Close contact was maintained by boat between these tribes trading goods and to standardize their religion, universal language, traditions and oral history. As all the Sea Peoples were actively involved in exploring the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Atlantic, the people keeping up the contacts must have heard fascinating tales of daring deeds, strange discoveries, amazing experiences and also of enormous hardships and loss of life. All these legendary tales are now irretrievably lost....and so we all know about their cultural identity, and of the existence and content of these tales, how?
1274 bce., Sherden auxiliaries, probably from Cyrenaica or Libya, fight alongside the Egyptian troops in the Battle of Kadesh. These may have been mercenaries who had been taken prisoners in the fighting of the past years.AFAIK, the Sherden in the account are generally attributed to Sardinians, presumably because Sardinia is an island (they were called Sea Peoples after all) and because of the similarity of the names.
1231 bce., In the fifth year of Pharaoh Merenptah's reign, the Libyans attacked the western Nile delta over land, supported by a group of Sea Peoples who had come from Anatolia by boat to Libya (probably Kirrukaska from the north coast of Anatolia). The attack was defeated, many were captured and settled in camps and trained as Egyptian mercenaries.The Libyans? Wouldn't the Sherden from next door help out?
1210 bce., Pharaoh Merenptah wins a decisive victory over the Libyans in the western desert. The allies of the Libyans had been the Aqaiwasha people of the "foreign lands of the sea" probably the British.The Aqaiwasha sound like Greek mercenaries.
Originally the Sea Peoples had been those tribes which had developed boat building, sailing, oak tanning of leather and star navigation and who led a life style almost entirely dependent on the sea. They may have started their experimentation on the ocean as early as 38,000 bce. and had learned that the sea could provide a reliable food supply at all times of the year and as a result had developed highly advanced sea-food harvesting methods. They coined the name 'ocean', Greek 'okeano', oke-ano, okegin (fulness, plentiful) ano (food supply): "plentiful food supply". When the central Sahara became unlivable because of fast advancing desertification (See Climate), which forced them to flee to the coast, the Sea Peoples were ready and available to ferry the displaced tribes and their livestock north to Europe.The central Sahara became unlivable, so they fled to Europe? Desertification wasn't complete even as recently as 2500 years ago, in Herodotus' time, although he explicitly refers to the sand sea; he also mentions that the remains of Lake Tritonis were still there, by then a chain of connected and isolated marshes.
The Berbers from Morocco likely were the Shekelesh (3) of the Egyptian records, while the people of Britain may have been called the Aqaiwasha. It appears that the people of the Hebrides and Scotland were known to the Egyptians as the Tyrrhenoi(4), the people of Odysseus' tribe, later known to the Romans as the Picts. Their migration was a simple one and covered an area that was within easy reach of the homeland."Hey, I've got a great idea! Let's pack up aboard ship and sail to someplace we've never even heard of, then have our butts handed to us in a war with some country we've got no quarrel with!" "Great idea, Bob! I'll text-message the Berbers and the Aqaiwasha!"
The people, jokingly called the Black Irish, have dark hair and eyes, wedge-shaped faces and look like Berbers and Basques. Their blood type proves that Berbers and Basques were originally closely related people, as many of them have Rh-negative blood.Y'know, because Rh-negative blood is really rare, that it originated among the Basques and Berbers, and couldn't have come from anywhere else. :'P
Today in many publications, the presence of these dark-eyed people is explained as them being castaways of the huge Spanish armada which was defeated in 1588 by a coalition of British and Dutch sailors in the North Sea... There is little doubt that the Black Irish are the descendants of the oldest population of the British Isles and Ireland.I wonder sometimes if anyone has ever heard of "The Book of Invasions"?
Where does the Dorians fit in on this? There was a History Channel Special on the Sea Peoples a while back. It put out the theory that the Sea Peoples were a mix bag of uprooted peoples that started with the Dorian migration to the Peloponnese.