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The Sea People

from <Qocheedy Daiin> by The Far Stairs

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At the end of the Bronze Age, there were multiple well-established and prosperous empires in the Ancient World. In the space of a few short centuries, nearly all of them had collapsed. This catastrophe―more disastrous to civilization than the fall of Rome―is one of the greatest mysteries in human history. Little is known of what caused it, although there are inscriptions on the monuments of Ancient Egypt and other cultures that tell of cities being destroyed by an unstoppable enemy. One-by-one, contact was lost with these cities, or letters from their rulers arrived requesting immediate aid. One letter to Ramesses III from the ruler of Ugarit begging for help was inscribed on a clay tablet and was found in a kiln. The city was destroyed before the letter could be fired and sent.

Following this collapse, the palace economies of the Aegean and Anatolia which characterized the Late Bronze Age were replaced by the isolated village cultures of the Ancient Dark Age. Between 1206 and 1150 BC, the cultural collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and Syria, and the empire of Ancient Egypt in Syria and Canaan interrupted trade routes and severely reduced literacy. In the first phase of this period, almost every city between Troy and Gaza was violently destroyed and often left unoccupied thereafter. Examples include Hattusa, Mycenae, and Ugarit.

The Thirteenth and Twelfth-Century inscriptions and carvings at Karnak and Luxor are the only sources for “Sea Peoples,” a term invented by the Egyptians themselves and recorded in their military accounts:

"The foreign countries... made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were on the move, scattered in war. No country could stand before their arms... Their league was Plst, Tjkr, Shklsh, Dnyn and Wshsh."

The inscriptions of Ramesses III at his Medinet Habu mortuary temple in Thebes record the battles with the Sea Peoples. The inner west wall of the second court describes the invasion which took place in Year 5. Only the Plst and Tjkr are mentioned, but the rest of the list is lost in a lacuna.

The Tjkr and the Plst (assumed to later have become the Philistines) had traditions that may connect them to Crete. The Tjkr may have left Crete to settle in Anatolia and left there to settle Dor in Israel. According to the Old Testament, the Israelite God brought the Philistines out of Caphtor. The mainstream of Biblical and classical scholarship accepts Caphtor to refer to Crete, but there are alternative minority theories.

Recent examinations of the eruption of the Santorini volcano suggest that it occurred very close (estimated between 1660-1613 BC) to the first appearances of the Sea People in Egypt. The eruption and its aftermath (fires, tsunami, weather changes, and famines) would have had wide-ranging effects across the Mediterranean and the Levant―particularly Greece―and could have provided the impetus for invasions of other regions of the Mediterranean. The legend of Atlantis is sometimes attributed to this event.

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from <Qocheedy Daiin>, released February 9, 1944

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