Sea Peoples and Land Peoples, 1250 BC–1100 BC

I

Both the fall of Troy and the Sea Peoples have been the subject of a vast literature. They were part of a common series of developments that affected the entire eastern Mediterranean and possibly the western Mediterranean too. Troy had been transformed at the end of the eighteenth century BCwith the building of the most magnificent of the cities to stand on the hill of Hisarlık: Troy VI, which lasted, with many minor reconstructions, into the thirteenth century BC. The citadel walls were nine metres thick, or more; there were great gates and a massive watchtower, a memory of which may have survived to inspire Homer; there were big houses on two floors, with courtyards. The citadel was the home of an elite that lived in some style, though without the lavish accoutrements of their contemporaries in Mycenae, Pylos or Knossos.¹ Archaeological investigation of the plain beneath which then gave directly on to the seashore suggests the existence of a lower town about ten times the size of the citadel, or around 200 square kilometres, roughly the size of the Hyksos capital at Avaris.² One source of wealth was horses, whose bones begin to appear at this stage; Homer’s Trojans were famous ‘horse-tamers’, hippodamoi, and even if he chose this word to fit his metre, it matches the archaeological evidence with some precision. In an age when great empires were investing in chariots, and sending hundreds of them to perdition at the battle of Kadesh (or, according to the Bible, in the depths of the Red Sea), horse-tamers were certainly in demand.

Opinion divided early on the identity of the Trojans. Claiming descent from Troy, the ancient Romans knew for sure that they were not just a branch of the Greek people. Homer, though, made them speak Greek. The best chance of an answer comes from their pottery. The pottery of Troy is not just Trojan; it belongs to a wider culture that spread across parts of Anatolia. The Trojans acquired a little Helladic pottery from Greek lands, but only 1 per cent of the finds from Troy VI and VIIa consists of Mycenaean pottery (including local imitations). All the evidence suggests that they were members of one of the peoples who had developed on the outer edges of the Hittite world and spoke a language close to Hittite, Luvian, the language of the peoples who lived along the western flank of Anatolia and, as has been seen, possibly the language of the Linear A tablets from Crete.³ The Hittite archives leave no doubt that they corresponded with the Hittite king, but none of their own correspondence has survived; only one minute written text has been found, a seal in Luvian hieroglyphs from the level of Troy VIIb (late twelfth century, though the seal itself may be older); its wording indicates that it belonged to a scribe and his wife.⁴ Troy was an outpost not of Mycenae but of the Hittite world. Globally, it was not a place of enormous consequence; regionally, however, it occupied a commanding position on the trade routes of the northern Aegean, and for this reason it became a desirable prize.⁵

In the thirteenth century the Hittite rulers became increasingly anxious to maintain some degree of influence on the Mediterranean shores of Anatolia. They aimed to outflank the Egyptians, with whom they were competing for control of northern Syria; but they were also wary of other rivals, the kings of Ahhiyawa, that is, the high kings of Mycenae. Troy itself was a little out of the way, but its military aid could be useful, and it has been seen that the aid of western Asiatic vassals was summoned at Kadesh. Flashpoints between the Ahhiyawans and the Hittites included Milawanda or Miletos, once a centre of Minoan trade and now, at least intermittently, a Mycenaean ally on the coast of Asia Minor. Infuriated by this alliance, the Hittites descended on the city in 1320 BC and destroyed it.⁶ The coast of Asia Minor was thus a troubled frontier zone, a region where allegiances changed back and forth and where Mycenaean warriors liked to interfere.

One source of trouble was a condottiere of unknown origin named Piyamaradu. Around 1250 BC he was the subject of a letter of complaint from the Hittite ruler to the king of Ahhiyawa, whom he now regarded as a friend following earlier disagreement about who should exercise influence over a place called Wilusa, a name that recalls the alternative Greek name for Troy, Ilios, or, originally, Wilios.⁷ Evidently, the coastline of Asia Minor was divided among a bewildering mass of petty kings who were sometimes loyal to the Hittites but occasionally sheltered under the protection of the king of Ahhiyawa: there was Alaksandu, king of Wilusa, whose name sounds suspiciously similar to Alexander (Alexandros), the alternative name given for Helen’s seducer Paris. Another condottierewho possessed a hundred chariots and many footsoldiers was the ‘man of Ahhiya’ Attarssiya, whose name is strikingly similar to that of the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, Atreus; he seems to have been aiming his small army at Cyprus, whose ownership was a matter of interest to both the Egyptians and the Hittites.⁸ Neither of these names is proof of Homer’s veracity; but somewhere there was a store of Anatolian names on which he or earlier tellers of tales drew. Having in the past opposed the Hittites, King Alaksandu of Wilusa entered into a treaty with them; Wilusa was one of the four lands of Assuwa, whose rulers often adopted different policies towards the Hittites and, by extension, towards the Mycenaeans, but which had supplied armies at Kadesh. Another entity within the region of Assuwa bore the name Taruisa, a name reminiscent of Troy.⁹ Everything about the description of Assuwa indicates that it lay in the far west of Anatolia; and it is clear that both Wilusa and Taruisa stood near the site of Ilios/Troy. A poem from the Hittite capital, written in Luvian in the sixteenth century BC, refers to ‘steep Wilusa’; and the same epithet was used by Homer to describe Ilios. Possibly Wilusa and Taruisa were one city or two neighbouring cities that at some stage shared a ruler, rather as Homer’s Agamemnon was king of Argos as well as Mycenae; but Hisarlık was certainly Homer’s Ilios and Virgil’s Troia.

There is no reason to doubt that the Mycenaeans and the Anatolians fought wars for the possession of the lands and towns of western Asia Minor. The Trojan War was a later memory of these conflicts, which were collapsed into a single campaign aimed at one of several cities targeted by the Greeks. While some historians have stressed the implausibility of a ten-year siege, the reality was that this was not a war of one season or of ten but of many dozens of seasons, fought intermittently and punctuated by periods of peace recorded in the Hittite diplomatic correspondence. Generally, it was not a war between the great kings of Mycenae and of the Hittites, for much of the fighting was conducted by ambitious mercenary captains, who changed sides to secure their best advantage; there is no reason to suppose they were loyal to their own ethnic group. It was low-level, endemic conflict; but occasionally it resulted in major clashes, as when the Hittites felt obliged to assert their dominion over Miletos. The prosperity of Ilios/Troy was not undermined by these troubles; indeed, Troy VI risked drawing the attention of greedy conquerors because it sat astride the trade routes running from the Mediterranean into Anatolia, carrying metals, textiles and, very importantly, horses.

Troy VI was destroyed by another agency than human greed. Troy stands in a zone prone to violent earthquakes. In about 1250 BC, the south walls were thrown outwards and part of the east wall collapsed completely, as a powerful earthquake tore the city to pieces. Debris from the collapse of the buildings reached a depth, in some places, of a metre and a half.¹⁰ The main circuit did, however, remain intact.¹¹ Whatever happened to the lower town, of which so little is known, it is plain that after these events the old elite no longer inhabited grand houses in the upper town. New houses were built atop the rubble of Troy VI, packed closer together to support a larger population at least within the citadel, and within these houses the Trojans sank storage vessels (pithoi), as they had never done in the past; so they were conscious of the need to build up their stocks in what seem to have been times of adversity. The decline in imports of Mycenaean pottery shows that trade connections had become weaker. Troy had passed its peak. But it was not alone. Mycenae was in difficulties; the lower town suffered an attack around 1250, and the citadel had to be strengthened; a wall was built across the isthmus of Corinth in the hope of keeping out the attackers, though whether these attackers were the kings of other cities within the Mycenaean world or invaders from outside is unclear.¹² By the end of the thirteenth century, watchtowers had been built along the coasts to alert the palace dwellers to invaders; even so, most of the great Mycenaean centres, including Tiryns and Pylos, had been ravaged by about 1200. At Pylos, sacrifices were offered to the gods as disaster loomed; a man and a woman mentioned on the Linear B tablets among a list of sacrificial beasts were probably intended for human sacrifice (a practice remembered in the Greek legend of Agamemnon and Iphigeneia). The damage reached the coasts of the Levant: the king of Ugarit sent his troops to serve the Hittites, and while they were away foreign fleets mustered off the Syrian coast; the king wrote a desperate letter on a clay tablet to warn his ally the king of Cyprus, but the letter was never sent – over 3,000 years later, it was found still waiting to be baked in the kiln, and within days or possibly hours the great trading centre at Ugarit was demolished, never to rise again.¹³ The town of Alalakh, which lay a little way inland, close to the modern Turkish–Syrian border, was destroyed in 1194; the city never recovered, but its port, at al-Mina, was refounded, and Mycenaean wares have been found there from before and after the destruction of the mother-city.¹⁴ Tossed between pro-Hittite and pro-Egyptian factions, the kingdom of Alalakh was always at political risk. The Hittite capital deep in the Anatolian interior at Boğazköy was destroyed at the same period, though this may have been the result of internal crises. Still, collapse at the centre meant that the Hittites were incapable of protecting their Mediterranean dependencies. And, despite the warnings from Ugarit, Cyprus suffered terribly; its towns were demolished – this was followed by the arrival of Greek refugees or invaders, bringing their archaic linear script and an early form of Greek. On Crete, part of the population moved inland to inaccessible points high above the island, at Karphi and Vrokastro.

And then, around the date assigned by the classical author Eratosthenes to the fall of Troy (1184), Troy was destroyed again, and this time the city went up in flames; the skeleton of one unfortunate Trojan who was trying to flee has been found beneath the debris of Troy VIIa.¹⁵ Thus, if the Greeks did destroy Troy at this stage, their victory occurred when their own towns had also passed the peak of their prosperity. Rather than a clash between Mycenae rich in gold and the wealthy horse-tamers of Troy, the fall of Troy VIIa was a battle between declining powers. Nor can it be proved that the destroyers were the Greeks acting together under their Great King or wanax Agamemnon; it is just as probable that the destroyers were a mixed rabble of exiles and mercenaries of Greek and other origins. They could have been the people who also attacked Mycenae and Pylos, or armed refugees from Mycenae and Pylos. Seen from this perspective, the ‘fall of Troy’ was a gradual process, beginning with the wars between the Hittites and their surrogates and the Greeks and theirs; the calamity of the destruction of Troy VI weakened the capacity of the city to resist, even, apparently, to feed itself (witness the pithoi); the seizure of the citadel around 1184 left further massive damage; and thereafter Troy entered into a steady decline. That raises fundamental questions about what was happening in the eastern Mediterranean at this time: whether the disruptions that occurred during the Late Bronze Age marked a sharp break with the past, or whether decline, which undoubtedly occurred, was more gradual. The evidence from Crete and Troy of greater efforts to store food hints at frequent famines, setting peoples on the march towards lands richer in supplies. Moreover, ‘decline’ can mean many things: the loss of political unity as great empires dissolved; a reduction in trade as demand withered; a lowering of the standard of living not just among the political elite but across most of society. Once again the question revolves around invaders of uncertain identity and takes us to the boundaries between legend and history.

II

This was a period when talented soldiers could make careers in the armies that were fighting for control of the lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean; if no one wanted their services, they could turn themselves into proto-Viking raiders and seize what they wanted. In an inscription found at Tanis, Ramesses II claimed to have destroyed people known as the Shardana who had pounced on Egypt out of the sea, but before long they were integrated into his armies, and they were present at the great battle of Kadesh in 1274. In one papyrus, from 1189 BC, Ramesses III claimed grandiloquently to have turned those who raided his kingdom into ashes, and then admitted that he had resettled vast numbers of them in strongholds.¹⁶ Excavation finds indicate that some Shardana were directed to the Bay of Acre, where they guarded the royal road through Canaan on Pharaoh’s behalf. They were poachers turned gamekeepers. The Shardana raiders were skilled with sword and spear; they wore distinctive horned helmets.¹⁷ While a welcome was extended to tough Shardana warriors, other groups were viewed with more suspicion: the apiru or habiru were seen as troublesome desert wanderers, occasionally employable as mercenaries; their name is possibly cognate with the term ‘Hebrew’, but it was not applied just to one small Semitic nation.¹⁸ It is no surprise that poorer peoples – nomads, refugees, exiles – were attracted by the wealth of Egypt and sought to acquire a share of it. Their desperation to do so was enhanced by the deteriorating economic conditions in the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean; it would be surprising if Cretans and Anatolians had not gone looking for land, employment and new opportunities.

From the late thirteenth to the mid-twelfth century BC, at the time that Troy VI and VIIa were destroyed, Lower Egypt was beset by enemies from many directions. The first threat came from the lands of the western peoples. A great multitude of Libu, or Libyans, led by their king, Meryry, moved eastwards in the late thirteenth century, bringing with them whole families, flocks of animals, their gold, silver and furniture: ‘they spend their day roaming the land and fighting to fill their bellies daily; they have come to Egypt to seek food for their mouths’, as Pharaoh Merneptah proclaimed in a long inscription preserved in the temple at Karnak. They came with their North African allies the Meshwesh and with foreign mercenaries. They had arrived on the edges of the richest country in the world, and they intended to stay; if the Egyptians would not welcome them, they would force themselves into their kingdom. This was more than Merneptah could tolerate. In April 1220 his troops fought a lengthy and tough battle against the Libyans and their allies in the western Delta region; in the end King Meryry was soundly defeated and fled back to his homeland, ‘leaving his bow and quiver and sandals on the ground behind him’. Merneptah claimed to have killed over 6,000 Libyans, and at least half that number of their allies.¹⁹ Yet this was only the beginning of a cycle of invasions which were not so much raids as attempted migrations; within a few decades other groups would arrive with their ox-carts, this time from the east. The Sea Peoples who have attracted so much attention from historians of this period were only one element in much wider and larger population movements in which long-term migrants outnumbered opportunistic mercenaries, and in which Land Peoples outnumbered Sea Peoples.

The Libyans knew where to turn for help, and King Meryry secured the services of several foreign contingents from ‘the countries of the sea’, to cite one inscription. One group who arrived was the Lukka, Anatolians who gave their name to Lycia (though this does not prove they had already settled in that precise area); they had been making a nuisance of themselves as pirates and soldiers since at least the fourteenth century. There were some Shardana as well as other peoples: the Egyptians claimed that 2,201 Ekwesh, 722 Tursha and 200 Shekelesh died in the battle with Meryry.²⁰Merneptah was now confident that he had solved the region’s problems, and proudly recorded his violent pacification not just of the territory stretching west to Libya but of lands and peoples to the east, asserting that ‘Israel is desolated and has no seed’ (the first reference to Israel in an Egyptian document, and, he clearly hoped, the last); his uncompromising peace encompassed the land of Canaan as well, which he had ‘plundered with every ill’; he had taken control of Ashkelon and Gezer. At last, he said,

men can walk the roads at any pace without fear. The fortresses stand open and the wells are accessible to all travellers. The walls and the battlements sleep peacefully in the sunshine till their guards wake up. The police lie stretched out asleep. The desert frontier-guards are among the meadows where they like to be.²¹

He certainly employed an able propagandist. But there is no reason to believe his boast about a general peace, any more than his boast about Israel. Whatever peace he had achieved lasted only a very short while. Within thirty years, in 1182 BC, Pharaoh Ramesses III faced a new invasion from the west, but this time the Libyans could not muster their northern allies from across the sea. Still, the invading army was even more formidable than in the days of Merneptah: if the Egyptians slew 12,535 of the enemy, as they claimed, the Libyan army may well have exceeded 30,000 men, excluding dependants.²² Egyptian reliefs portray a campaign in which some invaders are now part of the Egyptian army: there are Shardana, with their horned helmets; soldiers with feathered head-dresses which recall designs on small objects from twelfth-century Cyprus; kilted soldiers whose garments look similar to those worn by the Shekelesh on carvings elsewhere.²³

This was, if Ramesses is to be believed, a great victory; but peace remained elusive: the northern peoples mobilized, in about 1179 BC (and the Libyans attacked again in 1176, losing over 2,175 Meshwesh warriors). A lengthy inscription from the temple at Medinet Habu set out the Egyptian version of events; what is remarkable is the picture of convulsions taking place not just on the Mediterranean shores of Egypt but across a much wider region:

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. Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alasiya [Cyprus] were cut off.

They turned the land into a desert, so that it was ‘like that which has never come into being’, and then from Syria and Canaan they advanced on Egypt itself.²⁴ The Egyptians were right to insist that this plague affected not just themselves but their old foes the Hittites, whose land-based empire disintegrated at this point. The peoples who invaded Egypt were the Peleshet, the Tjekker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen and the Weshesh, all united together; ‘they laid their hands upon the lands to the entire circuit of the earth’. The image is intended to recall an invasion of locusts. The invaders came by both land and sea, and so they had to be confronted on the Mediterranean shores of Egypt and on its eastern frontier. The land battle brought the Egyptians and their Shardana auxiliaries face to face with charioteers mounted in Hittite style (three warriors to a vehicle); the invaders were thus capable of mobilizing considerable resources, including large numbers of expensive horses. Like the Libyans, they were also accompanied by women and children, travelling in large ox-carts.

Those who came by sea found themselves confronted with stockades and burning pyres: ‘they were dragged ashore, hemmed in and flung down on the beach’.²⁵ Yet elsewhere in the Egyptian accounts the invaders are seen entering the mouths of the river channels running through the Delta; and there were some warships in Egyptian service which aimed to drive the attackers towards the shore, where they could be trapped in range of Egyptian archers. The Egyptian ships appear from the reliefs to be adapted river vessels, while the invaders’ boats are similar to those of Syrian traders; all the vessels carry sails, though they would have depended on a combination of sail and oar-power. The ships of the Sea Peoples were decorated at bow and stern with birds’ heads, a feature which can be seen on a twelfth-century Mycenaean pot from the island of Skyros. A persistent feature was attributed to the Peleshet, and sometimes to the Denyen, Tjekker and Shekelesh: as well as kilts, the Peleshet wore helmets topped with what look like feathers, somewhat like high crowns. The strength of the invaders – defeat in Egypt notwithstanding – came not from their navies but from their armies: they were by and large infantry troops, fighting with javelins and thrusting swords, and these weapons proved more efficient on the battlefield than the expensive but often fragile chariots of the Hittites and Egyptians. The round shields of the Shardana were well suited for close combat. The invaders did not yet have iron weapons, although the Hittites had already begun to produce iron goods in a small way. What they had was discipline, determination and (literally) a cutting edge. An image of these fighting men is preserved on a late Mycenaean vase, known as the Warrior Vase, which shows a squad of soldiers equipped with javelins, round shields, greaves and kilts; on their heads are the horned helmets typical of the Shardana and their allies.²⁶ Pharaoh showed some wisdom in employing Shardana, because it meant that he had the means to resist invaders with similar weapons and battle tactics.

If it were possible to identify the peoples mentioned in the Egyptian inscriptions and papyri, a much clearer idea of the turmoil in the Mediterranean could be gained. Modern sceptics fly from any attempt to identify the peoples mentioned in the documents, arguing (as with the Ahhiyawa in the Hittite documents) that a few consonants are not sufficient evidence, and that names in any case migrate even more easily than peoples.²⁷ But the number of similarities between the names in the Egyptian records and those known from Homer, the Bible and other later sources is too great for haphazard coincidence: one or two similarities might be coincidence, but more than half a dozen constitute evidence. The Denyen recall the Danawoi (Danaoi, Danaans), a term Homer sometimes used for the Greeks encamped at Troy; they also recall the Danites, a maritime people living near Jaffa, according to the books of Joshua and Judges, who evidently joined the covenant of Israel after the other eleven tribes.²⁸ These peoples scattered; in the ninth century there was a ‘king of the Dannuniyim’ at Karatepe in southern Turkey.²⁹ It has already been seen that we encounter D-r-d-n-y, Dardanians, on Egyptian inscriptions. The Tjekker sound similar to the Teucrians, Anatolian neighbours of the Dardanians, some of whom settled on the coast of what is now northern Israel, where Wenamun encountered them. Some scholars have seized on rough similarities in sound to assign Meryry’s allies the Shekelesh to Sicily, the Ekwesh to Ahhiyawa, making them into Mycenaeans, and the Tursha (T-r-s-w) to Tuscany, assuming an identity with the Tyrsenoi or Etruscans five centuries later. These labels described peoples, tribes or places of origin, but by the time they had been rendered into hieroglyphics they lost their vowel sounds, and they are very difficult to reconstruct.³⁰ The overall impression is that by 1200 the eastern Mediterranean was being plagued by fluid and unstable alliances of pirates and mercenaries, able occasionally to form large enough navies and armies to pillage centres such as Pylos and Ugarit, possibly, indeed, to conduct a campaign against Troy which resulted in the fall of Troy VIIa. Sometimes they must have been attacking their own homeland, from which (to judge from later Greek legends) many a hero had been exiled. Sometimes the sack of their homeland led to an exodus of fighters who sought to recover their fortunes by attacking Cyprus, Ugarit or even the Nile Delta. Among them it is possible to identify the people of Taruisa, the area next to or fused with Wilusa. For that, and not the much later Etruscans, best explains the name Tursha; in other words, the Trojans were both Sea Peoples and victims of the Sea Peoples.

III

Egypt resisted conquest; but the Pharaohs lost control of the Nile Delta, which, as can be seen from Wenamun’s tale, led a separate existence in the eleventh century under autonomous rulers who paid no more than lip-service to their suzerain lords in Upper Egypt. Further north, the events of around 1200 did not lead to an immediate and total collapse of Mycenaean cultural life, though if the Greek legends have any foundation, they did cause enormous political damage. In fact, there were places that escaped destruction. The most important was Athens: although it was not a town of the first rank in Mycenaean times, the acropolis was still inhabited, and burials continued in the Kerameikos cemetery down below; possibly it escaped destruction because of its natural defences – not just the steep sides of the citadel, topped with ‘Cyclopean’ walls, but a water supply which could help it withstand a long siege.³¹ Even Mycenae was still inhabited for a while after the destruction of its larger buildings. In northern Greece, within Thessaly, and on several Aegean islands, conditions remained peaceful; Rhodes was the focal point of a trade route taking the good-quality ‘Late Helladic IIIC’ pottery of the Dodecanese to Greece, southern Italy and Syria; traditional designs, such as the octopus motif, were still strongly favoured. Emborio on Chios flourished as a centre of Mycenaean trade. The experience of Troy was very similar: after the destruction of Troy VIIa, a new, though less luxurious, city emerged.

The fact that an area in the north of Greece remained untouched by destruction suggests that those who attacked the great centres came from the south, across the sea; but the fact that not all the islands were affected suggests an invasion from the north. Greek tradition noted the remarkable survival of Athens in the face of an invasion from the north by Dorian Greeks. Since the Dorians were supposedly the ancestors of their Spartan rivals, the Athenians laid more emphasis on this tradition than the archaeological evidence allows. The leading authority on the end of the Mycenaean age commented: ‘there should in this case, however, be evidence not only of invasion but also of invaders’.³² He could find only two innovations: the cut-and-thrust sword and a type of safety-pin with a curved front known as the violin-bow fibula. The argument that new swords were arriving in the eastern Mediterranean may well explain the success of conquering forces pitted against Troy, Mycenae or the Syrian coastal towns; but it does not prove a massive invasion had occurred, and the Mycenaeans had access to the same swords. As for the safety-pins, very similar changes in design took place across the central and eastern Mediterranean in this period, and reflect changes in taste and perhaps greater skill in production, as far west as Sicily. And yet the evidence of dialect seems clear enough. Doric Greek dialects penetrated the Peloponnese. Meanwhile, refugees from Mycenaean Greece settled in Cyprus, marking the first injection of a substantial Greek population into the island and bringing their dialect (which otherwise survived only in remote Arcadia) with them. The philological evidence is for once neatly supported by the evidence of archaeology, for they carried with them the pottery styles of the area round Mycenae, which they long perpetuated, and a fashion for chamber tombs à la grecque.³³

Yet the old culture was being transformed. The evidence is not easy to read, and one can debate whether the change from family chamber tombs to single or double slab-lined tombs (‘cist tombs’) betokened a change in population, a change in fashion or a lack of resources which made it impossible to organize a labour force able to build a family mausoleum. The signs that old skills were being lost can also be read in the pottery, which archaeologists class pejoratively as ‘Sub-Mycenaean’. The Mycenaean civilization of the Aegean region was eventually affected too, and before 1000 the trading centres at Miletos and Emborio were wrecked; quantities of goods moving across the eastern Mediterranean were declining sharply, and what movement there was suffered constant harassment from pirates, known in later Greek tradition as ‘Tyrsenians’. Although attention inevitably focuses on the eastern Mediterranean at this crucial moment, there is also evidence of a hiatus in the central Mediterranean. In Sicily, in the mid-thirteenth century BC, ‘a time of war and fear began’; but the threat came from the Italian mainland, and not from distant Sea Peoples.³⁴ Judging from the finds of Late Helladic pottery in Sicily, contact with Greece began to decline around 1200 BC and may have come to an end by 1050 BC.³⁵

When they came, the land migrations into southern Greece were not coordinated in the way that the raids on Egypt were. They were probably not even invasions, in the sense of hostile armed conquests, so much as a slow but continuous trickle of northern Greeks, living in and around modern Epeiros and Albania. They confirmed and consolidated a trend towards a simpler, more basic existence. But such an existence greatly lessened the role of the Greek lands in what remained of the trade of the Mediterranean world. Contacts did continue: by the eleventh century Athens, which was the major centre of the production of pottery in the linear ‘proto-Geometric’ style, sent its goods across the Aegean, and this pottery, some of it quite sophisticated in style and technique, has been found at Miletos (now reoccupied) and at Old Smyrna (a new settlement). Its presence there is an indication that Greeks were beginning to recreate a trading network linking Asia Minor to the Greek mainland by sea, out of which the vibrant civilization of Greek Ionia would emerge in the eighth century.

IV

A papyrus known as the Onomastikon of Amenope, discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, helpfully places the Peleshet in southern Palestine, the Tjekker in the middle (confirmed by Wenamun) and the Shardana in the north, according well with the archaeological evidence – Sea Peoples inhabited Acre, and Acre was possibly one of the bases set up by the Egyptians, using mercenary garrisons.³⁶ Their ties to this region were so intense that one group, the Peleshet, gave their name to the area. The word ‘Peleshet’, like the Ethiopian Semitic word ‘Falasha’ used of the Ethiopian Jews, signifies ‘foreigner’ or ‘wanderer’; they became, in biblical Hebrew, Pelishtim; in Greek their land became Palaistina, whence the terms ‘Philistine’ and ‘Palestine’. The term can also be linked to the word ‘Pelasgian’, an impossibly vague term used by later Greek writers to identify a variety of pre-Greek peoples in the Aegean, some of whom were said to live in Crete – foreigners or wanderers, as the Semitic term prescribes. With the help of archaeology, it is possible to go much further in identifying the Philistines. Pottery of the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCfound on Philistine sites such as Ashdod in modern Israel is similar in style to Late Helladic pottery from the Mycenaean world; the closest parallels have been identified on Cyprus, although that does not prove their point of origin, since Cyprus was raided persistently by the Sea Peoples and settled by Mycenaeans.³⁷ This suggests a gradual process of migration which started about 1300 BC, punctuated by dramatic moments of destruction: if the migrants were not allowed to settle, they could take up arms, as the Pharaohs discovered; if they were welcomed, or even defeated by the Egyptians, they could be settled on the land, and many served alongside the Shardana in Pharaoh’s armies.

The area of choice for Philistine settlement became the coastline northwards from Gaza; their four major centres were Gaza, Ekron, Ashkelon and Ashdod. ‘Proto-Philistines’ arrived in Ashdod and brought with them the techniques and styles of Mycenaean potters (their Mycenaean-looking pots were not imported but manufactured in situ from local clays). It was the Philistines (and Cypriots) who preserved longest the traditional designs of the Mycenaean world, when within Greece they had given way to simpler, more schematic decoration. A favourite design, found on wares from Gezer in Israel, Tell Aytun in the West Bank and other sites, shows a long-necked bird with its head sometimes turned to face behind; the design is elegantly combined with hatched lines, thin red stripes and other patterns.³⁸ Their pottery and their extraordinary anthropomorphic clay coffins, found in the Gaza Strip, also reveal influences from Egyptian art. It is hardly surprising that soldiers in Egyptian service should have borrowed Egyptian styles; but Mycenaean influence was overwhelming and betrays their original identity.

The home-made pottery in Mycenaean style proves that those who crossed the seas were not just soldiers and pirates. These migrations were on a grander scale, bringing whole families, taking along potters as well as fighters. The Philistine settlement at Tell Qasile, in what is now Tel Aviv, became a centre of agricultural trade in wine and oil. The coming of the Philistines did not result in a surge in commercial contact with the Aegean; rather, it had the opposite effect, as trading cities were destroyed and the old way of life along the Canaanite coast came to an end. Commerce in foodstuffs remained active, as deficiencies in one region were compensated by surpluses in another; but the luxury trade of the great days of Mycenaean civilization had shrunk and there no longer existed great palaces where travelling merchants could sell articles of prestige.

The Philistines came from the Greek world.³⁹ They were the kinsmen of Agamemnon and Odysseus, speakers, when they arrived, of Greek or possibly Luvian. A couple of seals carry scratched marks which resemble letters from the Linear A or B syllabaries. The constant biblical insistence that the Philistines came from Caphtor (Crete) clearly reflects local traditions. Jeremiah called the Philistines ‘the remnant of the isle of Caphtor’. King David killed the Philistine giant Goliath, whose name recalls the Greek hero Alyattes (originally Wallyates); Goliath’s armour, described in the Bible, is very similar to that of contemporary Greeks, illustrated on the Warrior Vase from Mycenae.⁴⁰ Having spent some time as an exile among the Philistines, David later employed what were clearly Cretan guards (‘Cherethites’).

Once settled in Palestine, many Philistines lost their maritime vocation, turned to farming and crafts and rapidly adopted Semitic speech and Canaanite gods; originally, they brought along their own gods and goddesses. Small painted figurines with raised arms, thought to represent an Aegean earth-goddess, have been found at Ashdod and are similar to clay idols found in the Mycenaean world.⁴¹ At Ekron, in the interior, they built cult centres with hearths in the Aegean style which gradually modified their appearance to turn into Canaanite temples.⁴² Here, knives with iron blades were discovered, for use in temple rituals; the Bible relates that they kept control of iron supplies so that the Israelites would not have the benefit of its use, mainly in fact confined to prized objects, such as iron bracelets, which were the height of fashion. The Philistines were not simply marauders and destroyers, Philistines in the modern sense of the word. They created a vibrant town-based civilization along the coast of Palestine which long retained the imprint of their Mycenaean origins. The Philistines show how a group of mercenaries and settlers could take charge of other people’s lands, while the inhabitants of those lands, in the very long term, won a cultural victory by drawing them into Semitic Canaanite culture. They turned away from the Mediterranean towards the interior, occupying sites in the foothills of southern Canaan such as Ekron, which became famous for its olive-oil presses; and there they found themselves at odds with the Children of Israel.

V

Mention of Israel brings to the fore the question whether it was not just the Philistines but the Israelites who were set on the move during the convulsions of the Late Bronze Age: God asked through the prophet Amos, ‘Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor?’⁴³ Those who accept the historicity of the Israelite Exodus would generally assign it to the period between about 1400 and 1150; many of the details of the biblical account of the arrival of the Children of Israel in Egypt (if not their departure) match other evidence well – the arrival of Semitic travellers in search of food supplies and the occasional presence at court of Semitic viziers not too dissimilar to Joseph. The great Song of the Sea attributed to Moses after the Egyptian chariots had become stuck in the mud of the Red Sea is clearly very ancient and speaks of a style of chariot warfare which is consonant with the time of the Sea Peoples.⁴⁴ The presence of nomadic apiru or habiru in the lands to the east of Egypt has also been mentioned, and it is possible that they were involved in the fall of Ugarit; the king seems to mention them in one of his desperate last letters. Subject populations in Egypt, sometimes war captives, have also been encountered, and this is reminiscent of the long period of servitude the Israelites are said to have suffered in Egypt. A more cautious approach to the evidence would draw analogies with the way that Homer was able to refer back to features of a society hundreds of years before his time: oral histories, traditions, material from records of neighbouring peoples, could also have enabled the early Israelites to paint such a detailed and moving account of their long sojourn in Egypt and of their dramatic escape from Pharaoh’s chariots. Equally, there is a powerful argument that the great movements of peoples described in this chapter set off many smaller movements, of which the migration of some Semitic tribes from Egypt was one, which went unnoticed (excepting Merneptah’s brief reference) in the archives of the Near East; the Israelites wereapiru nomads who returned for a while to their nomadism, cast away their subjection to Pharaoh and subjected themselves instead to their own God.

On entering Canaan the Children of Israel certainly did not destroy either Jericho or Aï, which had been demolished many hundreds of years earlier, but settled with their sheep and goats (but no pigs) in villages in the hills, entering into a mutual covenant under their own God, into which they also admitted other tribes and peoples such as the Danites.⁴⁵ Just as the Philistines became to all intents Canaanites, serving Dagon and other gods of local peoples, the Danites became Hebrews, serving the God of Israel. The contact of the Israelites with the Mediterranean at this period was slight, apart from the tribe of Dan, and apart from the growing tension with the Philistines, who had arrived from Caphtor on the edge of the same small patch of land. As the Philistines began to cultivate the soil and merged with the local Canaanite population, they attempted to gain control of areas further inland, and clashed directly with the Israelites. If biblical sources are correct, the conflict peaked around 1000 BC. After King Saul and his son died in a ferocious battle with the Philistines, it fell to David, who had lived among the enemy, to crack Philistine power, using the newly conquered strong-point of Jerusalem as the base from which he supposedly dominated the entire region. Despite these growing military successes, Israelite sites of the eleventh century have left few indications of luxury, and trade with the Mediterranean countries was slight. Even so, the Israelites need to be kept in view, since in the very long term they would have such a massive influence on the history of the Mediterranean peoples. The impression from the Bible is that there were plenty of restless tribes and peoples in the eastern Mediterranean; no one stood still for very long in the lands where Asia and Africa met one another.

The Sea Peoples may not all have come from the sea, and the scale of their migration may not have been as massive as the Egyptian record-makers wanted their readers to believe. But none of this should be taken to underestimate the impact of the Sea Peoples and the Land Peoples, who were evidently just as active. The calamities that occurred at this time were symptoms of a world already falling apart. Political chaos was accompanied by economic crisis, partly experienced in the form of biting famines. A brief mention of plague in the biblical account of the war with the Philistines may indicate that one reason for the disorder was the spread of bubonic plague or a similar disease, and that the roots of the catastrophe must be sought in the same places as the great plague of Justinian’s time and the Black Death. In that case it would not be surprising if all the eastern Mediterranean were convulsed at once. But that, in a period when much is speculation, is perhaps a speculation too far. The end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean has been described as ‘one of history’s most frightful turning points’, more calamitous than the fall of the Roman Empire, ‘arguably the worst disaster in ancient history’.⁴⁶ The First Mediterranean, a Mediterranean whose scope had extended from Sicily to Canaan and from the Nile Delta to Troy, had rapidly disintegrated, and its reconstruction into a trading lake which stretched from the Straits of Gibraltar to Lebanon would take several hundred years.