Sea Peoples: Raiders of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean

The Sea Peoples were a loose collection of seafaring raiders and migrants who appear in Egyptian and Near Eastern texts at the end of the Late Bronze Age, between roughly 1210 and 1175 BC. They fought the pharaohs Merneptah and Ramesses III, threatened the kingdoms of Syria and Cyprus, and in some cases settled on the coast of Canaan. Their identity and their role in the collapse of the Bronze Age world are among the great puzzles of ancient history.

Who the Sea Peoples were

There was never a single nation called the Sea Peoples. The term is a modern one, coined by French scholars in the 19th century and popularised by the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero. It groups together several peoples whom Egyptian scribes described as foreigners coming “from the sea” or “from their islands”.

The names recorded in Egyptian hieroglyphs include the Sherden, Shekelesh, Lukka, Teresh, Ekwesh, Peleset, Tjeker, Denyen and Weshesh. Because Egyptian writing does not record vowels clearly, even the pronunciation of these names is uncertain. Scholars have tried for more than a century to link them to later peoples and places, with very mixed success.

Some identifications are widely accepted. The Peleset are almost certainly the Philistines of the Hebrew Bible, and the Lukka are generally linked to Lycia in south-western Anatolia, a region the Hittites also called Lukka. Others are only guesses based on similar sounds: the Sherden with Sardinia, the Shekelesh with the Sikels of Sicily, the Teresh with the Tyrsenians or Etruscans, the Ekwesh and the Denyen with Greek groups called Achaeans and Danaans. It is not even clear whether such names show where these peoples came from or where some of them ended up.

Early appearances

Several of these groups were known long before the great crisis. Letters from the Amarna archive in the 14th century BC mention Lukka raiders and Sherden men serving as soldiers in the Levant. Ramesses II boasted of defeating Sherden warriors who came in warships early in his reign, and later used Sherden as part of his guard; they appear in the reliefs of the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC, recognisable by their horned helmets and round shields.

In other words, some “Sea Peoples” were already familiar figures in the eastern Mediterranean: pirates, mercenaries and adventurers who could be enemies one year and paid soldiers the next. What changed around 1200 BC was the scale of their movements and the weakness of the states around them.

Merneptah’s war (c. 1208 BC)

The first major clash came in the fifth year of Merneptah, son and successor of Ramesses II, around 1208 BC. A Libyan king named Meryey invaded the western Nile Delta with a large force that included Ekwesh, Teresh, Lukka, Sherden and Shekelesh warriors. Merneptah’s long inscription at Karnak, and a stele set up in the same years, describe a decisive Egyptian victory at a place called Perire.

The Karnak text lists thousands of enemy dead and prisoners and the capture of large amounts of weapons and cattle. Such figures were meant to glorify the king and cannot be checked, but the victory itself is not doubted. The same reign produced the famous Merneptah Stele, which also contains the earliest known mention of Israel.

The Libyans came with their families and possessions, which suggests that hunger and the search for land, not only plunder, lay behind the invasion. This pattern of armed migration would return thirty years later on a much larger scale.

Ugarit and the crisis in Syria

The most moving evidence for the crisis comes from Ugarit, a rich trading city on the Syrian coast. Clay tablets found in its ruins include letters exchanged with the king of Alashiya, usually identified with Cyprus, in the city’s final years. In one, Ugarit’s last king, Ammurapi, explains that his troops and ships were away serving the Hittites while enemy ships attacked his coast and burned his towns.

Another letter, from a Hittite king, asks for information about a people called the Shikalayu, described as people who live on ships. This is usually connected with the Shekelesh or the Tjeker of Egyptian texts. Ugarit was destroyed by fire in the early 12th century BC, probably between about 1190 and 1185 BC, and never rebuilt. Its texts, written partly in a cuneiform alphabet, are described in Ugarit and Its Alphabet.

At around the same time the Hittite capital of Hattusa was abandoned and partly burned, and many cities in Cyprus and the Levant were damaged or destroyed. Not all of this can be blamed on raiders from the sea, but the letters show that attacks by ship were a real and urgent danger.

Ramesses III and the great invasion (c. 1177 BC)

The best-known confrontation took place in the eighth year of Ramesses III, usually dated between about 1180 and 1175 BC, with 1177 BC a popular round figure. His mortuary temple at Medinet Habu in Thebes carries a long inscription describing how “the foreign countries” made a conspiracy in their islands. It claims that no land could stand before them, naming Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alashiya.

According to this account, a coalition of Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh set up a camp in Amurru in Syria and then moved south towards Egypt by land and sea. The reliefs show warriors in feathered or horned headdresses, and ox-carts carrying women and children. Ramesses III met them in a land battle in Djahy, on the Levantine coast, and in a naval battle at the mouths of the Nile. The naval fight is described in detail in our article on the Battle of the Delta.

The Egyptians won both battles, at least in their own telling. The Medinet Habu reliefs show captured enemies being registered and branded, and the later Papyrus Harris I says that the king settled defeated foreigners in strongholds and supplied them from Egyptian stores. Whether those were prisoners, mercenaries or settlers on the frontier is debated.

Where they went: the Philistines and others

The clearest case of settlement concerns the Peleset. From the early 12th century BC, cities on the southern coast of Canaan such as Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron and later Gath and Gaza show a new material culture. It includes locally made pottery in an Aegean style (known to archaeologists as Mycenaean IIIC), new types of hearths, different cooking habits and even a taste for pork, which was rare in the region.

These cities became the Philistine Pentapolis, the five chief cities of the Philistines known from the Bible. A genetic study of burials at Ashkelon, published in 2019, found that some people living there in the early Iron Age had ancestry linked to southern Europe, which faded within a few generations through intermarriage with the local population. This supports the idea that newcomers arrived, without proving exactly where they came from.

Other groups left fainter traces. An Egyptian story set in the early 11th century BC, around 1075 BC, the Report of Wenamun, places the Tjeker at the port of Dor. The Sherden appear in later Egyptian documents as soldiers and landholders. Whether any of them reached Sardinia or Sicily, or came from there in the first place, remains an open question.

Cause or symptom of the Bronze Age collapse?

For much of the 20th century the Sea Peoples were blamed for the end of the Late Bronze Age, when the Mycenaean palaces, the Hittite Empire, Ugarit and many other centres fell within a few decades. Some writers pictured a wave of invaders sweeping across the Mediterranean like a storm.

Most historians now see things differently. The Late Bronze Age collapse appears to have had many interacting causes: prolonged drought and crop failure, attested by climate data and by letters asking for grain; a series of earthquakes; internal revolts; the disruption of long-distance trade in copper, tin and grain; and the movement of people. In this view the Sea Peoples were as much refugees and opportunists produced by the crisis as its cause.

The archaeologist Eric Cline has described the event as a “systems collapse”, in which closely linked kingdoms brought each other down once several shocks hit at once. Others still give raiding and migration a larger role. The evidence is patchy, and destroyed cities rarely reveal who set the fires.

Myths and facts

A common myth is that the Sea Peoples were a single invading nation from one homeland. In fact the texts name many separate groups, who appear at different times and in different alliances, sometimes as Egypt’s enemies and sometimes as its soldiers.

Another misconception is that the Egyptian records are neutral reports. They are royal monuments designed to show the pharaoh as the protector of order against chaos. Their numbers and claims of total victory should be read with care, even though the events behind them were real.

Timeline

• c. 1350 BC: Amarna letters mention Lukka raiders and Sherden soldiers in the eastern Mediterranean.
• 1274 BC: Sherden guards fight for Ramesses II at the Battle of Kadesh.
• c. 1208 BC: Merneptah defeats a Libyan invasion that includes Ekwesh, Teresh, Lukka, Sherden and Shekelesh.
• c. 1190-1185 BC: Ugarit is destroyed after letters describe attacks by enemy ships.
• c. 1180-1175 BC: Hattusa has been abandoned; the Hittite Empire has collapsed.
• c. 1177 BC (Year 8 of Ramesses III): Egyptian victories over the Sea Peoples in Djahy and the Nile Delta.
• 12th century BC: Philistine settlement at Ashdod, Ashkelon and Ekron.
• c. 1075 BC: The Report of Wenamun, set in this period, mentions the Tjeker at Dor.

Why it matters

The Sea Peoples are a window into one of the most dramatic turning points of the ancient world, when an interconnected network of kingdoms broke apart and a new Iron Age world slowly emerged. Their story shows how war, migration, climate and economic crisis can combine. It also shaped later history directly: the Philistines who settled in Canaan became neighbours and rivals of early Israel, and their name survives in the word Palestine.