The Sea Peoples
Egyptian reliefs record seaborne raiders nobody has been able to identify.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 50 years
- Known to
- ± 30 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Egyptian inscriptions from Ramesses III describe a confederation arriving by sea and land around 1177 BCE, having destroyed Hatti, Cyprus and the Levantine cities, and defeated only at the Nile mouth. Their names — Peleset, Sherden, Shekelesh — have been matched to everywhere from Sardinia to Sicily to the Aegean without agreement. Whether they were a cause of the collapse or a symptom of it, refugees rather than invaders, is now the more common reading.