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Mycenaean Warriors and the Sea-Peoples (2013)
- PicassoCTs 3y agoThe sea people sounds alot like "ship"-residing refugees sailing along the coasts to me. They would be armed, they would be desperate and pillage like the vikings. And they would end wherever there boats ended up falling apart. Either fighting the locals or mixing with them. I guess this is what you do, when your city is besieged, runs out of food and you still have an open harbor.
- izend 3y agoAnother example might be the Anglo-Saxons "invasion" of Britain near the end of the Western Roman Empire. The reason why the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain isn't entirely clear but it appears throughout history there are periods of mass population movements due to various reasons such as climate change, population explosions or invasion by "steppe people" as Dan Carlin refers to them.
- cryptonector 3y agoThe entire history of Europe for the past 4,000 years is of migrations from the East to the West. First the Lusitaninans, Basques, Etruscans, and Belgae, then the Celts (let's include the Gauls in that group), then the Mycenaeans, then the Greeks, then the Romans (who were Latins,), then the Franks, Angles, Saxons, and other Germanic tribes, then the Huns and Slavs. Roughly.
- philwelch 3y agoAnd if you go back far enough, the Yamnaya.
- pezezin 3y agoIn the Iberian Peninsula we also had a migration from the South to the North with the Muslim conquest that started in 711, but apparently they didn't leave that big of a genetic legacy.
- pjmlp 3y agoMaybe not genetic, but plenty of our southern dishes, music and some village traditions can be found in some form on the other side of Mediterrean.
- pezezin 3y agoSure, nobody can deny the Arabic influence in Spain. For example, around 10% of the vocabulary of modern Spanish comes from Arabic.
- stargazer-3 3y agoActually, genetic studies found that Al-Andalus did leave a sizable admixture behind. Lots of references here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_the_Iberian_Peninsula#North_African_influence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_the_Iberian...
- cryptonector 3y agoAnd the Ottomans in the Balkans.
- willvarfar 3y agoYeap there does seem to be a general drift from bottom-right towards top-left on the map of europe. Except, perhaps, the vikings who went from north to south?
- KineticLensman 3y ago> The reason why the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain isn't entirely clear Ye, it's really complicated. I was taught as a kid that the initial Anglo Saxon 'invasion' was a rebellion by Anglo-Saxon warriors against the British King whop had hired them as mercenaries. But in fact it was a really complex movement of populations that played out over > two hundred years [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Brit...
- rnoorda 3y agoIf anyone's interested in the Sea Peoples and the Late Bronze Age, I recommend 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline. It gives a great overview of the primary sources and evidences for the factors leading to the Late Bronze Age collapse, including the role the Sea Peoples may have played as both a cause and symptom of larger societal issues.
- verisimi 3y agoI have to wonder, what primary sources there could be. I would be amazed if there were any.
- cobbzilla 3y agoLargely archaeological finds that yield tons of forensic evidence. Plus there are actually plenty of written records that have survived, albeit with major gaps. The Akkadians wrote on stone tablets, thousands of which have survived. Mostly they are banal transaction records (which still tell us a lot!) but there are many others, including some court records from ancient Egypt and elsewhere.
- adastra22 3y agoMore specifically, the Akkadian language with cuneiform on clay tablets became the lingua franca of the late Bronze Age, long after the decline of the Akkadian empire. The Bronze Age collapse dates to about a thousand years after the end of the Akkadian empire, but it was still the language used for diplomatic purposes as far away as the Aegean Sea and the Egyptian imperial court. A number of royal and scribe family archives have been found, containing thousands of these clay tablet letters.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> but it was still the language used for diplomatic purposes as far away as the Aegean Sea and the Egyptian imperial court. And also the language in general use in southern Mesopotamia, presumably subject to historical changes. Note that while the various states in that region didn't call themselves "the Akkadians", they did tend to claim the title by giving their king the very traditional royal honor "King of Sumer and Akkad". By the twelfth century BC, the title was attached to Babylon.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- whobre 3y agoFor all who are interested in this period in history, I highly recommend the book “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” by Eric H. Cline
- badbart14 3y agoHighly recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast episode on the Bronze Age Collapse to learn more about the Sea-Peoples (https://youtu.be/B965f8AcNbw?list=PLR7yrLMHm11XAuYuZMPHPn9HznxQ40y_f https://youtu.be/B965f8AcNbw?list=PLR7yrLMHm11XAuYuZMPHPn9Hz...) . They discuss how the Sea-Peoples may be a symptom and a cause of the bronze age collapse, and the whole episode is extremely engaging and educational. (As all the episodes of this podcast are, cannot recommend it enough)
- a_gnostic 3y agoThat one's good! For an alternate perspective, check episodes 0028 and 0027 of The Dangerous History Podcast (1) 1. https://profcj.org/ https://profcj.org/
- Bjorkbat 3y agoI love this podcast so much I make something of an event out of it when each episode comes out. When the video format Egyptian one comes out, I’ll probably try my hand at some Egyptian Koshari and Mesopotamian Mersu.
- Ar-Curunir 3y agoTides of History is also really good! Both are two of my favourite podcasts =)
- krylon 3y agoI second this recommendation. This particular episode is unfortunately one of the shorter ones, but it is very good. The entire podcast (at 18 episodes as of today) is brilliant. You can find it here: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/ https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/
- histories 3y agoIf you understand italian, here's another short podcast: https://www.ilpost.it/episodes/podcasts/lafinedelmondo/ https://www.ilpost.it/episodes/podcasts/lafinedelmondo/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago>> For the thirteenth century BC, we have no evidence at all of metal body-armour or shields. These are features of the earlier Mycenaean epoch – for example, the bronze lobster cuirass from a tomb at Dendra – or of the period after the fall of the Mycenaean palaces, especially the middle of the twelfth century BC. I've seen that suit of armour up-close. I think it was in the War Museum, in Athens, but it might have been the Archeological Museum (I loved all museums as a child; also, as an adult). Wikipedia references imply it's in the Argos museum, where I haven't been, so when I saw it, it must have been on a loan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendra_panoply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendra_panoply Or maybe the one I saw was a copy. In any case, an impressive piece of kit and a bit steampunk in aesthetic. There's a clear picture of a beautiful boar's tusk helmet like the one found with the armour, here: https://www.hellenicaworld.com/Greece/Military/en/Armor.html https://www.hellenicaworld.com/Greece/Military/en/Armor.html
- canadianfella 3y ago[dead]
- kromem 3y agoOne of the rabbit holes I've gone down over the past few years has been the sea peoples. Specifically, the fact that while a bunch of the claims of the Exodus for the Israelites are anachronistic and dismissed as being true at all, that's not exactly the case if the stories had been absorbed into the local tradition and appropriated following the forced relocation of the sea peoples into the Southern Levant. Following Kadesh there's twelve tribes of Anatolian peoples brought into Egyptian captivity (one group of captives for each of Ramses II's 12 sons with him). At least one of these tribes is later allied with Libya fighting against Ramses II's successor. At this battle the sea peoples are described as being without foreskins. The Greeks themselves have a number of stories of someone coming from North Africa and being appointed king or prophet over themselves or the Thracians, whether Eumolpus (put in the water as a babe and raised by a different family), Danaus (leader of Libya and sibling to the Pharoh with 50 sons, like Ramses II who is described in his forensic report as appearing to be a Lybian Berber and who had 50 sons), or Zalmoxis (ex-slave who learned prophecy and predicting celestial events in Egypt). In the Argonautica there's even a story of how their prophet Mopsus died by a snakebite as their normally sea-faring adventure was instead wandering back through the desert from North Africa by foot. Shortly after this they even tell a story about how a shepherd killed one of their elite warriors with the cast of a stone. In Homer Odysseus seems to mention this one day battle against Egypt that was historically the sea peoples battle where they didn't have foreskins. In that story he's captive in Egypt for 7 years until "a certain Phrygian" shows up. Seven years after the actual historical one day battle is when a guy nicknamed 'Mose' conquered Egypt as an usurper which the following dynasty claimed involved outside help. Events the bear a striking resemblance to Manetho's story of the Exodus preserved in Josephus. In fact, the Greek and Egyptian accounts of the Exodus all involved a mixture of people with the Greek historians claiming it involved their own ancestors too, contrary to the Biblical claims of ethnocentrism. We're now finding things like Aegean style pottery made with local clay in early Iron Age Tel Dan, which lends itself to the theory that that Denyen sea peoples were the lost tribe of Dan and why the Song of Deborah refers to them "staying on their ships" or how Ezekiel 27 has them trading in what seem Anatolian goods with Tyre alongside the Greeks. Perhaps the most mind blowing is that Tacitus's claims of Jews having been people from Crete hiding out in Libya is pretty much spot on a description of certain non-Semitic features in the Ashkenazi genome, from the prevalence of G2019S LRRK2 mutation which originated in the Berbers and seem to have been acquired around 4,500 ybp +/- 1k years, or the similarities between Ashkenazi genome and Cretean DNA, with one individual on Athrogenica finding their closest genetic match was 3,700 year old remains from a Minoan graveyard that had just been added from a 2017 study. I've now been wondering if the matrilineal endogamy present in the Ashkenazi went back much further than we currently think, and reflected an endogamous subpopulation tracing back to the sea peoples even in Judea, which might explain oddities like 2 Kings 5:27 explaining the existence of a group ancestrally white as snow as a curse. Even things like the book of Joshua, completely anachronistic in describing a recapture of ancestral homelands may have been instead an appropriated story of Jason (one of the hellenizations of Yeshua). So while there were no walls to Jericho at the time that came crashing down, maybe those stories originally related to the destruction of Mycenaean sites where we're now finding it wasn't earthquakes: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/bssa/article-abstract/108/3A/1046/529882/Reassessing-the-Mycenaean-Earthquake-Hypothesis https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/bssa/article-abstract/1... Been a fun rabbit hole.
- begueradj 3y agoThe Sea People are mysterious because, as my older brother who's teaching history said, they were not only multiethnic but groups of warriors from different geographic areas all around the Mediterranean sea. They were behind the fall of some civilizations as they were moving around to plunder. Their attacks coincided with climate change (drought) and the scarcity of food in actual Iraq, Egypt, Syria, turkey, North Africa and so on.
- adolph 3y agoI never realized how the late Bronze Age collapse still plays out today. As Steve Jobs said, A players hire other A players, but B players hire Sea People and it doesn’t take long for things to get a lot worse. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/391717-steve-jobs-has-a-saying-that-a-players-hire-a https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/391717-steve-jobs-has-a-say...