Who were the Sea Peoples? | Eric Cline

Egypt had been attacked by a coalition of invaders and they give us their names. It's us that calls them the Sea Peoples. It comes from a French Egyptologist that was studying these originally, but the Egyptians actually give us the names and we know that there are nine different separate groups that come sweeping across the Mediterranean and wind up attacking Egypt. So, I was always told that these groups which are the Sherden, the Shekelesh, the Weshesh, the Ekwesh, the Peleset, you know, these names that most people have never heard of, that they were the ones that were responsible for attacking all the G8 and bringing them down one by one, if you will. Now, out of all those Sea Peoples, there's really only one group that we could identify. We've played around with the other ones. I mean, Sherden or Shardana sounds a lot like Sardinia. So, it may be that that's where they came from. The Shekelesh, that sounds a lot like Sicily. So, maybe they came from there. But, the earliest Egyptologist actually thought that that's where they went after they were defeated by the Egyptians and that they then gave their names to those islands. So, we've flip-flopped over the years. Personally, I think the Sea Peoples come from the Western Mediterranean and sweep across the Aegean and wind up attacking Egypt. But, we still have the problem of, you know, who are they? Out of all the groups, the only one that we think we've really identified is the group called the Peleset. And the Peleset are the Philistines. Now, the Philistines are mentioned in the Bible. We already know them archaeologically. It really looks like they are Mycenaeans from Greece who have fled Greece and come over to the Eastern Mediterranean because Philistine pottery looks like degenerate Mycenaean, meaning not that it's terrible, but it's Mycenaean pottery as if it were made in Greece, but it's made with clay that's local to Cyprus, Rhodes, the Levant. So, it looks like the Mycenaeans come across. Now, Ramses and Merneptah both say that they defeated the Sea Peoples. And in fact, Ramses III says, "I settled them in strongholds bound in my name. " Meaning, he settled the defeated Sea Peoples in Egypt and in the region of Southern Canaan, which the Egyptians controlled at that time. So, I think we know where they went even if we don't quite know where they came from.