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Sea Peoples: Who were they, where did they come from?

While I am not certain of a great deal about the Sea Peoples, I will add a few brief comments to the replies in the threads already linked.

1. An Agean connection for some of the Sea Peoples seem likely at this point, mainly because of visibly Agean material culture turning up at late Bronze/early Iron sites.

2. Recent-ish research has pointed to at least one polity possibly connected with the Peleset/Philistines in the early Iron Age. About fifteen years ago,a Luwian inscription dedicating the spectaular renovation of the temple of the Stormgod in Aleppo by one "Taita, king of Walistin" and this inscription has been connected to others mentioning the place-name Walistin at Tel Tayinat and Hamath. While this isn't as informative as one would like because the dating of Taita is still somewhat in the air beyond "early-ish Iron Age", it does I think point to a very general sense of what happened with the Sea Peoples-a variety of groups, some Agean and others from elsewhere-migrated to the levant during and after the collapse of the Hittite Empire where many if not most of them retained some Agean material culture but also assimilated into the Luwian elites(as marked by Taita's adoption of Imperial Hittite artistic styles and his use of Luwian in inscriptions) and broader West Semitic population.

3. While the quest for the "Sea Peoples" is important, two things should be pointed out. First, it's dangerous to project modern notions of ethnicity and identity onto the late Bronze Age. While it is unclear(if increasingly clearer) where they came from), the grouping we have from Egyptian texts is external and interested in chracterizing them as a specific class of invader. Second, a lot of the focus on the Sea Peoples has depicted them as directly responsible for the Late Bronze Age Collapse and for destroying the late Bronze empires. The problem with this is that it's increasingly clear that the empires were falling for other reasons as well. The Hittite Empire had serious internal problems and a nasty string of succession wars and breakaway sub-kingdoms and it seems that the internal political balance of the Near East as a while was becoming precarious and shifting. Moreover, there seems to be clear evidence of drought and food supply issues in the last century or so of the Hittite state; the second-to-last Hittite king we know of became increasingly invested in massive pool and dam works around the capital of Hattusa (historically not necessary) and we know from texts found at Emar in Syria of a number of famine years in this period. Emar in particular is a good case study because it didn't rely on irrigation but also had relatively limited available farmland, so it is reasonable to suspect that it would have been more sensitive than most regions to either drought conditions or increased political conflict limiting access to farmland. Whoever the Sea Peoples were, they were acting in relation to this political and population pressure and some of them may even have been specifically migrating to regions of the Levant and Syria that were weathering the political changes and droughts better.

Reposting a comment of mine from a while back:

The Sea People are incredibly mysterious, because we have so little material to work with. Most of what we know comes from two Egyptian inscriptions from the reigns of Merneptah and Ramesses III, in the late 13th and early 12th centuries BC. Merneptah fought off an invasion by "Northerners coming from all lands" (alternatively referred to as "Peoples of the Sea"), whom he listed as the Ekwesh, Teresh, Lukka, Sherden, and Shekelesh peoples. Ramesses III later describes two great battles fought against "the foreign countries...in their islands" and notes that "No land could stand before their arms." He lists the invaders as the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, and Wehesh peoples.

The question of who these peoples were is a heavily debated topic amongst archaeologists. Various identities have been suggested:

• The Lukka seem to have come from Anatolia and were probably the ancient Lycians.

• It's been proposed that the Shardana were from Sardinia, but this is far from a sure thing and is mostly based on the similarity of the names and the presence of Bronze Age structures found on the island.

• The Teresh are alternatively proposed to have been Trojans (due to the similarity to the Hittite name "Taruisa," which may have been one of several Hittite names for Troy and the area surrounding it) or to have been sort of proto-Etruscans. However, these are both very tentative identifications.

• The Shekelesh may have been from Sicily, but as with the Teresh, this is a very tentative identification.

• The Ekwesh may have been Greeks, due to the similarity with "Achaean" (one of Homer's names for the Mycenaean Greeks) and the Hittite word "Ahhiyawa/Ahhiya," which most likely refers to Greece. Again, not a sure thing by any means.

• The Tjeker may also have been from the area of Troy, but this one seems to be one of the more uncertain identifications.

• The Denyen have been suggested to have been Mycenaean Greeks (due to the similarity to the name "Danaan," another Homeric name for Greeks). They've also been suggested to have been the Biblical Tribe of Dan.

• The Peleset are widely considered to have been the Philistines of the Bible. This is the most widely-accepted identification of all the Sea Peoples. If they were, then the Philistines might have been Aegean in origin, due to the similarities between their pottery and that of Mycenaeans and Minoans.

• Like the Tjeker, the Wehesh are very shadowy, and as far as I can tell there really isn't a standout candidate for who they were.

Regardless of who they were, the Sea People seemed to have been a loose confederacy of disparate societies undergoing a major population migration. These weren't just marauding pirates -- we're talking about entire civilizations traveling around, not just the warriors. The Egyptians attest to the destructive nature of the Sea People (that no land could stand before them) and specifically mention their role in the collapse of the Hittite Empire. Because so many other civilizations collapsed at the same time (the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, Ugarit, etc.), it's been suggested that the Sea Peoples were a major factor in the collapse of the Bronze Age. However, there are plenty of others who feel that blaming the collapse on them is too simply of a solution and overplays the importance they had. It's a really murky, heavily debated subject, and unfortunately it's one that probably won't be resolved any time soon.

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