I find it bizarre and almost a historical cop-out that the Bronze age collapse has been widely chalked up to being brought on by the “Sea Peoples”... Recently, I watched a youtube video about the bronze age collapse (feeling ridiculous for never having studied it before) and I heard the video lend the wordly devastation to something called the “Sea Peoples” and immediately my mind’s record scratched loudly and sharply. Insert slack-jaw dumbfounded face. Finishing that video, I went on to watch a longer documentary about the collapse, and it was almost embarrassing watching these scholars and historians chalk things up to these Sea Peoples. Then I took to google to read as much as I could about both the collapse and the Sea Peoples but NOTHING managed to clear anything up. It all resembles some sort of historical conspiracy theory.

Anyway, go Wikipedia “Bronze Age Collapse” and scroll down a little ways to find: “Prior to and during the Bronze Age Collapse, Syria became a battle ground between the empires of the Hittites, Assyrians, Mitanni and Egyptians, and later the coastal regions came under attack from the Sea Peoples.

Follow the link for Sea Peoples and you get: “The Sea Peoples are a purported seafaring confederation that attacked ancient Egypt and other regions of the East Mediterranean prior to and during the Late Bronze Age collapse (1200–900 BC).” As well as “the Sea Peoples are conjectured to have sailed around the eastern Mediterranean and invaded Anatolia, Syria, Canaan, Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Egypt toward the end of the Bronze Age.” And to aid in the mystery “The Sea Peoples remain unidentified in the eyes of most modern scholars, and hypotheses regarding the origin of the various groups are the source of much speculation.”

In what I’ve learned between these various sources,these Sea People’s are said to have come from the Sea, the water, with origins unknown and undocumented, and the little “records” there are record these people being not so much an army of soldiers bent on destruction, but migrating families with women and children and wagons of their belongings. They didn’t appear to fight on the Sea very often, either, even though the wikipedia explanation compares them to a type of pirate. As it is currently reported, there was no decorated pottery to prove culture or ethnicity, no decorated ships or flags or clothing or jewelry or shrines, relics, gods, or anything left behind to prove a Sea Peoples... And this description of a culprit is supposed to be the very same that brought on “the cultural collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, the Kassite dynasty of Babylonia, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and the Levant, the Egyptian Empire; the destruction of Ugarit and the Amorite states in the Levant, the fragmentation of the Luwian states of western Asia Minor, and a period of chaos in Canaan. The deterioration of these governments interrupted trade routes and severely reduced literacy in much of the known world. In the first phase of this period, almost every city between Pylos and Gaza was violently destroyed, and many abandoned.”

And I think the idea of the Sea Peoples was originally provoked by an Egyptian King/god, bragging about a victory over them, which I don’t find trustworthy at all with their egos and godliness on the line.

I’m trying to study as much about this as I can, I am hooked. But I’m also just a regular joe and my mind may not be wrapping things up properly. AM I MISSING SOMETHING CRUCIAL IN ALL THIS? From what I’m understanding, believing the bronze age collapse was brought on by these Sea Peoples is no different from trying to believe martians did it all. I am open minded, I really am, but this one is rich.

I’ve actually been provoked to study the old Testament and The Exodus further, because it somewhat shockingly jives with the collapse if you can open your mind to it.

Open to all info and critiques and yada yada!