zenosanalytic:

liminalpolytheist:

did-you-kno:

Ancient Egypt was repeatedly attacked by
a mysterious army of massive warships.
The raiders suddenly showed up around
1250 BCE and continued attacking until
they were defeated by Ramesses III. No
record of them exists past 1178 BCE,
and scholars continue to debate theories
about where they went, where they came
from, and who they were- so everyone
just calls them the Sea Peoples. Source Source 2 Source 3

*puts on historian hat*

Okay but this fails to mention the fact that this was part of an enormous phenomenon called the Bronze Age Collapse, which affected basically every civilization in the region.

It’s not just that Ancient Egypt got attacked by unknown people who we refer to currently as the Sea Peoples. It’s that some sort of mysterious Bad Stuff involving unspecified raiders was going down everywhere. Egypt fragmented under the pressure, while the Mycenaean kingdoms and the Hittite empire collapsed entirely. Cities all up and down Asia Minor were destroyed completely. Think of it as an early equivalent to the fall of the Roman Empire: a collapse so monumental that it left an actual dark age in its wake.

The aspect of this collapse that laypeople are most familiar with is probably the destruction of Troy.

Okay, history rant over.

*puts on tiny snake-of-history hat*

Not all historians think the Bronze Age Collapse was as simple as “The Sea Peoples did it” however, particularly these days.

Here are Two videos of two talks by the same guy (Eric Cline) discussing the event and its larger context. He’s pretty funny in a Dad-Joke sort of way :p He’s not the only scholar who thinks this, obvsl, but he’s written a fairly successful lay-audience book on the subject, and he does a good job of summarizing the alternate arguments.