- 21 hours ago
Key sources for this episode:
Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age
Trude Dothan, People of the Sea
Feldman et al. (2019), Ancient DNA sheds light on the origins of the Philistines, Science Advances
The Medinet Habu inscriptions of Ramesses III
The Ugarit correspondence (RS 20.238 and related tablets)
Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age
Trude Dothan, People of the Sea
Feldman et al. (2019), Ancient DNA sheds light on the origins of the Philistines, Science Advances
The Medinet Habu inscriptions of Ramesses III
The Ugarit correspondence (RS 20.238 and related tablets)
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00Sometime around 1185 BC, a king sat down to write a letter he would not live to send.
00:06His city was Ugarit, on the coast of what is now Syria.
00:10It was one of the richest ports in the world, a place where ships from Egypt, Cyprus, the
00:16Hittite Empire, and the Aegean unloaded copper and grain and ivory, where scribes wrote in
00:21half a dozen languages, and where the archives held thousands of clay tablets for courting
00:26the ordinary business of a connected world.
00:29The letter was a plea for help.
00:31Enemy ships had appeared off the coast, the king wrote.
00:34They had already burned his towns and done terrible things to his country.
00:38And he was defenseless, because his own army was away in Hittite lands, and his own fleet
00:44was stationed off the coast of Cyprus.
00:46The land, he wrote, was abandoned to itself.
00:50We know the letter existed because it was found, 3,000 years later, baked hard in the
00:55ruins of the palace.
00:56It was still in the kiln, where it had been fired.
00:59It was never sent.
01:01Because before the messenger could carry it out, the enemy arrived.
01:05Ugarit was destroyed so completely that it was never resettled.
01:09The city, that had stood for 2,000 years, that sat at the crossroads of every trade route
01:14in the eastern Mediterranean, simply ended, in fire, within a few years of that unsent letter.
01:20It vanished from history so thoroughly that its very location was forgotten until a farmer
01:27struck a stone roof with his plow in 1928.
01:30And Ugarit was not alone.
01:33Across a thousand kilometers from Greece to the edge of Egypt, the same thing was happening.
01:38The great palaces of Mycenaean Greece burned.
01:42The Hittite Empire, one of the superpowers of the age, disappeared so completely that history
01:49forgot it had ever existed.
01:51City after city after city fell, in a wave of destruction that ended the Bronze Age and
01:57plunged the entire eastern Mediterranean into a dark age that would last for centuries.
02:02It is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of civilization.
02:08And the ancient Egyptians, the one great power to survive it, left a record of who they believed
02:14was responsible.
02:15They carved it on a temple wall.
02:18Enemies who came from the sea, they drew their ships and their armor and they wrote down their
02:22names.
02:24Historians call them the Sea Peoples.
02:27There is only one problem.
02:28That name was invented 3,000 years later.
02:31The people who carved the record never used it.
02:34And after two centuries of investigation, using everything from ancient inscriptions to
02:40lakebed pollen to DNA recovered from the bones of the dead, we still cannot say for certain
02:45who the Sea Peoples were, where they came from, or even whether they were a single people at
02:50all.
02:50What we can do is open the case file, every scrap of evidence, every suspect, every theory.
02:57And what we find, when we look closely, is not the story we were told.
03:01It is stranger than an invasion, and far more unsettling.
03:06Because the deeper you go, the less the Sea Peoples look like the cause of the disaster.
03:11And the more they look like its consequence.
03:14To understand what was destroyed, you have to understand what existed.
03:18And what existed in the eastern Mediterranean around 1250 BC was something that would not
03:24exist again for a very long time.
03:27It was a connected world.
03:29Five great powers dominated the region, and they knew each other well.
03:33Egypt under the Ramesside pharaohs, old and immensely rich.
03:37The Hittite Empire in Anatolia, Egypt's great military rival, and, by this period, its treaty
03:45partner.
03:47Assyria and Babylonia in Mesopotamia.
03:50And in Greece and the Aegean, the palace civilization we call Mycenaean.
03:56The world that later Greeks would half remember as the age of their heroes.
04:00Between and beneath these powers lay a network of smaller kingdoms and city-states.
04:06Ugarit on the Syrian coast.
04:08Cyprus.
04:09Rich in copper.
04:10The trading towns of the Levant.
04:12Troy.
04:13Guarding the entrance to the Black Sea.
04:15What makes this period remarkable is not the powers themselves.
04:19It is how densely they were tied together.
04:22The kings wrote to each other constantly.
04:25A cache of diplomatic correspondence found in Egypt, the Amarna letters, preserves the
04:30tone of it.
04:30They address each other as brother.
04:32They complain about the quality of gifts.
04:35They negotiate marriages, demand gold, apologize for late shipments, and gossip about other
04:41kings.
04:42It is recognizably the correspondence of a functioning international system, with shared conventions,
04:47a common diplomatic language, and rules that everyone understood.
04:52Beneath the diplomacy ran trade, and the trade was the system's bloodstream.
04:57A single shipwreck tells the story better than any inscription.
05:01Off Ulubarone, on the southern coast of Turkey, a vessel went down around 1300 BC, carrying 10 tons
05:08of copper from Cyprus and a ton of tin, along with glass ingots colored with Egyptian technology,
05:15ebony from Africa, amber from the Baltic, ivory, gold jewelry, and pottery from at least half
05:22a dozen cultures.
05:23One ship.
05:25One sailing.
05:26The copper and tin matter most, because together they make bronze, and bronze was not optional.
05:32Every sword, every spearhead, every chariot fitting, every plowshare and chisel and razor
05:38in this world was bronze.
05:40It was the strategic material of the age, the way oil is now.
05:45And here is the structural weakness hiding inside the prosperity.
05:50Tin does not occur anywhere useful in the eastern Mediterranean.
05:54It came from far away, probably from as far as modern Afghanistan in the east, and possibly
06:01from Atlantic Europe in the west.
06:03Moving through long relay chains of middlemen before it reached a forge in Greece or Egypt.
06:11Which means every kingdom in this world, however mighty, depended for its basic military and
06:16agricultural technology on supply lines it did not control and could not see the far end
06:22of.
06:23The palaces made the dependency worse.
06:26Mycenaean Greece in particular ran on what scholars call a palace economy.
06:31The palace at Pylos, or Knossos, or Mycenae, was not just a royal residence.
06:37It was the warehouse, the factory, the tax office, and the distribution center for its entire region.
06:44Grain came in, was recorded, was stored, was redistributed.
06:48Wool went out to weavers.
06:50Cloth came back, was recorded, was exported.
06:53Scribes tracked all of it on clay tablets, in a script we call Linear B, in an accounting
07:00system of genuinely obsessive thoroughness.
07:04The tablets that survive record rations, flocks, chariot wheels, and personnel, down to individual
07:11named slaves.
07:12What they do not record, anywhere, is anything resembling a market.
07:17This was a command economy, centralized to a degree that is difficult to exaggerate.
07:24Centralization is efficient, and efficiency is fragile.
07:28A system where one building holds the records, the reserves, and the administrative knowledge
07:33of an entire kingdom, is a system with a single point of failure.
07:38For most of the 13th century BC, none of this mattered, because the system was delivering.
07:45These decades are, by the standards of the ancient world, a golden age.
07:50The great powers fought occasionally, most famously at Kadesh around 1274 BC, where Egypt
07:56and the Hittites fought the largest chariot battle ever recorded, and then, 16 years later,
08:02signed the world's first surviving peace treaty between equals.
08:05A copy of it hangs in the United Nations building today.
08:09Trade volumes were enormous.
08:12Literacy within the scribal class was widespread.
08:16Cities were large and unwalled, or lightly walled, which tells you something about how
08:21safe the world felt to the people building them.
08:25If you were a merchant in Ugarit in 1250 BC, you lived at the meeting point of every route
08:31in the known world under a small king who answered to the Hittites in a city with archives, temples,
08:36two harbors, and a commercial quarter full of foreigners.
08:40Your bronze came from Cyprus.
08:42Your grain price was set in Egypt.
08:44Your luxury market ran on Mycenaean pottery and Baltic amber.
08:48You were, though you could not have known it, living inside a machine of extraordinary complexity,
08:54and every part of that machine assumed the other parts would keep working.
08:58Then, within roughly a single lifetime either side of 1200 BC, nearly all of it stopped.
09:06The Hittite Empire, a state that had stood for four centuries and fought Egypt to a draw,
09:13disappeared, not declined, disappeared.
09:16Its capital, Hattusa, was burned and abandoned,
09:19and the very memory of the Hittites was lost so completely
09:22that until the 19th century, the only trace of them left in the world
09:27was a handful of mentions in the Hebrew Bible.
09:30The Mycenaean palaces were destroyed, every major one within a few decades of each other.
09:36Pylos burned.
09:37Mycenaean Tyrians burned.
09:39Linear B vanished with the palaces,
09:42because a script that exists to do palace accounting has no purpose once there are no palaces,
09:47and Greece forgot how to write for 400 years.
09:51Ugarit was wiped out and never rebuilt,
09:53and we will come back to its final days,
09:55because Ugarit did something for us that no other victim of this catastrophe did.
09:59It left letters.
10:01Cities burned in a band stretching from Greece across Anatolia,
10:05down through Syria and the Levant, to the edge of Egypt.
10:08Not every city, and not all at once,
10:10and the pattern of exactly which places died and which survived
10:14is one of the most important clues we have.
10:17Egypt lived, but it was the last of the great power standing,
10:20and it never fully recovered its reach.
10:23The whole event is called the Late Bronze Age Collapse,
10:26and it is one of the most severe breakdowns of civilization in human history.
10:31Populations fell.
10:32Long-distance trade died.
10:35Literacy contracted to almost nothing outside Egypt and Mesopotamia.
10:39The connected world of the Amarna letters became an archipelago of survivors who no longer wrote to each other,
10:45because most of them no longer wrote at all.
10:49And in the middle of the wreckage,
10:51in the official record of the one great power that survived,
10:54there are inscriptions describing who Egypt believed was responsible.
10:58They describe enemies who came from the sea.
11:02The Egyptians listed their names,
11:05carved them in stone,
11:06alongside pictures of their ships,
11:09their armor,
11:10their families riding in ox carts.
11:12A full portrait of a people,
11:14made by the civilization that claimed to have destroyed them.
11:18There is just one problem.
11:20Nobody has ever been able to work out,
11:22with certainty,
11:23who they were.
11:25Everything anyone has ever claimed about the Sea Peoples
11:28rests on a body of evidence
11:30small enough to describe in a single chapter.
11:32So before this story goes any further,
11:35it is worth laying all of it on the table,
11:38because the arguments that fill the rest of this documentary
11:40are arguments about how to read what you are about to see.
11:44The largest single piece of evidence is a wall.
11:47On the west bank of the Nile at Thebes
11:50stands Medinet Habu,
11:52the mortuary temple of Ramesses III,
11:55who ruled Egypt in the early 12th century BC.
11:58Its outer walls carry enormous carved reliefs
12:02commemorating his wars,
12:03and among them,
12:05in year 8 of his reign,
12:06a campaign against enemies arriving by land and by sea.
12:11The reliefs are extraordinary,
12:14and they are extraordinary in a specific way.
12:17They are detailed.
12:18The sea battle scene shows enemy ships with a distinctive design,
12:22bird-headed prowls at both ends,
12:25crewed by warriors in two kinds of headgear,
12:27some in horned helmets,
12:29some in what look like stiff-feathered crowns.
12:32The land battle shows something even stranger for a war monument.
12:36It shows ox carts,
12:38heavy,
12:39solid-wheeled carts loaded with women and children,
12:42traveling with the fighting men.
12:44Armies do not bring their families to an invasion.
12:47Migrations do.
12:48That single carved detail has shaped the entire modern debate,
12:53because it suggests these were not raiders in the simple sense.
12:56They were peoples on the move.
12:58The inscriptions alongside the images named the enemy groups,
13:02the Peleset,
13:03the Cheker,
13:04the Shekelesh,
13:05the Denyon,
13:06the Washesh.
13:07In the account of an earlier war,
13:09under the pharaoh Merneptah,
13:11a generation before,
13:12other names appear.
13:14The Sherdin,
13:15the Luka,
13:16the Ekwesh,
13:18the Teresh.
13:20The Shardana appear earlier still,
13:22some of them fighting as mercenaries inside the Egyptian army itself.
13:26Notice what the Egyptians never call them.
13:29There is no collective term,
13:30no nation,
13:32no country of origin.
13:34The phrase Sea Peoples
13:36does not appear anywhere in the ancient record.
13:38It was coined by a French Egyptologist in the 19th century,
13:42and the label has been organizing,
13:44and possibly distorting,
13:46the evidence ever since.
13:48Now the problems,
13:50because they are serious.
13:52Medinet Habu is not a news report.
13:54It is royal propaganda in the most literal sense,
13:57a monument built by a king
13:59to proclaim his own triumph to the gods.
14:02Egyptian temple art ran on convention.
14:06Pharaohs are always gigantic,
14:07enemies are always crushed,
14:09victory is always total.
14:11Some of the scenes and phrases at Medinet Habu are copied,
14:15close to word for word and figure for figure,
14:18from the monuments of Ramesses II,
14:20who fought entirely different wars a century earlier,
14:23which forces an uncomfortable question.
14:26If parts of the monument are recycled,
14:28how much of the rest is reportage,
14:30and how much is theater?
14:32Some scholars accept the year eight campaign
14:34as a real, large-scale event.
14:37Others argue it compresses decades of scattered raiding
14:40into one glorious stage victory.
14:42A few have suggested the great invasion,
14:45as depicted,
14:46never happened at all.
14:48The second body of evidence comes from the victims,
14:50and it has a different kind of authority.
14:53Ugarit,
14:54the great trading city on the Syrian coast,
14:56kept its archives on clay.
14:58When the city was destroyed,
15:00around 1185 BC,
15:02the fires that consumed it
15:04baked the tablets hard
15:06and preserved them.
15:07Among the last documents
15:09are letters that were written
15:10as the catastrophe was arriving.
15:13The king of Ugarit writes to the king of Cyprus
15:15that enemy ships have appeared
15:17and burned his towns.
15:19He reports that his own army
15:21is away in Hittite territory,
15:23his fleet is elsewhere,
15:25and the land is defenseless.
15:27Another correspondent warns of enemy ships
15:29and urges that the cities be fortified.
15:32These letters are not propaganda.
15:34They are working correspondence,
15:36written by frightened administrators
15:37with no audience but each other.
15:39Whatever arrived at Ugarit was real,
15:42it came from the sea,
15:44and the city it destroyed
15:45was never inhabited again.
15:47But notice what the letters do not say.
15:49They never named the enemy.
15:51Not once.
15:52The ships are simply enemy ships.
15:55The most reliable witnesses we have
15:57saw the attackers coming
15:59and did not tell us who they were,
16:01possibly because they did not know.
16:04The third category of evidence
16:06is the quietest
16:07and increasingly the most important.
16:09It is the ground itself.
16:12Across the region,
16:13archaeology documents the destruction layers,
16:16city by city,
16:17and the picture it produces
16:18is messier than any invasion narrative.
16:20The burnings are not simultaneous.
16:23They spread across several decades.
16:26Some cities show battle debris,
16:28arrowheads in the ash.
16:30Others show fire
16:31with no sign of fighting at all.
16:34Some sites were abandoned,
16:36without any destruction.
16:38A few,
16:39like the Phoenician ports,
16:40sailed through the whole period
16:42essentially untouched.
16:44That pattern matters,
16:45because a single coordinated invasion
16:48should not look like that.
16:49Whatever happened,
16:50happened in waves,
16:52unevenly,
16:53over a generation or more.
16:55Add to this the newest tools.
16:57Pollen cores drilled from lake beds
17:00in the region
17:00record a sharp dry period
17:02beginning in the late 13th century B.C.,
17:05evidence of a sustained drought.
17:07Letters from the Hittite court
17:09in the same decades
17:10beg Egypt for grain shipments
17:12and speak of famine.
17:14Two independent lines of evidence,
17:17one from the ground
17:18and one from the archives,
17:19pointing at hunger
17:20arriving before the ships did.
17:22And that is the entire case file.
17:25One magnificent,
17:27untrustworthy monument.
17:28A handful of desperate letters
17:30that never name the enemy.
17:32A scatter of burned cities
17:34that refuse to line up
17:36into a single event.
17:38And a climate record suggesting
17:40the crisis began
17:41in the fields,
17:43not on the water.
17:45Every theory about the Sea Peoples,
17:47and there are many,
17:48is a different way of arranging
17:50exactly these pieces.
17:52The names, though.
17:54The names are where
17:55the real detective work begins.
17:59Peleset,
18:00Sherden,
18:02Shekeresh,
18:03Luka.
18:04Nine or so labels,
18:06carved by Egyptian scribes
18:07doing their best with foreign words,
18:09in a writing system
18:11that does not record vowels.
18:13For 200 years,
18:15scholars have been trying
18:16to match those names
18:17to known peoples and places.
18:19Some of the proposed matches
18:20are close to universally accepted.
18:23Others have started arguments
18:24that are still running.
18:26Because if you can work out
18:27where the names point,
18:28you can work out
18:28where the ships came from.
18:30And that is the question
18:32the next chapter takes up.
18:34Suspect by suspect.
18:35There are only two moments
18:38in the entire record
18:39where the Egyptian state
18:40describes a full-scale confrontation
18:42with these enemies.
18:44Two pharaohs,
18:45roughly 40 years apart.
18:47Everything else is fragments.
18:49So the honest way
18:50to tell this part
18:51is to walk through
18:52exactly what each account says,
18:55and then ask
18:55how much weight it can bear.
18:57The first is Merneptah,
19:00son of Rannus the Great,
19:01in the fifth year of his reign,
19:03around 1207 BC.
19:06According to his inscriptions,
19:08a Libyan king named Meriah
19:10marched into the western delta of Egypt.
19:12He did not come alone.
19:14He came in alliance
19:15with peoples from across the sea,
19:17and the Egyptian text names them
19:19the Ekwesh,
19:21the Teresh,
19:22the Luka,
19:23the Sheridan,
19:25the Shekalesh.
19:26This is the first time
19:28the northern sea raiders
19:29appear in Egyptian records
19:31as a coordinated force,
19:33and the detail worth holding onto
19:35is that they appear
19:36as allies of a Libyan invasion,
19:38not as an independent fleet.
19:40They are auxiliaries
19:41in someone else's war.
19:43The Ekwesh are even described
19:44as being circumcised,
19:46which is unusual enough
19:47that the scribes remarked on it,
19:49and which has fed a century of argument
19:51about where they came from.
19:53Merneptah claims a crushing victory.
19:55The inscriptions give casualty
19:57and prisoner figures
19:58running into the thousands,
20:00broken down group by group.
20:02Whatever the exact numbers,
20:04Egypt held.
20:04The delta did not fall.
20:06The alliance was thrown back.
20:09And then,
20:10for a generation,
20:11the record on this front
20:12goes largely quiet,
20:14which is itself
20:15a piece of evidence,
20:16and we will come back to it.
20:18The second moment
20:19is the one
20:20everything centers on.
20:22Rameses III,
20:24year 8 of his reign,
20:25around 1177 BC.
20:27The Medinet Habu inscriptions
20:30describe a threat
20:31of a completely different order.
20:33This was not a raid
20:34on the delta
20:35in support of a Libyan king.
20:37This,
20:38in the Egyptian telling,
20:39was a wave
20:40that had already
20:41swallowed the north.
20:42The text is worth
20:43paraphrasing closely
20:44because it is
20:46the closest thing we have
20:47to a contemporary description
20:48of the collapse itself.
20:50It says the foreign lands
20:51made a conspiracy
20:52in their islands.
20:53It says no land
20:54could stand before their arms.
20:56And then it lists them.
20:57Hatti,
20:58the Hittite Empire,
21:00Kode,
21:00and Karkamish,
21:02and Arzawa,
21:03and Alashia,
21:03that is,
21:05kingdoms across Anatolia,
21:07Syria,
21:07and Cyprus.
21:08All of them,
21:09the inscription says,
21:11cut off,
21:12wasted,
21:13destroyed,
21:13at one time.
21:15Then it says
21:16the enemy came toward Egypt,
21:17and it names them.
21:18The Peleset,
21:20the Cheker,
21:20the Shekelish,
21:21the Denyon,
21:22the Weshish,
21:23lands united.
21:25This is a remarkable passage
21:27because the Egyptian scribes
21:29are describing
21:29the destruction
21:30of the entire
21:31Bronze Age order
21:32of the Eastern Mediterranean
21:33as the prelude
21:34to their own war.
21:36They are telling us,
21:37in their own monument,
21:38that the great powers
21:39to the north
21:40had already fallen
21:41before the enemy
21:42reached the Nile.
21:44Rameses claims
21:44to have stopped them
21:45in two battles,
21:47one on land
21:48at the edge
21:48of Egyptian-controlled
21:49territory in the Levant,
21:50and one in the mouths
21:52of the Nile itself,
21:54a sea battle
21:54fought in the shallows,
21:56where the enemy ships
21:57could be trapped
21:58against the shore
21:58and destroyed by Egyptian archers.
22:01He wins.
22:03Of course he wins.
22:04It is his temple.
22:05Now the weight-bearing question.
22:07How much of this
22:08can we trust?
22:09Start with what pushes
22:11toward belief.
22:12The two accounts
22:13name overlapping
22:14but not identical groups,
22:15which is not
22:16what you would expect
22:17if a lazy scribe
22:18were simply copying
22:19a fixed list.
22:20The specific naval tactic
22:22described,
22:23luring ships
22:24into the shallows
22:25and shooting them apart,
22:26is plausible
22:27and concrete.
22:28And the claim
22:29that the northern kingdoms
22:30had already fallen
22:31is independently confirmed.
22:34Hattusa really was destroyed.
22:36Ugarit really was destroyed.
22:38On that central point,
22:40the boastful monument
22:41and the archaeological record agree.
22:43Now what pushes
22:44the other way?
22:45We have already seen
22:47that Medinet Habu
22:48reuses material
22:49from older monuments.
22:51Egyptian victory reliefs
22:53follow rigid conventions
22:54and a pharaoh
22:55who had actually lost
22:57or merely survived
22:58would still be shown triumphant.
23:01The casualty figures
23:02are unverifiable
23:03and there is
23:05a deeper problem
23:05of framing.
23:07The inscription
23:08presents a single,
23:10unified enemy,
23:11lands united,
23:12a conspiracy
23:13in the islands.
23:14But we have also seen
23:16that the archaeology
23:17shows destruction
23:18spread across decades,
23:20not one coordinated wave.
23:23The monument compresses.
23:24It takes a long,
23:26messy,
23:27regional unraveling
23:28and stages it
23:29as one heroic afternoon
23:31at the mouth of the Nile.
23:33So here is a reading
23:35that a number of serious scholars
23:36now favor
23:37offered not as fact
23:38but as the most defensible
23:40interpretation
23:41of thin evidence.
23:43There probably was
23:44no single great invasion.
23:46There was a prolonged period
23:48running across
23:49the late 13th
23:50and early 12th centuries
23:51in which displaced groups,
23:53some raiding,
23:54some migrating,
23:56some serving as mercenaries,
23:58moved through a Mediterranean
23:59that was already breaking down
24:01for other reasons.
24:02Egypt fought several engagements
24:04against shifting coalitions
24:06of these groups
24:07over decades.
24:08Ramesses III
24:09fought a real
24:10and serious battle
24:11around 1177
24:12and then did
24:13what every pharaoh did
24:15and carved it
24:15as the salvation
24:16of the world.
24:18On this reading,
24:19the Sea Peoples
24:20are not the cause
24:21of the collapse
24:22arriving from outside.
24:24They are one of its symptoms,
24:26a thing the collapse produced,
24:28rolling ahead of it
24:29and deepening it
24:30as it went.
24:32But that is getting ahead
24:33of the evidence,
24:34into the question of cause,
24:36which has its own chapter.
24:38Before we can ask
24:40why it happened,
24:41there is a prior question
24:42and it is the one
24:44that has generated
24:45more heat than any other.
24:46Those names,
24:48carved so carefully
24:49by Egyptian scribes,
24:50Peleset,
24:51Sherdin,
24:52Shekelesh,
24:53Danyan,
24:54Lucca,
24:54if these were real peoples,
24:56they came from real places.
24:58And for two centuries,
25:00scholars have been trying
25:01to pin those places
25:02on a map.
25:03Some of the answers
25:04are now solid,
25:05some are guesses
25:06dressed as answers.
25:08And one or two
25:09have become
25:10quietly notorious.
25:12Here is the difficulty
25:13in a single sentence.
25:16Egyptian scribes
25:17wrote down foreign names
25:18by ear
25:19in a script
25:20that records consonants
25:21and not vowels
25:22more than 3,000 years ago.
25:25So when the record
25:26says PRST,
25:27we have to guess
25:28the vowels,
25:29guess how close
25:30the Egyptian was
25:31to the original sound,
25:32and then guess
25:33which people
25:33in the wider world
25:34that sound points to.
25:36With that warning
25:37firmly in place,
25:39let us go through
25:39the suspects.
25:40From the most secure
25:41identification
25:42to the most disputed.
25:44Start with the one
25:45nearly everyone agrees on,
25:47the Peleset.
25:48The Peleset are named
25:50among the enemies
25:51of Ramesses III,
25:52and after his war,
25:54Egyptian and biblical evidence
25:56places a people
25:57of that name
25:58settling on the southern
25:59coast of the Levant.
26:00The consonants,
26:02PLST,
26:03carry directly
26:04into the Hebrew word
26:05for the people
26:06the Bible calls
26:07the Philistines,
26:08and into the place
26:09name that eventually
26:10becomes Palestine.
26:12And here the archaeology
26:14does something rare
26:15in this whole subject.
26:16It agrees.
26:17The cities associated
26:18with the Philistines,
26:20places like Ashkelon,
26:22Ashdod,
26:23and Ekron,
26:23show a sudden appearance
26:25in the early 12th century BC
26:27of material culture
26:29with strong Aegean
26:30characteristics.
26:31Pottery made
26:32in a Mycenaean style,
26:34but locally,
26:35Aegean style hearths,
26:37loom weights,
26:38foodways,
26:39even pig breeds
26:40with Aegean genetics.
26:42Something Aegean
26:43arrived on that coast
26:44fairly abruptly,
26:46right when the Peleset
26:47were supposed
26:48to have settled there.
26:49The Peleset
26:50are the closest thing
26:51this field has
26:52to a solved case.
26:54A named group
26:55in the Egyptian record,
26:56a matching people
26:57in the biblical record,
26:58and a matching material
27:00culture in the ground,
27:01all converging
27:02on the same coast
27:03at the same time.
27:05If every identification
27:06were this good,
27:08there would be no debate.
27:10They are not.
27:11Take the Sheridan,
27:13sometimes written Shardana.
27:14These are the ones
27:16in the horned helmets,
27:17and they are the most
27:18widely traveled name
27:19in the whole dossier,
27:21appearing across centuries.
27:22They raid Egypt
27:24under Ramesses II,
27:26then serve as elite bodyguards
27:28in the pharaoh's own army,
27:30then appear again
27:31among the enemies later.
27:33Mercenary one decade,
27:34marauder the next.
27:36The traditional identification
27:38links the Sheridan
27:39to Sardinia,
27:41partly on the resemblance
27:42of the names,
27:43partly because Sardinia
27:44has a Bronze Age
27:45warrior culture,
27:47the Neuragic civilization,
27:48whose bronze figurines
27:50wear horned helmets
27:51strikingly like those
27:53in the Egyptian reliefs.
27:54But the direction of travel
27:56is the whole problem,
27:57and it is genuinely unresolved.
28:00Did the Sheridan
28:01come from Sardinia,
28:02raid the east,
28:03and give their homeland
28:04its name?
28:05Or did they end up
28:06in Sardinia
28:07after the collapse,
28:08and the island
28:09took its name from them
28:10as settlers?
28:11The resemblance is real.
28:13What it proves about origins
28:15is close to nothing,
28:16and honest scholars say so.
28:18The same shape of argument
28:20attaches to the Shekalesh,
28:22often linked to Sicily,
28:24and the Teresh,
28:25sometimes linked to the Tyrrhenians,
28:27and thus to the later
28:28Etruscans of Italy.
28:30In every case,
28:31there is a tempting name match,
28:33and in every case,
28:34the same unanswerable question
28:36about which way
28:37the people in the name
28:38were moving.
28:39Then there is the Luka,
28:40and here the ground
28:42gets firmer again.
28:43The Luka are known
28:44from Hittite records
28:45well before the collapse,
28:46as a troublesome people
28:48in southwestern Anatolia,
28:50in the region
28:51later called Vlisia.
28:52This one is reasonably secure,
28:54and it matters,
28:56because it means
28:57at least some of the sea raiders
28:58were not exotic invaders
28:59from the far west.
29:01They were locals,
29:03Anatolian coastal populations
29:04who had been a nuisance
29:05to the Hittites for generations,
29:07and who joined the chaos
29:08when the chaos came.
29:10Now the two
29:11that start real fights.
29:12The Ekwesh,
29:14named by Merneptah,
29:15are argued by many scholars
29:17to be the Ahiyawa
29:18of Hittite texts,
29:20who are in turn
29:21widely identified
29:22with the Achaeans,
29:23that is,
29:24the Mycenaean Greeks.
29:26Homer's word for the Greeks
29:27at Troy
29:28is Achaeans.
29:30If the identification holds,
29:32then Mycenaean Greeks
29:33were among the sea raiders
29:35attacking Egypt,
29:36which is a striking thought,
29:37and it connects this whole story
29:39to the Trojan War tradition.
29:40The chain of reasoning
29:42is plausible at every link
29:43and proven at none.
29:45And the Dinian.
29:47The Dinian have been linked
29:48to the Denuna of the Levant,
29:50and also,
29:51more provocatively,
29:52to the Denaui,
29:54which is Homer's
29:54other main word
29:55for the Greeks.
29:56Same tantalizing possibility,
29:59same lack of proof.
30:01Step back
30:01from the individual suspects,
30:03and a general lesson
30:04comes into focus,
30:05and it is the honest takeaway
30:07of this entire chapter.
30:09The evidence does not describe
30:11a single people
30:12from a single place.
30:13It describes
30:14a genuinely mixed bag.
30:16At least one group,
30:17the Luca,
30:18is Anatolian and local.
30:21One,
30:21the Pellicet,
30:22is strongly Aegean
30:24and well-attested.
30:25Others point loosely west
30:27toward Sardinia,
30:28Sicily,
30:28and Italy,
30:29but with the direction
30:30of movement unresolved.
30:32One or two
30:33may be Mycenaean Greeks,
30:35and several
30:36we simply cannot place at all.
30:38Which suggests
30:39that the phrase
30:40Sea Peoples,
30:41singular and capitalized,
30:43may be the most
30:43misleading thing about them.
30:45There was probably
30:45never a Sea People.
30:47There was a shifting
30:48collection of groups,
30:49from several different regions,
30:51who ended up in motion
30:52at the same time
30:53and got swept together,
30:55first in reality
30:56on the beaches
30:57of the eastern Mediterranean,
30:58and then permanently,
31:00under one tidy label,
31:02by a French scholar
31:03three thousand years later.
31:05But saying they were
31:06a mixed group in motion
31:07only relocates the mystery.
31:09It does not solve it,
31:11it just changes the question.
31:12The question is no longer
31:14only who they were,
31:15it is what set them in motion
31:17in the first place.
31:18What could empty out
31:20whole regions,
31:21put families in ox carts,
31:22and warriors in ships,
31:24and send them crashing
31:25into every kingdom
31:26on the eastern Mediterranean
31:27at once?
31:29For that,
31:30we have to leave
31:31the names behind
31:32and look at the theories.
31:34For a long time,
31:36the answer was simple.
31:37The Sea Peoples
31:38caused the collapse.
31:39They came out of nowhere,
31:41they burned the civilized world,
31:43and the Bronze Age ended.
31:44Case closed.
31:46Almost no serious scholar
31:47believes that anymore,
31:48and the reason
31:49is the timeline.
31:51We have already seen
31:52that the destruction
31:53spread across decades,
31:54that a drought shows up
31:56in the climate record
31:57before the worst of it,
31:58that the Hittites
31:59were begging for grain
32:00while their empire still stood.
32:02The ships did not arrive
32:04into a healthy world
32:05and shatter it.
32:06They arrived into a world
32:08that was already coming apart,
32:09and the harder question
32:10is what was pulling it apart.
32:12There are four main theories.
32:14They are not rivals
32:16so much as ingredients,
32:17and the modern consensus,
32:18to the extent there is one,
32:20is that the truth
32:21is a combination.
32:22Let us take them
32:23one at a time.
32:25The first is climate.
32:27This is the theory
32:28with the strongest
32:29new evidence behind it.
32:31Pollen samples
32:32from the Sea of Galilee,
32:34from cores in Cyprus,
32:35and from other sites
32:37across the region
32:37record a sharp shift
32:39to drier, cooler conditions,
32:41beginning in the late
32:4313th century BC,
32:44and lasting perhaps
32:46a century and a half or more.
32:48Independent studies
32:49keep confirming
32:50the same signal.
32:51A long, severe drought
32:53settled over the
32:54eastern Mediterranean
32:55at precisely the wrong moment.
32:58And the written record
32:59lines up with the science
33:00in a way that is
33:02genuinely striking.
33:03A Hittite queen
33:04writes of
33:05having nothing to eat.
33:07A pharaoh record
33:08sending emergency grain
33:09to keep the Hittite people alive.
33:12Letters speak of famine
33:13as a present,
33:14gnawing reality.
33:16For agricultural kingdoms
33:18living close to the margin,
33:19a multi-decade drought
33:21is not an inconvenience.
33:23It is an existential threat,
33:25and it hits the crowded,
33:27centralized palace states
33:29hardest of all.
33:30The second theory
33:31is earthquakes.
33:33Geologists have
33:34identified evidence
33:35that the eastern Mediterranean
33:36passed through a period
33:37of intense seismic activity
33:39around 1200 BC,
33:40what some researchers call
33:42an earthquake storm,
33:43a sequence of major quakes
33:45striking along the region's
33:46fault lines
33:47over a span of decades.
33:48Several destroyed cities
33:50show the signature
33:51of earthquake damage
33:52rather than fire and battle.
33:54Collapsed walls
33:55fallen in a single direction,
33:57skeletons crushed under masonry,
33:59columns toppled in alignment.
34:02The objection is obvious.
34:04Earthquakes are local
34:05and civilizations are old.
34:06The region had always had earthquakes
34:08and had always rebuilt.
34:10A quake can knock down a city.
34:13It cannot, by itself,
34:14end a world.
34:15But as one more shock
34:17to a system already weakened
34:18by drought and famine,
34:20it fits.
34:21The third theory
34:22is systems collapse,
34:24and this is the one
34:25that has quietly become central.
34:27Remember the picture
34:29from the opening.
34:30This was the most
34:31interconnected world
34:32the ancient Near East
34:33had ever produced,
34:35and its interconnection
34:36was the danger.
34:37Every kingdom depended
34:38on long, fragile supply chains
34:40it did not control.
34:42Bronze required tin
34:43from thousands of kilometers away.
34:45The palace economies
34:47were rigid, centralized,
34:48and brittle,
34:49with a single point of failure.
34:52A system like that
34:53has a property
34:54that engineers understand well.
34:56It is efficient
34:57under normal conditions
34:58and catastrophic under stress,
35:00because the very connections
35:02that make it productive
35:03also transmit failure.
35:06A disruption in one place
35:08does not stay in one place.
35:10Drought reduces the harvest,
35:12which starves the palace,
35:13which cannot pay
35:14the bronze workers,
35:15which breaks the trade in tin,
35:17which idols the smiths
35:18in a kingdom
35:19that never had a drought at all.
35:20Trade routes
35:21that carry prosperity
35:22in good times
35:23carry collapse in bad ones.
35:26On this reading,
35:27the sea peoples
35:28are not the cause.
35:29They are what a collapsing system
35:31looks like from the outside.
35:33When the palaces
35:34stopped feeding their people,
35:36the people took the boats.
35:38Displacement became raiding,
35:40raiding wrecked
35:41the surviving trade routes,
35:42and the wreckage
35:43displaced still more people.
35:45The migration
35:46was not the meteor.
35:47It was the crater
35:48forming and widening.
35:51The fourth theory
35:52is military and technological,
35:54and it is the weakest
35:55of the four now,
35:56though it was once popular.
35:58The idea was that
36:00new weapons,
36:01or new fighting methods,
36:02cheaper iron,
36:04long slashing swords,
36:05massed infantry with javelins,
36:07let raiders overwhelm
36:09the chariot armies
36:10of the great powers.
36:11The trouble is that
36:12the timing does not really work.
36:14Iron came into
36:15widespread use
36:16after the collapse,
36:17as a consequence
36:18of the bronze trade
36:19breaking down,
36:20not before it as a cause.
36:22This one has largely
36:23been folded into the others,
36:25if it survives at all.
36:27So which was it?
36:28The honest answer,
36:30and the one
36:30most scholars now give,
36:32is that the question is wrong.
36:33It was not any single
36:35one of these.
36:36It was all of them,
36:37arriving close enough together
36:39that a civilization
36:40could not absorb them
36:41in sequence.
36:42Picture it as a chain.
36:45Decades of drought
36:46weaken the agricultural base
36:47and empty the granaries.
36:49Famine spreads,
36:51and with it,
36:52internal unrest.
36:53Earthquakes shatter
36:54key cities
36:55at the worst possible time.
36:56The fragile,
36:58overconnected trade system
37:00begins to seize,
37:01and as it seizes,
37:02the supply of tin
37:04and therefore of bronze
37:05falters.
37:06Populations start to move,
37:08some fleeing hunger,
37:10some turning to raiding
37:11to survive.
37:12That movement
37:13severs the remaining
37:15trade arteries,
37:16which starve still
37:17more palaces,
37:18which send still more people
37:20onto the roads
37:21and the sea.
37:22Each failure
37:23triggers the next.
37:24The system
37:25does not decline gently.
37:27It cascades.
37:29Modern researchers
37:30have a phrase
37:31for this
37:31borrowed from
37:32complexity science.
37:34A general system's
37:35collapse.
37:36It is what happens
37:37when a tightly coupled
37:39network is pushed
37:40past a threshold
37:41and unravels
37:42all at once,
37:43faster than anyone
37:44inside it
37:45can understand
37:45or stop.
37:46The people
37:47living through it
37:48would have experienced
37:49none of that analysis.
37:50They would have experienced
37:52failed harvests,
37:53then hunger,
37:54then the roads
37:55growing dangerous,
37:56then the ships
37:57on the horizon,
37:58then the fire.
37:59And when it was over,
38:00in Egypt,
38:01someone carved
38:01the ships
38:02and the fire
38:03onto a temple wall
38:04and gave the whole
38:05incomprehensible
38:06catastrophe
38:07a single face
38:08and a handful
38:09of names.
38:10Which is perhaps
38:11the deepest reason
38:12the Sea Peoples
38:12have haunted us
38:13for so long.
38:14They are the face
38:15the collapse wears.
38:16They let a systemic,
38:18faceless,
38:19almost modern sound
38:20in disaster
38:21be told as a story
38:22about invaders.
38:23And stories
38:24about invaders
38:25are far easier
38:26to hold in the mind
38:27than stories
38:28about supply chains
38:29and feedback loops.
38:31But the Sea Peoples
38:32were not only
38:33to stories passing through.
38:34Some of them stopped.
38:36Some of them stayed
38:37and settled
38:38and were slowly absorbed
38:39into the world
38:40they had helped to break.
38:41And in one case,
38:43we can now follow them
38:44into the ground
38:45and read their origins
38:46and their bones.
38:47Of all the groups
38:48swept up under
38:49the label Sea Peoples,
38:50one left a trail
38:51we can actually follow.
38:52The Peleset.
38:54The people the Bible
38:55calls the Philistines.
38:57Almost everyone
38:58knows the word
38:59and almost everyone
39:00knows it wrong.
39:01The Philistines
39:02have come down to us
39:03through the biblical stories
39:05of Samson
39:06and of David
39:06and Goliath
39:07as brutes.
39:09Uncultured,
39:10aggressive,
39:11the enemy.
39:11The modern insult
39:13Philistine,
39:14meaning a person
39:14hostile to art
39:15and learning,
39:16comes directly
39:17from that reputation.
39:18It is almost
39:20exactly backwards.
39:21The archaeology
39:22of the Philistine cities
39:23reveals one of the
39:25more sophisticated
39:25cultures in the region.
39:27And their story
39:28is the clearest window
39:29we have
39:30into what actually happened
39:31when the Sea People
39:32stopped being raiders
39:34and became residents.
39:35After the wars
39:36of Ramesses III,
39:38the Peleset settled
39:39on the southern
39:40coastal plain
39:40of the Levant
39:41in five cities
39:42that the Bible itself
39:43names as their heartland.
39:45Gaza,
39:46Ashkelon,
39:47Ashdod,
39:48Ekron,
39:49and Gath.
39:50Archaeologists
39:51have excavated
39:52several of them
39:53extensively
39:53and what comes out
39:54of the ground
39:55is startling.
39:56The earliest
39:57Philistine levels,
39:58right at the start
40:00of the 12th century BC,
40:01are full of the Aegean.
40:03Pottery
40:04in Mycenaean
40:05shapes and styles,
40:06but made from local clay
40:08so it was not imported.
40:09It was made by people
40:11who knew the Aegean tradition
40:13from the inside.
40:14Hearths of a type
40:16found in the Aegean
40:17and in Cyprus,
40:18not in the local
40:19Canaanite world,
40:21loom weights
40:21of the Aegean kind.
40:23Even the animal bones
40:25change.
40:26Cattle and pig breeds
40:27appear,
40:28whose closest relatives
40:29are western,
40:30brought in by people
40:31arriving from somewhere
40:32across the sea.
40:33They also brought
40:34their diet.
40:35The Philistines
40:36ate pork in a region
40:38where their neighbors
40:38increasingly did not,
40:40and they ate dog
40:41on occasion too,
40:42another practice
40:43that marks them
40:44as outsiders.
40:45For the first few
40:46generations,
40:47they kept their
40:48imported identity distinct,
40:49a transplanted
40:50Aegean-flavored culture,
40:52sitting on a Levantine shore.
40:54And then,
40:55slowly,
40:56they became local.
40:58Over the following
40:59centuries,
40:59the Aegean pottery
41:00gives way to local forms.
41:02The material culture
41:03blends.
41:04By the time
41:05the Philistines
41:06appear as the villains
41:07of the biblical narrative,
41:08some centuries
41:10after their arrival,
41:11they are worshipping
41:12largely Levantine gods
41:14with Semitic names,
41:15and there is good evidence
41:17they had adopted
41:18a Semitic language.
41:19The distinct newcomers
41:21were absorbed
41:22into the world
41:22they had landed in,
41:24exactly as migrant
41:25populations usually are,
41:27given enough time.
41:28For a long time,
41:30this was as far
41:31as the evidence
41:31could take us.
41:32A strong,
41:33circumstantial case,
41:34built on pots
41:35and bones
41:35and hearths,
41:36that the Philistines
41:37came from somewhere
41:38in the Aegean world.
41:40Persuasive,
41:41but not proof.
41:43Pottery styles
41:44can travel without people.
41:46Fashions can be copied.
41:48Then,
41:48in 2019,
41:50the argument changed,
41:51because for the first time
41:53we were able to read it
41:54directly from the people
41:55themselves.
41:56A team excavating
41:57at Ashkelon
41:58found a Philistine cemetery,
42:00and from a small number
42:01of individuals buried there,
42:03they recovered
42:03ancient DNA.
42:04DNA.
42:05This is difficult work.
42:06DNA degrades badly
42:08in the hot Levantine climate,
42:10and the sample
42:11was small.
42:12But the results,
42:13published in a major study,
42:15were clear enough
42:16to matter.
42:17The individuals
42:18from the early
42:19Philistine period
42:19carried a genetic signature
42:21that included ancestry
42:23derived from southern Europe,
42:24a component
42:25that was not present
42:26in the local population
42:27before their arrival,
42:29and that pointed
42:29across the Mediterranean,
42:31consistent with the Aegean
42:32or nearby.
42:33The bones confirmed
42:34what the pottery
42:35had only suggested.
42:36Some of the people
42:37buried at Ashkelon,
42:39or their recent ancestors,
42:40had come from
42:41across the sea.
42:43And then the DNA
42:44showed the second half
42:45of the story, too.
42:46Within a few generations,
42:48that European signal
42:49becomes diluted,
42:50absorbed into
42:51surrounding Levantine population
42:53until it fades from view.
42:55The genetics record
42:56both the arrival
42:57and the assimilation.
42:58People came from the Aegean,
43:00settled,
43:01intermarried,
43:01and within a handful
43:03of generations were,
43:04genetically as well
43:05as culturally,
43:06part of the local world.
43:08It is worth being careful
43:10about how much this proves.
43:11It is one cemetery,
43:13one city,
43:14a small number
43:15of individuals.
43:16It tells us
43:17about the Pelesets
43:18specifically,
43:20and not about
43:20the Sheridan,
43:21or the Shekelech,
43:22or any of the others,
43:24who may have had
43:25entirely different origins.
43:27It does not vindicate
43:29the grand invasion narrative.
43:30What it does
43:32is confirm,
43:33for one group,
43:34with the hardest evidence
43:35we have,
43:36the pattern this whole story
43:38has been circling.
43:39Real people,
43:41genuinely displaced,
43:42moving across the sea
43:44from the Aegean world
43:45into the Levant
43:46during exactly the window
43:48of the collapse.
43:49The Philistines are the proof
43:51that the Sea Peoples,
43:52whatever else they were,
43:54were not merely
43:54a literary invention,
43:56or a scribe's
43:57convenient label.
43:58At least some of them
43:59were a real population
44:00on the move,
44:01and we can now trace them
44:03from an Egyptian temple wall
44:04to a distinctive culture
44:06in the ground,
44:07to the ancestry written
44:09in their own bones.
44:10The other groups
44:12vanish into the fog
44:13of the early Iron Age.
44:14The Sheridan may or may not
44:15have ended up in Sardinia.
44:17The checker are recorded briefly
44:19in an Egyptian story,
44:21controlling a port
44:22on the Levantine coast,
44:24and then they too fade.
44:26Most of the names carved
44:27at Medinet Habu
44:29are never heard from again.
44:30They dissolved into the populations
44:32of the early Iron Age Mediterranean,
44:35leaving their names
44:36on a temple wall
44:37and very little else,
44:39which returns us,
44:40at the end,
44:41to the strangeness
44:42we started with.
44:43We have a catastrophe
44:45with no clear cause,
44:47attackers with no clear origin,
44:49and a name,
44:50Sea Peoples,
44:51that describes something
44:52that may never have existed
44:54as a single thing at all.
44:56And yet the mystery
44:57refuses to close,
44:58it only deepens.
45:00The more carefully
45:01the evidence is examined,
45:03the less it looks like
45:04a story about invaders,
45:05and the more it looks like
45:06something else entirely,
45:08something that should feel
45:09uncomfortably familiar.
45:11There is a reason
45:12this particular mystery
45:13has never let go of us,
45:15and it is not really
45:16about the ancient world.
45:18Think about what we have
45:19actually found.
45:20Not a horde of barbarians
45:22who appeared from nowhere
45:23to destroy civilization.
45:25Instead,
45:26a tightly connected network
45:28of prosperous societies,
45:29dependent on long supply chains
45:31they did not control,
45:33reliant on a single
45:34strategic resource
45:35that came from far away,
45:37organized into efficient
45:38but rigid systems
45:39with very little slack in them.
45:42And then a run of shocks,
45:43a change in climate,
45:44failed harvests,
45:46natural disasters,
45:47arriving close enough together
45:49that the connections
45:50which had carried prosperity
45:51began to carry collapse instead,
45:54one failure triggering the next,
45:56faster than anyone could adapt.
45:58The people set in motion
46:00by that unraveling
46:01became, to the survivors,
46:03the face of the catastrophe.
46:04The Sea Peoples
46:05were not the cause.
46:07They were the collapse,
46:08given ships,
46:09and a name.
46:10That is not a story
46:11about the deep past.
46:13That is a description
46:14of how complex systems fail,
46:16and it is why historians
46:17and economists
46:18and even risk analysts
46:20keep returning
46:21to the Late Bronze Age.
46:23It has become
46:24the standard case study
46:25for a specific fear.
46:27What happens
46:28when an interconnected,
46:29specialized,
46:30efficient civilization
46:32meets a cascade of stresses
46:33it was too rigid to absorb?
46:36The parallels are not exact,
46:38and it would be dishonest
46:39to pretend they are.
46:40We are not them.
46:41Our knowledge does not sit
46:42in a single palace
46:43that can burn in a night.
46:44But the underlying anxiety
46:46is real,
46:47and it is why a catastrophe
46:49from 32 centuries ago
46:51can feel,
46:52when you look at it closely,
46:54unsettlingly current.
46:55Now set the lesson aside
46:57and look at what remains
46:58of the people themselves.
47:00Almost nothing.
47:01A campaign carved
47:03on an Egyptian temple wall
47:04by a king
47:05proclaiming a victory
47:06that may have been
47:07something much smaller
47:08and messier.
47:09A handful of clay letters,
47:11baked by the fires
47:12that destroyed the city
47:13that wrote them,
47:14describing enemy ships
47:16and never naming them.
47:18Nine or so names,
47:20recorded by scribes
47:21in a script
47:22without vowels,
47:23most of which
47:24we cannot confidently
47:26attach to any place
47:27on earth.
47:28A scatter of burned cities
47:29that will not line up
47:31into a single event.
47:32And in one cemetery
47:33on one coast,
47:35a few fragments
47:36of ancient DNA
47:37that confirm,
47:38for one group only,
47:39that real people
47:41really did cross the sea.
47:42From that,
47:44generations of scholars
47:45have built libraries
47:46of theories.
47:47And the theories
47:48keep changing
47:48because the evidence
47:50is thin enough
47:50that each generation
47:51can see something new in it.
47:53In the 19th century,
47:55the Sea Peoples
47:56were a barbarian invasion.
47:58In the 20th,
47:59they became refugees
48:00and migrants.
48:01In the 21st,
48:03they are dissolving
48:04into a symptom
48:05of systems collapse
48:06and climate stress.
48:07Each version says
48:08as much about the age
48:10that produced it
48:10as about the Bronze Age itself.
48:13That is worth
48:14being honest about.
48:15When the evidence
48:16is this sparse,
48:17we do not just discover
48:18the Sea Peoples,
48:19we project onto them.
48:21They are a mirror
48:22as much as a mystery.
48:24And every confident documentary
48:26that tells you
48:26exactly who they were
48:28and exactly what they did,
48:30this one included,
48:31is reading a great deal
48:33into a very small amount
48:34of stone.
48:35What we can say
48:37is narrow
48:37and strange
48:38and true.
48:40Around 1200 BC,
48:41the most advanced
48:43and interconnected world
48:44the Mediterranean
48:45had yet produced
48:46came apart.
48:47Cities that had stood
48:48for centuries burned
48:50and were never rebuilt.
48:51Two entire writing systems
48:53were lost.
48:54A network of great kingdoms
48:55that wrote each other letters
48:57and called each other brother
48:58collapsed into isolated survivors.
49:01who, for a time,
49:02could barely write at all.
49:04It took centuries to recover
49:05and some of what was lost
49:07was never recovered.
49:09And moving through the wreckage,
49:11recorded by the one power
49:12that survived
49:13to carve its version into stone,
49:15were people who came
49:16from the Sea.
49:17We do not know
49:18all of who they were.
49:20We do not fully know
49:21what drove them.
49:22We know they were there,
49:23at the end of a world,
49:25and that some of them
49:26settled down
49:26and helped build
49:27the one that followed.
49:28The Greeks who came after
49:30remembered this vanished age
49:32only dimly
49:32as a time of heroes
49:34greater than themselves
49:35and stories of a great war
49:37fought at a place called Troy.
49:40They did not know
49:41that their heroic age
49:42had been a catastrophe.
49:43They did not know
49:44they were living
49:45in its long shadow
49:46in the dark centuries
49:47after the lights went out.
49:49They only knew
49:50that once,
49:51before the fall,
49:53the world had been brighter
49:54and larger
49:55and more connected
49:56than the one
49:56they had inherited
49:59and that something
50:00had come out of the sea
50:01and it had never
50:02been the same again.
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