- (a) A very good example of how important the Hellenic innovation with the vowels in the alphabet has been. If the Egyptian script had vowels, as well, the enigma of the Sea Peoples might have long since been solved!

The Asia Minor/Anatolia amalgam:
the most important regions and peoples
Anatolian connections have been suggested for other Sea Peoples, as well, like the Lukka (Lycians). Most striking is that the vast majority of them seem to have descended from the Troad. Therefore, some researchers, such as the Swiss geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger, have proposed that “the Sea Peoples may well have been Troy and its confederated allies, and the literary tradition of the Trojan War [e.g. the Iliad] may well reflect the Greek effort to counter those raids.”(b) Therefore, despite the attempts of many historians to discredit the historicity of the Iliad, the Trojan War is considered a historical event and a key to grasp the underlying causes of these epoch-making developments. “For sure, the Sea Peoples’ movement was one of the largest and most important migrations in history that changed the face of the ancient world more than any other single event before the time of Alexander the Great”, Andrea Salimbeti remarks. This long, ravaging war, in combination with the widespread famine in the entire peninsula, created the explosive conditions leading to the collapse. Under the circumstances, many Trojans, allies or neighbours became refugees, and some survived by their wits and swords. Archeological evidence leads to the conclusion that the Sea Peoples were not pirates anymore, nor raiders plundering and pillaging established cities, but instead a mass of people looking for a place to settle, in search of a home. This was obvious since their first invasion of Egypt under Libyan leadership when they were accompanied by their families and belongings. The Libyan tribes also played a role in the first campaigns against Egypt. Herodotus and Hecataeus mentioned one of them centuries later. It was the Berber tribe of the Maxyes or Mazyes, the Mazaces to the Romans or the Meshwesh to the Egyptians, who also claimed to have a Trojan heritage.
Despite the attempts to discredit the historicity of the “Iliad”, the Trojan War is considered a historical event. “The Sea Peoples may well have been Troy and its confederated allies, and the literary tradition of the Trojan War may well reflect the Greek effort to counter those raids.” (Eberhard Zangger)

Trojan War scenes on pottery
- (b) According to this scenario, the Trojan War was a ‘just’, defensive war on the part of the Greeks, not intended for conquest and destruction of the city controlling the passage to the Black Sea.
- In his Anatolian hypothesis, Eberhard Zangger caused a sensation because of his controversial identification of Troy as Atlantis. Zangger’s point of view is that Plato used an Egyptian version of the story about Troy for his legendary report on Atlantis. He based his argument on comparisons between Mycenaean culture and Plato’s account of the Hellenic civilization facing Atlantis, as well as parallels between the recollections of the Trojan War and the one supposedly fought between Greeks and Atlanteans (a Titanomachy variation). He interpreted the legend of the Trojan War to be the memory of the momentous chaos leading to the Bronze Age collapse, and arrived at the conclusion that Troy must have been much bigger than most scholars had presumed, with artificial harbours inside the modern floodplain. In order to prove it, he prepared a helicopter-based geophysical exploration of the plain of Troy to locate settlement layers and artificial port basins using ground-penetrating techniques. Having granted an exclusive excavation license for Troy to the German archaeologist Manfred Korfmann, the Turkish government rejected Zangger’s request and, as a consequence, he withdrew from science with a lecture in the Heidelberg Academy of Science. It was his “swan song” as a scientist before he turned to more “lucrative” activities as a business consultant specializing in corporate communications and public relations. In my view, his last project was jeopardized not by Korfmann’s… exclusive rights to excavate for Troy [!] (Zangger’s plan did not entail any real excavations) but rather by Turkey’s unwillingness to authorize any disclosure of sensitive military data for the sake of science.

Ilium/Troy: the wider area and, below on the right, the modern coastline in red and, therefore, the floodplain that interested Zangger – next to the strategic straits and the Greek border…
- Geoarchaeology is a multi-disciplinary approach which uses the techniques and subject matter of geography, geology and other Earth sciences (those dealing with our planet) to examine topics which inform archaeological knowledge and thought. Geoarchaeologists study the natural processes that affect archaeological sites such as geomorphology, as well as soil and sediments, to contribute to archaeological studies.

A Peleset captive in Egypt, and the particular Phaestos disc symbol (below on the right)
An important Sea People have been the Peleset, identified with the Philistines, the Palestinians:
“One of the theories links them to the Pelasgians who were allies of Troy, and one group of them lived in Thrace”, Andrea Salimbeti explains.(c) “Those Pelasgians would have migrated south, overrunning and fatally damaging Achaean Greek civilization. Shortly after, many would have gone farther south to Crete.” In addition, there are Biblical references to the Philistines as coming from a place called Caphtor, identified by certain scholars with Crete.(d) “This theory”, Salimbeti adds, “has been somewhat strengthened by the discovery in Crete of the Phaestos disc. One of the symbols shows the head of a man crowned with feathers – very similar to the feather-topped helmets of the Peleset depicted” at the Temple of Ramses III.(e)

The Cycladic civilization, one of the most important Pelasgian cultures: here’s a frying pan of 2800 BCE (some imaginative people see on its design a map of Atlantis!)
- (c) What was the Philistine language? In Wikipedia we are ‘informed’ of “possible relations to Indo-European languages, even Mycenaean Greek, [which] support the independently-held [?] theory that immigrant Philistines originated among ‘sea peoples’.” And what do we know about the Pelasgian language(s)? “In the absence of certain knowledge about the identity (or identities) of the Pelasgians, various theories have been proposed. Since Greek is classified as an Indo-European language, the major question of concern is whether Pelasgian was [also] an Indo-European language”. For further information we are forwarded to the Aegean language family, proposed by Giulio M. Facchetti, due to some alleged similarities between Etruscan and Lemnian, and some other languages of the area, such as Minoan, Eteocretan, Eteocypriot, and Philistine. These languages could constitute a pre-Indo-European phylum stretching from Canaan to the Alps. However, this is not a view held in common; there are attempts to link Eteocretan and Eteocypriot with Semitic. Of course, all the above are nothing but hypotheses, as Facchetti himself admits. What really counts is the idea the ancient Hellenes had about the Pelasgians who had survived even in the classical period in several locations of mainland Greece, Crete and other parts of the Aegean. Those identified as “Pelasgian” spoke a language or languages that the Hellenes described as “barbaric” – that is, incomprehensible to them. A tradition also survived that many parts of Greece had once been Pelasgian before being Hellenized. Taking this into account, we can relish watching all scholarly theorizations crumbling and crashing down…

The Nile Delta with Pelusium in the East, the Hellenic colony Naucratis in the West, and further on the location Alexandria was to be built. The ancient canal linking the Mediterranean and the Red Seas is also shown.
- (d) Wikipedia: “Caphtor is a locality mentioned in the Bible and related literature. The people of Caphtor are called Caphtorites (or Caphtorim) and are named as a division of the ancient Egyptians. Traditional Hebrew sources place Caphtor in the region of Pelusium [in the Nile Delta]. Other sources associate Caphtor with localities outside Egypt such as Cilicia, Cyprus or Crete.” The least probable scenario is “hard truth” for certain scholars. A measure of their “credibility”…
- (e) Well, it was almost unavoidable: “The similarity [of the Peleset helmet] with Maya and Aztec feather headdresses is truly amazing, given the distance that separated the Mesoamerican culture” from the Mediterranean… Galloping imagination somewhere in the Internet Sea, while far in the distant horizon the land of Atlantis is gradually emerging….
Another ‘Trojan’ Sea People might have been the Weshesh. The scarcity of information led ‘necessarily’ to speculation about possible links between their name and that of Ilion, as the city of Troy was also called by the Greeks, or Wilusa (Wilusiya) by the Hittites – after king Ilus (thence the Iliad). “The W of Weshesh”, Salimbeti notes, “is a modern invention for ease of pronunciation; the Egyptian records refer to Uashesh”. Some scholars associate this people with Assos, also in the Troad, or with Iasos (Iassos) in Caria, or with Issos in Cilicia. Others have theorized that they became part of the Israelite confederacy, as the tribe of Asher. Another people connected with the Hebrews were the Tjeker. Moving to Canaan, they captured the city-state of Dor and turned it into a large, well-fortified capital of their kingdom. Dor was violently destroyed in the mid-11th century BCE by the expanding Phoenicians, who were checked by the Philistines, and then by the Hebrews. King David (if he was something more than just a mythological figure) supposedly conquered Dor and the Tjeker were mentioned no more.

Achilles and Ajax playing a dice game: an amphora by painter-potter Exekias, ca 540-530 BCE
A possible linguistic connection has been proposed between the Tjeker and the Tekrur, identified with the Teucri, a tribe described by some ancient sources as inhabiting northwest Anatolia to the south of Troy. Tradition offers basically two candidates for a homeland: Crete or Attica. Legend links all three places and goes even further, following two heroes with the same name: Teucer (or Teucrus). According to Virgil, the older Teucer was from Crete but left the island with a third part of its inhabitants during a great famine (how many such stories…). They settled near a river, which was named Scamander after his father. Dionysius of Halicarnassus claims Teucer had gone to the Troad from Attica. Scamander (or Xanthos) was said to have been a river-god, a son of Oceanus. According to Homer, he fought on the side of the Trojans after Achilles insulted him. He was the personification of the river that flowed by Troy. The Hellenes had set up their camp near its mouth, and their battles with the Trojans were fought on its plain. With the arrival of Dardanus there, Teucria was renamed as Dardania (thence Dardenelles), and later Troad (from king Tros). But these toponymic changes would not deter the Trojans to often call themselves Teucrians. Aeneas e.g. is described as “the great captain of the Teucrians”.
The younger Teucer (or Teucrus) was a son of king Telamon of Salamis, the island of Attica where the decisive naval battle of the Graeco-Persian Wars would be fought. He was half Trojan because his mother was a princess of Ilion. He also fought in the Trojan War, but on the side of the Hellenes, having his half-brother, Ajax, as a co-fighter, while his cousins, Hector and Paris, and his uncle Priam were ‘enemies’. After all, war was a family affair – let alone for Teucer Jr! On his return to Salamis, however, his father accused him for not bringing Ajax’s body back home. He was disowned, exiled, and set out to find a new home. With his departing words that Horace turned into a moving ode, he exhorted his companions to “despair in no way… tomorrow we shall set out upon the vast ocean”.(f) This speech, related later to the theme of voyages of discovery, is also found in Dante’s Inferno and in Tennyson’s Ulysses. Teucer eventually joined the Phoenician king Belus of Tyre in his campaign against Cyprus, and when the island was seized, Belus handed it over to Teucer as a reward. He founded there the city of Salamis, named after his homeland.
- (f) “Wherever fortune may bear us, kinder than my father, / We shall go, o men and comrades! / Do not despair with Teucer as your leader and as protector, / Surely resolved Apollo has promised uncertain / Future to Salamis in a new world. / O men, who with me often have endured / Worse fortunes, now, banish cares with wine; / Tomorrow we shall set out upon the boundless sea!” Horace, Odes.
The “copper island”, a vital node in the trade networks, experienced two waves of Greek settlement: The initial consisted of Mycenaean traders around 1400 BCE. Towards the end of this period, great amounts of ‘Mycenaean’ pottery were produced in Cyprus. A major second wave, connected with Teucer’s story, took place just after the Bronze Age collapse ca 1100 BCE, with the island’s predominantly Hellenic character dating from this era, due to the ‘invasion’ of Helladic refugees. Apart from Salamis, Teucer is credited as a founder of other cities, as well. A local legend in Galicia, in northwestern Iberia, relates the foundation of Pontevedra to ‘Teucro’. The legend seems to be based more on the conjecture that Greek traders might have arrived there in ancient times. Though legends appear for a certain reason, historians and archaeologists tend to agree that the initial settlement was probably formed when Gallaecia was integrated into the Roman Empire (1st century BCE). Pontevedra, which means “the old bridge”, in reference to an old Roman bridge across the Lérez River, is sometimes poetically called The City of Teucro, and its inhabitants teucrinos – like the Trojans.(g)

Oil lamp, Tróia, Portugal
- (g) It seems as if Tróia, across Setúbal, Portugal, was named after Troy but we do not know why. Tróia peninsula has been inhabited since prehistoric times when it was an island called Acalá. In the 1st century CE the Romans built a town and named it Cetóbriga. It served as a fishery centre until 412 when it was destroyed completely by an earthquake with tsunami. If the town’s initial name had been Tróia, one could surmise that the Romans, considering themselves as Trojans, decided to build a ‘Troy’ in the vicinity of the city of Odysseus – Olisipo, Lisbon! According to José Pedro Machado, in the Onomastic-Etymologic Dictionary of the Portuguese Language, Tróia is not a toponym found exclusively in the area of Setúbal. There are more ‘Tróias’ in Portugal and a Troya in Galicia. Their ‘godfathers’ were probably inspired by the famous Iliad but used the name of the Portuguese town. Based on an article in the Great Portuguese and Brazilian Encyclopedia, Machado referred to the possibility this name to originate from Cetóbriga: > Cetóbria > Cetróbia > Cetróia > Xetróia > Atróia – though it seems too much of an adventure for a toponym… Or perhaps the name comes not from Troy but from either Troyes or Truyes, two cities of France; or its origin is the Latin phrase ‘Trogia (villa)’, derived from the Celtic name Trogus.

Trojan Horse: its oldest known depiction on the Mykonos vase; ca 670 BCE
Up to now, with the sole exception of Teucer attacking Cyprus in collaboration with the Phoenicians and representing the people who found refuge there (well, at the expense of the locals), we have seen no Hellenes fighting alongside the Sea Peoples, but rather against them, in the Trojan War. It is what Sanford Holst already said in our previous Chronicle:
“The Mycenaeans attacked the Anatolian people from the seaward side. To deal with this problem, warriors and ships in the Sea Peoples confederacy poured from Anatolia and the Black Sea into the Aegean, where they ravaged the Mycenaeans.”
Let us try to verify this in Wikipedia:
“The invaders, that is, the replacement cultures at those sites, apparently made no attempt to retain the cities’ wealth but instead built new settlements of a materially simpler cultural and less complex economic level atop the ruins. For example, no one appropriated the palace and rich stores at Pylos, but all were burned up, and the successors (whoever they were) moved in over the ruins with plain pottery and simple goods. This demonstrates a cultural discontinuity.”
This may demonstrate a logical discontinuity, as well! The author leaves the question of who the invaders were open. However, he/she identifies them with “the replacement cultures”, who were stupid enough to “burn up the palace and rich stores” instead of appropriating them. Quite simply, the invaders had no plan to settle there; they went there just to destroy: they were not “the replacement cultures”.

Captive Sea Peoples in Egypt
The Anatolians predominated among the Sea Peoples but were not alone. Names of tribes with dubious or unknown origin are several in the Egyptian files – like the Shekelesh, probably the Siculi, who moved to Sicily from the Italian mainland.
“There was a gigantic series of migratory waves, extending all the way from the Danube valley to the plains of China”, Michael Grant comments, and Moses I. Finley agrees: “A large-scale movement of people is indicated… The original centre of disturbance was in the Carpatho-Danubian region of Europe… pushing in different directions at different times.”
However, if we have faith in Michael Wood, they were Greeks:
“Were the sea peoples in part actually composed of Mycenaean Greeks – rootless migrants, warrior bands and condottieri on the move? Certainly there seem to be suggestive parallels between the war gear and helmets of the Greeks and those of the Sea Peoples”. Moreover, including the Sherden and Shekelesh among the ‘villains’, he reminds us that “there were migrations of Greek-speaking peoples to [Sardinia and Sicily] at this time”. Troy, he concludes, “was sacked by essentially [!] Greek Sea Peoples”…(h)
- (h) Pity there were… “essentially” no Iberian or Britannic “condottieri on the move”. Or else the… “thinking woman’s crumpet” (as Wood was humorously dubbed by British newspapers for his good looks most appealing to women) would have found Hellenic colonies even on Mars!

Cycladic head: a Pelasgian suspect as an “islander” (more than obvious for he has deformed his features)!
Michael Wood is not alone, too. The identification of the Denyen and Ekwesh with the Danaans and Achaeans respectively are long-standing issues in Bronze Age scholarship, especially as the “suspects” lived “in the isles”…(i) Were the Egyptian scribes so naïve to use two names for one and the same people? What kind of Bronze Age scholars are they if they (pretend to) ignore that Achaeans and Danaans are synonymous terms? Have they not been schooled in the Iliad? Homer mentions the name Achaeans 598 times; Danaans 138 times; Argives 182 times; and Hellenes only once. According to a version of the myth, they were ancestors of the Greeks and their tribes: Hellen, Graecos, Magnes, and Macedon (Makednos) were sons of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only survivors of the Great Flood. Sons of Hellen were Dorus, Xuthus, and Aeolus; sons of Xuthus were Ion and Achaeus. Danaus from Egypt, Pelops from Anatolia, and Cadmus from Phoenicia gained a foothold in Greece and were assimilated and Hellenized. At least for the Danaans, perhaps due to their ‘Egyptian’ origin, there is some “flexibility”: they are either identified with the people of Adana in Cilicia, or possibly related to the land of the Danuna near Ugarit in Syria, or perhaps they are rumoured to have joined Hebrews to form one of the original 12 tribes of Israel, that of Dan.
- (i) Although even the connection of the Hittite toponym Ahhiyawa or Ahhiya with Achaea is strongly disputed (Wikipedia: “the exact relationship of the term Ahhiyawa to the Achaeans beyond a similarity in pronunciation is hotly debated by scholars”), the… “Wikipedists” are absolutely sure about the identification of the Achaeans with the Ekwesh. So, if you search information on the latter, you are redirected to the former… As for the phrase “in the isles”, used by the Egyptians when referring to Sea Peoples and quoted by scholars as an argument, it ends up meaning: “Whoever is not a landsman is a suspect”!

The major event in Pharaoh Merneptah‘s reign (1213-1203 BCE) was a war against a confederacy termed the ‘Nine Bows’ acting under the leadership of the king of Libya. The pharaoh states that he defeated the invasion, killing 6,000 soldiers and taking 9,000 prisoners. To be sure of the numbers, among other things, he took the penises of all uncircumcised dead and the hands of all the circumcised. We mention this macabre detail because, as it turned out, the Ekwesh were circumcised, a fact that would certainly have obliged any Bronze Age scholar to ‘acquit’ the Greeks.(j)
- (j) …“a fact causing some to doubt they were Greek,” is what we read indeed in Wikipedia! Perhaps they were circumcised as a… camouflage! Or just to baffle our Bronze Age scholars! What the latter do remember is Virgil’s aphorism: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”; “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” – in our case: bearing circumcision! At least they have been schooled in the Aeneid… Note that not only the Ekwesh, but also the Shekelesh and Shardana were circumcised, as the Egyptians made clear (unfortunately they did not inform… Michael Wood!) Therefore, these two peoples had also been Oriental in origin and settled in Sicily and Sardinia only later. Those who were not circumcised were the Peleset…

The stele ‘appropriated’ by Israel; Merneptah was the first to blame for he usurped it from his predecessor, Amenhotep III: he turned it round and used the rough surface for his text.
- The pharaoh’s victories over the Libyans and their Sea People allies are glorified on the Merneptah Stele, a black granite slab over three meters high, discovered by Flinders Petrie in Thebes in 1896. There is, however, a kind of a footnote in the final two of the 28 lines, which refers to a separate campaign in Canaan. There the king boasts of defeating and destroying four cities, the fourth one being most probably a city and valley in northern Canaan, called Jezreel – a word so similar to… Israel! Certainly that would be far more convenient and beneficial for all: for the whole Jewish diaspora, the emerging Zionism, formally established as a movement the next year after the discovery, for many Christians, especially the clergy, and, of course, Petrie himself! That same day he wondered: “Won’t the reverends be pleased?” and then he prophesied: “This stele will be better known in the world than anything else I have found.” He was not a fool: if this set of hieroglyphs on Line 27 could be read as “Israel”, it would represent the first documented instance of this name in the historical record, and the only mention in Ancient Egypt!
Despite the fact that the readings in many places are illegible due to the rough surface and the poor cutting (Petrie’s own translation of the text contains dozens of question marks; only next to the controversial word the mark is missing…), most biblical archeologists accept Petrie’s version. That is how his find was also proclaimed as… Israel Stele: based on a disputed word in the penultimate line of a text dealing with another subject! What a disgrace for Merneptah: a proud pharaoh boasting of a triumph over a handful of poor villagers! In his time, there were no more than about 25 villages in the highlands of Canaan. Archaeologists and historians attempting to trace the origins of these villagers have found it impossible to identify any distinctive features that could define them as specifically Israelite. Archaeologist Paula McNutt says: “It is probably… during Iron Age I [(1200-1000 BCE) that] a population began to identify itself as ‘Israelite’.” The Kingdom of Israel emerged as an important, worth-mentioning local power even later, by the 9th century BCE, before falling to the Assyrians in 722. Thus, there was no “Israel” for Merneptah to mention – unless he was as prophetic as Petrie himself…
- This “misspelling” trick was a kind of “compensation” for the Egyptians’ historical “error” not to mention either the celebrated Exodus or the calamitous Biblical plagues. The archeologists are equally to blame for they also failed to find any evidence to support the story of the Hebrews departing Egypt… The consensus among biblical scholars is that there was never any exodus of the proportions described in the Bible. According to the book of Exodus, arguably the most important in the Bible, the population leaving the country would have numbered some 2 million people, compared with an entire Egyptian population in 1250 BCE of around 3 to 3.5 million. Marching ten abreast and without accounting for livestock, they would have formed a line 240 kilometers long! No evidence has been found that Egypt ever suffered such a demographic and economic catastrophe or that the Sinai desert ever hosted (or could have hosted) these millions of people and their herds. The date proposed initially of an Exodus around 1450 BCE is also problematic: digs in the 1930s had failed to find traces of the simultaneous destruction of Canaanite cities ca 1400 BCE – in fact many of them, such as Jericho, the first one to fall to the Israelites according to the Bible, were uninhabited at the time. A century of research by archaeologists and Egyptologists has found no evidence which can be directly related to the Exodus captivity and the escape and travels through the wilderness, and most archaeologists have abandoned their investigation of Moses and the Exodus as “a fruitless pursuit”. According to archaeologist William Dever, there is “no room for an Exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness.”

Flinders Petrie’s “fine”, “Caucasian”, “dynastic race”
just before landing in Egypt…!
- Flinders Petrie, who could possibly “address the issue”, had died a long time ago and was buried on Mount Zion, in Palestine. Furthermore, he remains a controversial figure as a committed advocate of “eugenics” and of the “superiority” of the Northern peoples over the Latinate and Southern peoples, as well as for his affiliation with a variety of fascist groups and anti-democratic thought in England. His views on archaeological issues were equally racist: He contended that the Egyptian civilization was derived from a “fine”, invading “Caucasian” (“white”) “Dynastic Race” which had conquered Egypt in predynastic times of late prehistory and introduced the Pharaonic, dynastic culture to the “inferior” “mulatto” race then inhabiting the country. These views spilled over into disputes with E. A. Wallis Budge. The British Museum‘s Egyptologist declared that the ancient Egyptians were an African people with roots in eastern Africa and their religion was essentially identical to the religions of the peoples of northeastern and central Africa. However, all but a few of his colleagues followed Petrie – a most revealing fact about the dominant ideology at the time, at least among intellectual circles. Thus Petrie and his followers derided Budge’s ideas as impossible and “unscientific”…

The great Pharaoh proudly presented his captives: from left to right
the Libyan, Nubian, Syrian, Shasu, and Hittite
(the… Hellene probably escaped!)
The next round in this protracted war took place some three decades later, during the reign of Ramses III (1186-1155 BCE), the last great pharaoh of Egypt. His inscriptions state that the ‘Nine Bows’ re-appeared as a “conspiracy in their isles”. Most tribes mentioned above were there again; we also learn that there were at least two great battles, one in the sea and the other on the land.
“When it was over”, the Wikipedia article on the Sea Peoples says, “several chiefs were captive: of Hatti, Amor, and Shasu among the ‘land peoples’, and the Tjeker, ‘Sherden of the sea’, ‘Teresh of the sea’ and Peleset or Philistines (in whose name some have seen the ancient Greek name for sea people: Pelasgians).”

Ramses III vs the Sea Peoples
What conclusions can we draw? We are surprised first of all since our scholars were not… surprised at all when they read about a Hittite chief among the captives: Hatti had been a Sea Peoples’ arch-enemy – and one of their greatest victims! But scholars are usually aware of such “details” and are not taken by surprise. Furthermore, the same thing had happened before and the pharaoh’s complaints had been officially forwarded to the Hittite monarch – as long as the Hittite kingdom still existed. OK, but why don’t they bother to explain, instead of wasting their time trying to involve the Greeks in this… “conspiracy theory”? We eventually realize that the destruction of the established civilizations, above all the Hittite and Mycenaean, was a deliberate tactics of the Sea Peoples to garner more strength at sea and amass land forces, as well. After all, the empires belonged to the aristocracies, Hittite or Mycenaean. What else could a desperate Hellene or a destitute Anatolian do under the circumstances but to follow the peoples with whom he shared the same aspirations for a better life? But what a pity for our scholars: not even one Greek among the captive chiefs… He probably managed to escape! The other captives were chiefs of the Amorites, who lived in Syria and part of Mesopotamia, and possibly of the Hebrews: Shasu is a term for nomad wanderers, and at least one of their tribes worshipped the Jewish god Yahweh. The rest were captains of ships. The pharaoh concluded his report as follows: “I slew the Denyen in their isles” and “burned” the Tjeker and Peleset… He thus implied some maritime raids of his own, some punitive expeditions elsewhere in the Mediterranean. In the Aegean? Where, what and whose were these “isles”? Whatever the answers, the chain reaction of the raids went on; it was the Egyptians’ turn to destroy – but destruction bears no signature.
The destruction of the established civilizations was a deliberate tactics of the Sea Peoples to garner more strength at sea and amass land forces, as well. After all, the empires belonged to the aristocracies, Hittite or Mycenaean. What else could a desperate Hellene or a destitute Anatolian do under the circumstances but to follow the peoples with whom he shared the same aspirations for a better life?

Lady of Mycenae (fresco)
Homer mentions an Achaean attack upon the Nile delta, and Menelaus speaks of the same in the Odyssey recounting his own return home from the Trojan War. This was not the only such action by Mycenaeans against Egypt, where they went ‘just for the fun of it’, and some gain, of course. Taking into account the turbulence among and within the great Mycenaean royal families, the hypothesis that they may have destroyed themselves completely is long-standing and seems to find support by the reputable historian Thucydides:
“For in early times the Hellenes and the barbarians of the coast and islands… were tempted to turn to piracy, under the conduct of their most powerful men… They would fall upon a town unprotected by walls… and would plunder it… no disgrace being yet attached to such an achievement, but even some glory.”

Mycenaean gold diadem
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