are told, “Te wretchedchie o Libya has invaded [with] Shekelesh and every oreign country,

which is with him, to violate the borders o Egypt.”17

Te same wording isrepeated on another inscription, known as the “Cairo Column.” 18

In a longer inscription ound at Karnak (modern- day Luxor), we aregiven additional details about this earlier wave o incursions by the SeaPeoples. Te names o the individual groups are included:

[Beginning o the victory that his majesty achieved in the land o Libya]Eqwesh, eresh, Lukka, Shardana, Shekelesh, Northerners coming

rom all lands. . . . the third season, saying: Te wretched, allen chieo Libya . . . has allen upon the country o ehenu with his bowmen—Shardana, Shekelesh, Eqwesh, Lukka, eresh, taking the best o everywarrior and every man o war o his country . . .

List o the captives carried off rom this land o Libya and the countrieswhich he brought with him . . .

Sherden, Shekelesh, Eqwesh o the countries o the sea, who had nooreskins:

Shekelesh 222 menMaking 250 hands

eresh 742 menMaking 790 handsShardana—[Making]—[Ek]wesh who had no oreskins, slain, whose hands were carried off,

( or) they had no [ oreskins]—Shekelesh and eresh who came as enemies o Libya—Kehek, and Libyans, carried off as living prisoners 218 men. 19


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Several things are apparent in this inscription. First there are vegroups, rather than six, who made up this earlier wave o Sea Peoples:

the Shardana (or Sherden), Shekelesh, Eqwesh, Lukka, and eresh. TeShardana and Shekelesh are present in both this invasion and the laterone during the time o Ramses III, but the other three groups are di -

erent. Second, the Shardana, Shekelesh, and Eqwesh are specicallyidentied as being “o the countries o the sea,” while the ve groupsare together described as “Northerners coming rom all lands.” Te lat-ter is not too surprising, or most lands with which the New KingdomEgyptians were in contact (except or Nubia and Libya) lay to the north

o Egypt. Te identication o the Shardana and the Shekelesh as “coun-tries o the sea” rein orces the suggestion that they are to be linked withSardinia and Sicily, respectively.

Te description o the Eqwesh as being rom “the countries o thesea” has led some scholars to suggest that they are Homer’s Achaeans,that is, the Mycenaeans o the Bronze Age Greek mainland, whomRamses III would perhaps identi y as the Danuna in his Sea Peoplesinscriptions two decades later. As or the nal two names, scholars

generally accept Lukka as a re erence to peoples rom southwesternurkey, in the region later known during the classical era as Lycia. Te

origin o the eresh is uncertain but might be linked to the Etruscansin Italy. 20

We are told little else in the inscriptions, and have no more than a very general idea where the battle or battles were ought. Merneptahsays only that the victory was “achieved in the land o Libya,” whichhe urther identies as “the country o ehenu.” However, Mernep-

tah clearly claims victory, or he lists the killed and captured enemycombatants, both men and “hands.” Te general practice o the daywas to cut off the hand o a dead enemy and bring it back as proo ,in order to get credit and reward or the kill. Gruesome evidence othis practice has just been ound rom the Hyksos period in Egypt,some our hundred years be ore Merneptah’s time, in the orm o six-teen right hands buried in our pits at the Hyksos palace at Avaris inthe Nile delta. 21 In any event, we do not know whether all o the SeaPeoples were killed or some survived, but we can probably assumethe latter, since several o the groups returned in the second invasionthirty years later.


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In 1177 BC, as previously in 1207 BC, the Egyptians were victorious.Te Sea Peoples would not return to Egypt a third time. Ramses boastedthat the enemy were “capsized and overwhelmed in their places.” “Teirhearts,” he wrote, “are taken away; their soul is own away. Teir weaponsare scattered in the sea.” 22 However, it was a Pyrrhic victory. AlthoughEgypt under Ramses III was the only major power to success ully resistthe onslaught o the Sea Peoples, New Kingdom Egypt was never thesame again aferward, most likely because o the other problems aced

by the entire Mediterranean region during this period, as we shall seebelow. Te succeeding pharaohs, or the rest o the second millenniumBC, were content to rule over a country much diminished in inuenceand power. Egypt became a second- rate empire; a mere shadow o whatit had once been. It was not until the days o Pharaoh Shoshenq, a Lib-yan who ounded the wenty- Second Dynasty ca. 945 BC—and who isprobably to be identied as Pharaoh Shishak o the Hebrew Bible 23—that Egypt rose to a semblance o prominence again.

Beyond Egypt, almost all o the other countries and powers o the sec-ond millennium BC in the Aegean and Near East— those that had beenpresent during the golden years o what we now call the Late BronzeAge—withered and disappeared, either immediately or within less thana century. In the end, it was as i civilization itsel had been wiped awayin much o this region. Many, i not all, o the advances o the previ-ous centuries vanished across great swaths o territory, rom Greece toMesopotamia. A new transitional era began: an age that was to last or at

least one century and perhaps as many as three in some areas.Tere seems little doubt that terror must have prevailed throughout the

lands in the nal days o these kingdoms. A specic example can be seenon a clay tablet, inscribed with a letter rom the king o Ugarit in northernSyria, addressed to the higher- ranking king on the island o Cyprus:

My ather, now the ships o the enemy have come. Tey have been set-ting re to my cities and have done harm to the land. Doesn’t my ather

know that all o my in antry and [chariotry] are stationed in Khatte, andthat all o my ships are stationed in the land o Lukka? Tey have not ar-rived back yet, so the land is thus prostrate. May my ather be aware o


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this matter. Now the seven ships o the enemy which have been cominghave done harm to us. Now i other ships o the enemy turn up, send me

a report somehow, so that I will know.24

Tere is some dispute about whether the tablet ever reached the in-tended recipient on Cyprus. Te original excavators who ound the tabletthought the letter might never have been sent. It was originally reportedto have been ound in a kiln, along with more than seventy other tablets,where it had apparently been placed or baking— the better to survivethe rough journey to Cyprus. 25 Tese excavators and other scholars ini-

tially surmised that the enemy ships had returned and sacked the citybe ore the urgent request or assistance could be dispatched. Tis is thestory that has since been repeated in textbooks or a generation o stu-dents, but scholars have now shown that the tablet was not ound in akiln and, as we shall see, was probably a copy o a letter that had beendispatched to Cyprus afer all.

Tere was a tendency on the part o earlier scholars to attribute any de-struction rom this period to the Sea Peoples. 26 However, it may be pre-sumptuous to lay the blame or the end o the Bronze Age in the Aegeanand Eastern Mediterranean entirely at their eet. It probably gives themtoo much credit, or we have no clear evidence, apart rom the Egyptiantexts and inscriptions, which give conicting impressions. Did the SeaPeoples approach the Eastern Mediterranean as a relatively organizedarmy, like one o the more disciplined Crusades intent on capturing the

Holy Land during the Middle Ages? Were they a loosely or poorly orga-nized group o marauders, like the Vikings o a later age? Or were theyre ugees eeing a disaster and seeking new lands? For all we know, thetruth could involve a combination o all or none o the above.

A wealth o new data available in the past ew decades now needs tobe considered within the equation. 27 We are no longer certain that allo the sites with evidence o destruction were razed by the Sea Peoples.We can tell rom the archaeological evidence that a site was destroyed,but not always by what or by whom. Moreover, the sites were not all de-stroyed simultaneously, or even necessarily within the same decade. Aswe shall see, their cumulative demise spans several decades and perhapsas much as a century.


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Moreover, while we do not know or certain the cause, or all thecauses, o the collapse o the Bronze Age world in Greece, Egypt, and

the Near East, the weight o contemporary evidence suggests that itwas probably not the Sea Peoples alone who were to blame. It nowseems likely that they were as much the victims as they were the ag-gressors in the collapse o civilizations.28 One hypothesis suggests thatthey were orced out o their homes by a series o un ortunate eventsand migrated eastward where they encountered kingdoms and empiresalready in decline. It is also quite possible that they were able to attackand ultimately vanquish many o the kingdoms o the region precisely

because those monarchies were already in decline and in a weakenedstate. In this context, the Sea Peoples might perhaps be consideredsimply opportunistic, as one scholar has called them, and might havesettled down in the Eastern Mediterranean much more peace ully thanhas previously been assumed. We shall consider these possibilities ingreater detail below.

Nevertheless, or decades o scholarly research the Sea Peoples were aconvenient scapegoat, taking the all or a situation that may have been

ar more complex and not o their own making. Te tide is now turning,or several scholars have recently pointed out that the “story” o the Sea

Peoples’ catastrophic wave o wanton destruction and/or migration hadbeen created by scholars such as Gaston Maspero, the amous FrenchEgyptologist, as early as the 1860s and 1870s, and was solidied by 1901.However, it was a theory based solely upon the epigraphic evidence othe inscriptions, long be ore any o the destroyed sites had actually beenexcavated. In act, even those scholars who ollowed Maspero’s lead were

divided as to the direction ollowed by the Sea Peoples, or some thoughtthat they ended up in the Western Mediterranean afer being de eatedby the Egyptians, rather than starting there. 29

In our current view, as we shall see below, the Sea Peoples may wellhave been responsible or some o the destruction that occurred at theend o the Late Bronze Age, but it is much more likely that a concatena-tion o events, both human and natural— including climate change anddrought, seismic disasters known as earthquake storms, internal rebel-lions, and “systems collapse”—coalesced to create a “per ect storm” thatbrought this age to an end. However, in order to understand the enor-mity o the events that took place around 1177 BC, we have to beginthree centuries earlier.


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T a b

l e 1

.

L a t e B r o n z e A g e E g y p t i a n a n d N e a r E a s t e r n k i n g s m e n t i o n e d i n t h e t e x t ,

l i s t e d b y c o u n t r y / k i n g

d o m a n d c h r o n o l o g y

C e n t u r y

E g y p t i a n

H i t t i t e

A s s y r i a n

B a b y l o n i a n

M i t a n n i

U g a r i t

O t h e r

1 8 t h

H a m m u r a b i

Z i m r i - L i m

( M a r i )

1 7 t h

H a t t u s i l i I

M u r s i l i I

1 6 t h

S e k n e n r e

K h y a n ( H y k s o s )

K a h m o s e

A p o p h i s ( H y k s o s )

A h m o s e I

T u t m o s e I

T u t m o s e I I

1 5 t h

H a t s h e p s u t

u d h a l i y a I / I I

S a u s h t a t a r

K u k k u l i ( A s s u w

a )

T u t m o s e I I I

1 4 t h

A m e n h o t e p I I I

S u p p i l u l i u m a I

A d a d - n i r a r i I

K u r i g a l z u I

S h u t t a r n a I I A m m i s t a m r u I

a r k h u n d a r a d u

( A r z a w a )

A k h e n a t e n

M u r s i l i I I

A s s u r - u b a l l i t

K a d a s h m a n - E n l i l I

u s h r a t t a

N i q m a d d u I I

u t a n k h a m e n

B u r n a - B u r i a s h I I

S h a t t i w a z a N i q m e p a

A y

K u r i g a l z u I I

1 3 t h

R a m s e s I I

M u r s i l i I I ( c o n t ’ d )

u k u l t i - N i n u r t a I

K a s h t i l i a s h u

N i q m e p a ( c o n t ’ d ) S h a u s h g a m u w a ( A m u r r u )

M e r n e p t a h

M u w a t t a l l i I I

A m m i s t a m r u I I

H a t t u s i l i I I I

N i q m a d d u I I I

u d h a l i y a I V

A m m u r a p i

S u p p i l u l i u m a I I

1 2 t h

R a m s e s I I I

S u p p i l u l i u m a I I

A m m u r a p i

S h u t r u k - N a h h u n t e ( E l a m

)

( c o n t ’ d )

( c o n t ’ d )


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Table 2.

Modern areas and their probable Late Bronze Age names

Area Ancient name #1 Ancient name #2 Ancient name #3

Cyprus Alashiya Mainland Greece Tanaja Ahhiyawa HiyawaCrete Kefiu Caphtor (Kaptaru)

roy/ road Assuwa (?) Isy (?) WilusaCanaan Pa-ka-na-na Retenu Egypt Misraim


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