Sea Peoples

The Sea Peoples were a group of tribes who raided Egypt and other Eastern Mediterranean regions around 1200 BC during the Late Bronze Age. They included well-attested groups such as the Lukka and Peleset, as well as others such as the Weshesh whose origins are unknown. The term "Sea People" is a modern coinage, and is often regarded as a misnomer since most of them appear to have travelled by land.

The modern concept of the Sea People originates in the work of the 19th-century Egyptologists Emmanuel de Rougé and Gaston Maspero, who drew on primary texts such as the reliefs on the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu. Subsequent research developed their interpretation further, attempting to link these sources to other Late Bronze Age evidence of migration, piracy, and destruction. In early scholarship, the Sea Peoples were often regarded as a primary cause of the Bronze Age Collapse but recent work tends to view them as refugees fleeing a crisis which was already in motion.

History of the concept

The concept of the Sea Peoples was proposed by Emmanuel de Rougé, curator of the Louvre, in his 1855 work Note on Some Hieroglyphic Texts Recently Published by Mr. Greene, as an interpretation of the battles of Ramesses III described on the Second Pylon at Medinet Habu, based upon recent photographs of the temple by John Beasley Greene. De Rougé noted that "in the crests of the conquered peoples the Sherden and the Teresh bear the designation of the peuples de la mer (Sea Peoples)", in a reference to the prisoners depicted at the base of the Fortified East Gate. In 1867, de Rougé published his Excerpts of a dissertation on the attacks directed against Egypt by the peoples of the Mediterranean in the 14th century BC, which focused primarily on the battles of Ramesses II and Merneptah and which proposed translations for many of the geographic names included in the hieroglyphic inscriptions.