[SunkenCiv]

Thanks JV. The Sea Peoples weren't a distinct, otherwise unknown group, although given their lack of a homeland, lack of burial grounds or distinctive burials, lack of any inscriptions or sign of their own language, and the list goes on and on, basically no cultural remains *at all*, they are mythical. They are known from a couple of later New Kingdom texts in Egypt, and that's all there is. The problem is, the conventional chronology is a pseudochronology that assigns dates to a number of pharaonic dynasties that are too high. This has been borne out by (for example) the radiocarbon dating of the innards of Ramses II "the Great", preserved in his canopic jars, and over 700 years 'too young'.

[lentulusgracchus]

The Sea Peoples weren't a distinct, otherwise unknown group

Nancy Sandars wrote a monograph on the Sea Peoples so-called, and yes, they were not "a" discrete group, but rather several.

There are material remains linkable to the Sea Peoples through documentary evidence in the monuments of Egypt, which offers physiognomic descriptions of the Sea Peoples and names of certain leaders captured by the Pharaohs Merneptah (or Merne-Ptah, separating out the god-name) and Ramesses III.

There were actually four intersections spread over time, these being two wars with Libya in which the Sea Peoples appeared as allies of the Libyan king. (These Libyans were Caucasian, related to the Ligurians and other North African peoples who crossed into Europe in remote antiquity and engendered the Windmill Hill Culture that built the henges in England, and also to the Minoans and to the so-called "Argive" Greeks.)

The two later incidents were irruptions of the Sea Peoples, the first by direct assault from the sea, defended by Delta Egyptians under Merneptah, and a later land invasion met and defeated by Ramesses III about 1180 BC. The land invasion was more in the nature of a migration similar to what we are seeing now, originating in the Greek islands and western Anatolia, as witness the fact that the Egyptian monument to the occasion (accompanied by the Trumpian inscription, "You [Pharaoh] have muzzled the mouths of the insolent / And bound your yoke upon the proud") shows the Egyptian infantry meeting and overrunning the head of the Sea Peoples' column, which was made up not of a vanguard of fighting men, but of oxcarts containing families (a man is shown lifting one of his boys out of the cart and passing him down to his mother). The inference is that the Egyptians surprised the migrants and caught them cold.

The names associated with the Sea Peoples in the inscriptional evidence and preserved diplomatic correspondence of the time suggest that the Peoples were, in fact,

• Sicilians or Siculi ("Shekelesh" in Egyptian)
• Sardinians ("Sherden/Shardana"), who wore a distinctive salad-bowl helmet with horns
• Teucrians i.e. Trojans ("Tjekker")
• Achaean Greeks ("Akhiyawa", the "Ahhiyawa" of Hittite sources, spelt "Akhaiwoi" in Mycenaean Greek)
• Danaan Greeks, who were the people identified by Cadogan et al. as the bearers of the Greek language from the steppes to Greece proper in the 19th century BC ("Danuna" in Egyptian, dynnm in Ugaritic)
• Another people unidentified but called "Ekwesh" in Egyptian; they appear in the Libyan wars but then disappear
• Philistines, who were probably Greeks or Hellads from around the Greek city of Palaiste in central Greece, whom the Egyptians called "Peleset".

Keying on and metasearching on any of these names should bring up a wealth of information.

After the land invasion, Ramesses settled the migrants in client-state lands in what is now Philistia, Gaza, and Phoenicia.

One last note: The Danaans are possibly the people known to the composers of the Vedic Hymns as the "Danawo", an enemy people whom the Proto-Indo-Iranians knew on the steppes east of the Caspian Sea; their Homeric name is "Danawoi' ", accent on last syllable as in Proto-Indo-European; and as the "Danuna" they were settled first in Philistia, but then moved after a couple of generations to the northern Levant and modern Syria; and there they proselytized, and became the Tribe of Dan. In this way, one people appears in the Vedic Hymns, the Iliad of Homer, the monuments of the XIXth and XXth Dynasties of Egypt, and the Judaeo-Christian Bible.

Not a bad career.