The Sea Peoples is the term used…
1341 BCE to 1198 BCE
The Sea Peoples is the term used for a confederacy of seafaring raiders of the second millennium BCE who sail into the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, cause political unrest, and attempt to enter or control Egyptian territory during the late nineteenth dynasty, and especially during Year Eight of Ramesses III of the Twentieth dynasty.
The arrival of the Sea Peoples, around 1200 BCE, marks the end of the Bronze Age in the region and brings about new development of warfare, inaugurating the so-called Greek Dark Ages, which will prevail for nearly four centuries.
The Sea Peoples are held responsible for the destruction of old powers such as the Hittite Empire.
Because the invasions result in an abrupt break in ancient Near Eastern records, the precise extent and origin of the upheavals remain uncertain.
Principal but one-sided evidence for the Sea Peoples is based on Egyptian texts and illustrations; other important information comes from Hittite sources and from archaeological data.
The Egyptians wage two wars against the Sea Peoples: the first, in the fifth year of King Merneptah (reigned 1236 BCE to 1123 BCE), which would be 1231; the second, in the reign of Ramesses III (who reigned from about 1198 BCE to about 1166 BCE).
Tentative identifications of the Sea Peoples listed in Egyptian documents are as follows: Ekwesh, a group of Bronze Age Greeks (Achaeans; Ahhiyawa in Hittite texts); Teresh, Tyrrhenians (Tyrsenoi), known to later Greeks as sailors and pirates from Anatolia, ancestors of the Etruscans; Luka, a coastal people of western Anatolia, also known from Hittite sources (their name survives in classical Lycia on the southwest coast of Anatolia); Sherden, probably Sardinians (the Sherden, whose origins perhaps lay in Syria, acted as mercenaries of the Egyptians in the Battle of Kadesh, 1299 BCE); Shekelesh, probably identical with the Sicilian tribe later called Siculi; Peleset, generally believed to refer to the Philistines, who perhaps came from Crete and were the only major tribe of the Sea Peoples to settle permanently in Palestine.
Further identifications of other Sea Peoples mentioned in the documents are much more uncertain.
