Posted on 01/08/2016 3:20:29 PM PST by SunkenCiv
You’re thinking of the Gaynaanites.
It is hard to be sure what the Egyptians meant when the wrote about about sea peoples. Sometimes there is even confusion as to what our own kids might mean with their new slang. All the more difficult translating across millenia.
Maybe they were referring to the seafaring nations of the day, or maybe the connotation of the time indicated pirates.
It does seem like they mentioned multiple groups, over the course of several generations.
The Wikipedia article on the Sea Peoples lists seven Egyptian sources which refer to more than one of the nine peoples:
c. 1275 BCE: Kadesh Inscription:[16] 3 peoples named (Karkisha, Lukka, Sherden)
c. 1200 BCE: Great Karnak Inscription: 5 peoples named (Eqwesh, Lukka, Shekelesh, Sherden, Teresh)
c. 1200 BCE: Athribis Stele:[17] 4 peoples named (Eqwesh, Shekelesh, Sherden, Teresh)
c. 1150 BCE: Medinet Habu: 7 peoples named (Denyen, Peleset, Shekelesh, Sherden, Teresh, Tjekker, Weshesh)
c. 1150 BCE: Papyrus Harris I: 5 peoples named (Denyen, Peleset, Sherden, Tjekker, Weshesh)
c. 1150 BCE: Rhetorical Stela to Ramesses III, Chapel C, Deir el-Medina:[18] 2 peoples named (Peleset, Teresh)
c. 1000 BCE: Onomasticon of Amenope: 5 peoples named (Denyen, Lukka, Peleset, Sherden, Tjekker)
Other Egyptian sources refer to one of the individual groups without reference to any of the other groups.
That article posits that the origins of those groups were:
the Denyen, identified by some with the Greek Danaoi and by others with the Israelite tribe of Dan;
the Ekwesh, possibly a group of Bronze Age Greeks (Achaeans);
the Lukka, an Anatolian people of the Aegean who may have given their name to the region of Lycia and the Lycian language;
the Peleset, whose name is generally believed to refer to the Philistines;[12]
the Shekelesh, identified possibly with the Italic people called Siculi (from Sicily);
the Sherden, possibly Sardinians or people of Sardis;
the Teresh, i.e. the Tyrrhenians, possibly ancestors of the Etruscans;
the Tjeker, possibly Greek Teucrians;
the Weshesh.
The dates are too high, which is why there’s been nothing but questions about who they were. They left no graves, no cities, no written records, no shipwrecks, no characteristic pottery or anything else, yet they blotted out whole empires? Not a chance.
There are theories about what caused the great collapse in the late Bronze Age. Before the collapse, their were trade and diplomatic relations from Egypt to Afghanistan.
Then, over about a fifty year period, a whole host of cities evidence a destruction layer of ashes and rubble. My guess is epidemic, followed by economic collapse, famine and raiding. Perhaps some natural disaster(s) like serious drought.
My take on “Sea Peoples” is that it just refers to those over the sea from Egypt - people who came in boats, regardless of where they came from (like we might say overseas). In addition to the Minoans; Sardina, Siciliy, Malta, and other islands in the Mediterranean, and Aegean had seafaring cultures at the time, who traded. There were cities and graves in those places.
The Egyptians recorded that the Philistines (Peleset) came over water to Egypt as migrants, and that the Pharaoh settled them in what is now Gaza (where they established their five cities) and taxed them. Other nations from overseas may have engaged in warfare or raiding, rather than migration.
Rather than some great organized horde, Sea peoples may have come and gone in groups large and small, from different groups. The widespread destruction during the collapse, may have been largely civil unrest during famine, with a combination of warfare and raiding, from both land and sea.
The P-r-s-t were the Persians. The conventional pseudochronology is wrong.
What do you think happened that caused the widespread collapse of societies around 1177 BC?
Ouch. you win this thread.
Wow, talk about urban development and adaptive reuse!
Yeah, it’s great problem to have! :’D
Well, the fact that Carthage was totally destroyed and then salted probably didn’t help. Any archives there or in Alexandria are gone forever. Those Romans could really hate. There might be shipwrecks though.
The Romans didn’t destroy the Great Library — that was left to the lovely caliph when the muzzies took over. The library continued in use, and in fact the papyrus scrolls were replaced with parchment. That probably means, in some dried out old desert dump, the papyrus discards are waiting to be found.
The Carthaginians are not known to have had archives, and weren’t really chatty about their recordkeeping because they were concerned about their various business and trade monopolies. A Greek traveler to Carthage recorded the Periplus of Hanno in a temple there, and Herodotus described the Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa, otherwise nothing would be known about either.
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