1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated

1177 B.C.

TURNING POINTS IN ANCIENT HISTORY

Barry Strauss, Series Editor

Turning Points in Ancient History presents accessible books, by leading scholars, on crucial events and key moments in the ancient world. The series aims at fresh interpretations of both famous subjects and little-known ones that deserve more attention. The books provide a narrative synthesis that integrates literary and archaeological evidence.

1177 B.C.

THE YEAR CIVILIZATION COLLAPSED

REVISED AND UPDATED

ERIC H. CLINE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2021 by Eric H. Cline

Princeton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the progress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission.

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [email protected]

Published by Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cline, Eric H., author.

Title: 1177 B.C. : the year civilization collapsed / Eric H. Cline. Other titles: 1177 BC

Description: Revised and updated edition. | Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2021] | Series: Turning points in ancient history | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020024530 (print) | LCCN 2020024531 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691208015 (paperback) | ISBN 9780691208022 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bronze age—Mediterranean Region. | Mediterranean Region—Civilization. | Mediterranean Region—History—To 476. | Sea Peoples.

Classification: LCC GN778.25 .C55 2021 (print) | LCC GN778.25 (ebook) | DDC 937—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024530

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024531

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Rob Tempio and Matt Rohal

Production Editorial: Lauren Lepow

Text and Cover Design: Leslie Flis

Cover art: Kerstiaen de Keuninck (Coninck). Fire of Troy. Oil on panel. 58.3 × 84.8 cm. Inv. no. GE-6780. Courtesy of The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

Dedicated to James D. Muhly, who has been debating these issues, and introducing them to his students, for nearly half a century

Frontispiece. Map of the Late Bronze Age civilizations in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrationsxi

Series Editor’s Forewordxiii

Author’s Preface to the Revised and Updated Editionxv

PROLOGUE

The Collapse of Civilizations: 1177 BC1

CHAPTER ONE

Act I. Of Arms and the Man: The Fifteenth Century BC13

CHAPTER TWO

Act II. An (Aegean) Affair to Remember: The Fourteenth Century BC41

CHAPTER THREE

Act III. Fighting for Gods and Country: The Thirteenth Century BC69

CHAPTER FOUR

Act IV. The End of an Era: The Twelfth Century BC98

CHAPTER FIVE

A Perfect Storm of Calamities?134

CHAPTER SIX

Sea Peoples, Systems Collapse, and Complexity Theory167

EPILOGUE

The Aftermath181

Acknowledgments189

Dramatis Personae191

Notes197

Works Cited223

Index267

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

Frontispiece. Map of the Late Bronze Age civilizations in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean

Fig. 1. Sea Peoples portrayed as captives at Medinet Habu

Fig. 2. Naval battle with Sea Peoples at Medinet Habu

Fig. 3. Asiatics at Beni Hasan

Fig. 4. Rekhmire’s tomb, with Aegean peoples depicted

Fig. 5a–b. Colossi and Aegean List of Amenhotep III

Fig. 6. Faience plaque of Amenhotep III, found at Mycenae

Fig. 7. Social relationships in the Amarna Letters

Fig. 8. Reconstruction of the Uluburun ship

Fig. 9. Royal letters in Urtenu’s archive at Ugarit

Fig. 10. Sites destroyed or affected ca. 1200 BC

Fig. 11. Ramses III ivory pen case from Megiddo

TABLES

Table 1. Late Bronze Age Egyptian and Near Eastern kings mentioned in the text, listed by country/kingdom and chronology

Table 2. Modern areas and their probable Late Bronze Age names

SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

This volume is part of a series called Turning Points in Ancient History. Each book in the series looks at a crucial event or key moment in the ancient world. Always volatile and frequently dramatic, these were points at which history took a new direction. Whether famous or forgotten, they are moments that matter. Our focus is on why and how, as well as on when. Series authors are scholars who know how to tell a story and narrators who have the latest research at their command.

Turning Points in Ancient History reflects wide-ranging trends in the study of the ancient world. Each book integrates archaeology and classic texts; that is, it combines the evidence of material and literary culture. Books look both at the elite and at ordinary lives. The series does not confine itself strictly to the Greco-Roman world, though that certainly is at its core. We examine as well neighboring peoples of Greece and Rome, the non-Greco-Roman people of Greco-Roman lands, and civilizations and peoples of the wider ancient world, both East and West.

This is an exciting time for ancient history. Now more than ever, we realize that understanding the ancient past is essential to our understanding of the present and just plain fascinating.

Few events had a bigger impact on the evolution of the ancient world than the end of the Bronze Age. It was then that the great kingdoms and city-states of prehistory fell. They left behind stirring monuments like the Pyramids and dimly remembered tales such as the ones that were eventually reshaped into the Trojan War saga. To those who lived through it, the calamity seemed to be the end of the world. Yet the end of the massive palatial states of the Bronze Age opened the door for the growth of a new world on a more human scale, the world of the first millennium BC, a world in which we are still at home today.

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed begins with the invasion of Egypt by the Sea Peoples in 1177 and moves outward and backward. It takes us to the Late Bronze Age in the glory days of the fifteenth century BC and surveys a range of civilizations from Mesopotamia to Greece, and from Israel to the Hittites. Then it proceeds over the centuries to the processes, people, and events that brought down a world. Throughout there is a fingertip feel for the evidence. The scale of detail is as grand as the sack of the Syrian port city of Ugarit around 1190 BC, and as intimate as a CT scan of King Tut’s skeleton and the infection after a broken leg that probably killed him.

With verve, wit, and a sense of drama, Eric Cline explores the echoes between the Late Bronze Age and our own time, from economic crisis and climate change to war in the Middle East. The year 1177 BC might not be a household word, but it deserves to be.

Barry Strauss

AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE REVISED AND UPDATED EDITION

In early 2020, as I was working on the revision of this book, I saw a banner headline in the Guardian: Humanity under Threat from Perfect Storm of Crises. The world is facing a series of interlinked emergencies that are threatening the [very] existence of humans, wrote environmental correspondent Fiona Harvey. She was reporting on the results of a survey taken of 222 leading scientists from 52 countries. They had concluded that there are a number of principal emergencies facing us today: climate change with weather extremes; species loss; water scarcity; and a food production crisis. What was particularly worrisome, she said, is that the combination of all … is amplifying the risks of each, creating a perfect storm that threatens to engulf humanity unless swift action is taken.¹

I found that alarming, of course, but also intriguing, for the contemporary situation that she describes has many similarities to 1177 BC. That was a time more than three thousand years ago, when the Bronze Age Mediterranean civilizations collapsed one after the other, changing the course of history. Clearly calamitous collapses have happened before; could it happen again?

It’s a question I’ve been asking since 2014, when the first edition of this book was published. I have long believed that the answer is yes; it’s a matter of not if but when.

And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit full force, with devastating effects worldwide, millions of people infected, and hundreds of thousands dead. The full effects of this pestilence on top of the perfect storm of other stressors affecting our globalized world remains to be seen. But it is already clear that the future history of life on this planet will be changed, perhaps as fundamentally as life changed in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean regions some thirty-two hundred years ago. Now, however, the changes that lie ahead are not limited to those areas but are global in scope.

I argued in the first edition of this book that 1177 BC was a pivotal moment in the history of civilization—a turning point for the ancient world. By that time, the Bronze Age in the Aegean, Egypt, and the Near East had lasted nearly two thousand years, from approximately 3000 BC to just after 1200 BC. When the end came, as it did after centuries of cultural and technological evolution, most of the civilized and international world of the Mediterranean regions came to a dramatic halt in a vast area stretching from what is now Italy to Afghanistan and from Turkey down to Egypt. Large empires and small kingdoms, which had taken centuries to evolve, collapsed rapidly, from the Mycenaeans and Minoans to the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Mitannians, Cypriots, Canaanites, and even Egyptians.

And with their end came a period of transition, frequently described by scholars as the world’s first Dark Age. It was not until centuries later that a new cultural renaissance emerged in Greece and the other affected areas, setting the stage for the evolution of society as we know it today.

Since those Bronze Age civilizations and the factors that led to their collapse transpired more than three millennia ago, there are many who assume that little of it is relevant to us today, and that there is no valid comparison to be made between the world of the Late Bronze Age and our current technology-driven culture. However, there are more parallels between the two eras than one might think. For example, in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, there were diplomatic embassies and economic trade embargoes; magnificent marriages and unpleasant divorces; international intrigues and deliberate military disinformation; rebellions and migrations; and climate change, including drought.

After nearly a lifetime of studying the Bronze Age, it is my belief that taking a closer look at the events, peoples, and places of an era more than three millennia distant from us is more than merely an academic exercise in studying ancient history.² It is especially relevant now, considering what we have all been going through recently in our own globalized and transnationalized society, where we also find complex diplomatic embassies (think North Korea) and economic trade embargoes (think China); magnificent royal marriages (William and Kate; Harry and Meghan); international intrigues and deliberate military disinformation (think Ukraine); rebellions (Arab Spring) and migrations (Syrian refugees); and, of course, climate changes and pestilence (COVID-19).

I strongly suspect that future historians will see the year 2020 as another pivotal moment in history. It is clear that in our global economy, the fortunes and investments of the United States and Europe are inextricably intertwined within an international system that also involves East Asia and the oil-producing nations of the Middle East. What if we are just at the beginning of another perfect storm of stressors on our interconnected societies? Although most people will survive the current COVID-19 pandemic, its repercussions, both economic and otherwise, are likely to be felt for a long time. Furthermore, we may try to slow down climate change, but some effects are probably already irreversible, and famine is now widespread in the developing world. Are other cataclysmic events on the way? Recall that the Apocalypse has other horsemen besides Pestilence and Famine. Will we exhibit sufficient resilience to overcome whatever else is thrown at us, or are we headed for a collapse of multiple elements of our complex global society?

According to Joseph Tainter, who literally wrote the book on the collapse of complex societies, collapse is fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.³ That was exactly what happened back in 1177 BC. We should note, though, that discussing collapses and comparing the rise and fall of empires is not new; scholars have been doing it since at least the 1700s, when Edward Gibbon wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire. A more recent example is Jared Diamond’s book Collapse.⁴ However, both Gibbon and Diamond were considering how a single empire or a single civilization came to an end—the Romans, the Maya, the Mongols, and so forth. Here, we are considering a globalized system in antiquity, with multiple civilizations all interacting and at least partially dependent upon each other. There are only a few instances in history of such globalized world systems; the one in place during the Late Bronze Age and the one in place today are two of the most obvious examples, and the parallels—comparisons might be a better word—between them are sometimes intriguing.

To give just one illustration, Carol Bell, a British academician, has observed that the strategic importance of tin in the LBA [Late Bronze Age] … was probably not far different from that of crude oil today.⁵ At that time, tin is thought to have been available in quantity only from specific mines in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan and had to be brought overland all the way to sites in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and north Syria, from where it was distributed to points farther north, south, or west, including onward across the sea to the Aegean. Bell continues, The availability of enough tin to produce … weapons grade bronze must have exercised the minds of the Great King in Hattusa and the Pharaoh in Thebes in the same way that supplying gasoline to the American SUV driver at reasonable cost preoccupies an American President today!⁶

Susan Sherratt, an archaeologist formerly at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and now at the University of Sheffield, began arguing for such a comparison nearly twenty years ago. As she noted, there are some genuinely useful analogies between the world of 1200 BC and that of today, including an increase in political, social, and economic fragmentation, as well as the conducting of direct exchange at unprecedented social levels and over unprecedented distances. Most relevant is her observation that the situation at the end of the Late Bronze Age provides an analogy for our own increasingly homogeneous yet uncontrollable global economy and culture, in which … political uncertainties on one side of the world can drastically affect the economies of regions thousands of miles away.⁷

The historian Fernand Braudel once said, The story of the Bronze Age could easily be written in dramatic form: it is replete with invasions, wars, pillage, political disasters and long-lasting economic collapses, ‘the first clashes between peoples.’ He also suggested that the history of the Bronze Age can be written not only as a saga of drama and violence, but as a story of more benign contacts: commercial, diplomatic (even at this time), and above all cultural.⁸ Braudel’s suggestions have been taken to heart, and so here I present the story (or rather, stories) of the Late Bronze Age as a play in four acts, with appropriate narrative and flashbacks to provide proper contexts for the introduction of some of the major players, as they first appeared on the world stage and then made their exits: from Tudhaliya of the Hittites and Tushratta of Mitanni to Amenhotep III of Egypt and Assur-uballit of Assyria (a glossary, Dramatis Personae, has been provided at the back of the book, for those wishing to keep the names and dates straight).

However, our narrative will also be something of a detective story, with twists and turns, false leads, and significant clues. To quote Hercule Poirot, the legendary Belgian detective created by Agatha Christie, who was herself married to an archaeologist, we will need to use our little grey cells in order to weave together the various strands of evidence at the end of our chronicle, as we attempt to answer the question of why a stable international system suddenly collapsed after flourishing for centuries.

Moreover, in order to truly understand what collapsed in 1177 BC and why it was such a decisive moment in ancient history, we must begin earlier, just as one might wish to go back to the eighteenth century AD and begin with the culmination of the Enlightenment period, the Industrial Revolution, and the founding of the United States, in order to really understand the origins of today’s globalized world. Although I am primarily interested in examining the possible causes of the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations in this area, I also raise the question of what it was that the world lost at this pivotal moment, when the empires and kingdoms of the second millennium BC came crashing down. I am also interested in the extent to which civilization in this part of the world was set back, in some places for centuries, and altered irrevocably. The magnitude of the catastrophe was enormous; it was a loss such as the world would not see again until the Roman Empire collapsed more than fifteen hundred years later.

This revised edition of 1177 B.C. updates both the original version that appeared in 2014 and the paperback with a new afterword in 2015. The principal changes will be found toward the end of the book, which has been augmented and reorganized, but changes and additions have been made throughout the other chapters as well.⁹

The majority of the new data are textual and scientific discoveries bearing upon the Collapse that have appeared since the publication of the first edition of this book. These include additional texts from the site of Ugarit in north Syria published in 2016, some of which specifically mention nearby invaders and famine in the city just before it was destroyed. There is also a new and very important DNA study, published in July 2019, of burials found in the Philistine city of Ashkelon that date to the late twelfth century BC. The results appear to indicate that the Philistines, who were part of the Sea Peoples, did indeed migrate from either the Aegean or the western Mediterranean, according to the most likely genetic models. There are also new data from studies of lake sediments, stalagmites in caves, and coring from lakes and lagoons, in regions stretching from Italy and Greece to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Iran. All point ever more conclusively to the occurrence of a megadrought that impacted much of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean beginning ca. 1200 BC and lasting between 150 and 300 years.

I will end by simply noting again my belief that we would do well to heed what happened to the flourishing kingdoms of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean during the Collapse at the end of the Bronze Age. We are not as far removed from those days as one might think; COVID-19 has just exposed a vulnerability of modern societies to one of the forces of nature. The story that unfolds here thus has its own inherent fascination, but it should also remind us of the fragility of our own world.

1177 B.C.

PROLOGUE

THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATIONS: 1177 BC

The warriors entered the world scene and moved rapidly, leaving death and destruction in their wake. Modern scholars refer to them collectively as the Sea Peoples, but the Egyptians who recorded their attack on Egypt never used that term, instead identifying them as separate groups working together: the Peleset, Tjekker, Shekelesh, Shardana, Danuna, and Weshesh—foreign-sounding names for foreign-looking people.¹

We know little about them, beyond what the Egyptian records tell us. We are not certain where the Sea Peoples originated: perhaps in Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy, according to one scenario, perhaps in the Aegean or western Anatolia, or possibly even Cyprus or the Eastern Mediterranean. No ancient site has ever been identified as their origin or departure point. We think of them as moving relentlessly from site to site, overrunning countries and kingdoms as they went. According to the Egyptian texts, they set up camp in Syria before proceeding down the coast of Canaan (including parts of modern Syria, Lebanon, and Israel) and into the Nile delta of Egypt.

The year was 1177 BC. It was the eighth year of Pharaoh Ramses III’s reign.² According to the ancient Egyptians, and to more recent archaeological evidence, some of the Sea Peoples came by land, others by sea. There were no uniforms, no polished outfits. Ancient images portray one group with feathered headdresses, while another faction sported skullcaps; still others had horned helmets or went bareheaded. Some had short pointed beards and dressed in short kilts, either bare-chested or with a tunic; others had no facial hair and wore longer garments, almost like skirts. These observations suggest that the Sea Peoples comprised diverse groups from different geographies and different cultures. Armed with sharp bronze swords, wooden spears with gleaming metal tips, and bows and arrows, they came on boats, wagons, oxcarts, and chariots. Although I have taken 1177 BC as a pivotal date, we know that the invaders came in waves over a considerable period of time. Sometimes the warriors came alone, and sometimes their families accompanied them.³

According to Ramses’s inscriptions, no country was able to oppose this invading mass of humanity. Resistance was futile. The great powers of the day—the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Canaanites, the Cypriots, and others—fell one by one. Some of the survivors fled the carnage; others huddled in the ruins of their once-proud cities; still others joined the invaders, swelling their ranks and adding to the apparent complexities of the mob of invaders. Each group of the Sea Peoples was on the move, each apparently motivated by individual reasons. Perhaps it was the desire for spoils or slaves that spurred some; others may have been compelled by drought, famine, or population pressures to migrate eastward from their own lands in the West.

On the walls of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, near the Valley of the Kings, Ramses said concisely:

The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms, from Khatte, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on, being cut off at [one time]. A camp [was set up] in one place in Amurru. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjekker, Shekelesh, Danuna, and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting.⁴

We know these places that were reportedly overrun by the invaders, for they were famous in antiquity. Khatte is the land of the Hittites, with its heartland located on the inland plateau of Anatolia (the ancient name for Turkey) near modern Ankara and its empire stretching from the Aegean coast in the west to the lands of northern Syria in the east. Qode is probably located in what is now southeastern Turkey (possibly the region of ancient Kizzuwadna). Carchemish is a well-known archaeological site first excavated almost a century ago by a team of archaeologists that included Sir Leonard Woolley, perhaps better known for his excavation of Abraham’s Ur of the Chaldees in Iraq, and T. E. Lawrence, who was trained as a classical archaeologist at Oxford before his exploits in World War I ultimately transformed him into Hollywood’s Lawrence of Arabia. Arzawa was a land familiar to the Hittites, located within their grasp in western Anatolia. Alashiya may have been what we know today as the island of Cyprus, a metal-rich island famous for its copper ore. Amurru was located on the coast of northern Syria. We shall visit all of these places again, in the pages and stories that follow.

Fig. 1. Sea Peoples portrayed as captives at Medinet Habu (after Medinet Habu, vol. 1, pl. 44; courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago).

The six individual groups who made up the Sea Peoples during this wave of invasion—the five mentioned above by Ramses in the Medinet Habu inscription and a sixth group, named the Shardana (also sometimes called the Sherden), mentioned in another relevant inscription—are far more shadowy than the lands that they reportedly overran. They left no inscriptions of their own and are therefore known textually almost entirely from Egyptian inscriptions.⁵

Most of these groups are also difficult to detect in the archaeological record, although archaeologists and philologists have been making a valiant attempt for much of the past century, first by playing linguistic games and then, more recently, by looking at pottery and other archaeological remains. For instance, the Danuna were long ago identified with Homer’s Danaans, from the Bronze Age Aegean. The Shekelesh are often hypothesized to have come from what is now Sicily and the Shardana from Sardinia, based in part on the consonantal similarities in each case and the fact that Ramses refers to these foreign countries as making a conspiracy in their islands, for the Shardana in particular were labeled in Ramses’s inscriptions as being of the sea.⁶

However, not all scholars accept these suggestions, and there is an entire school of thought which suggests that the Shekelesh and the Shardana did not come from the Western Mediterranean, but rather were from areas in the Eastern Mediterranean and only fled to the regions of Sicily and Sardinia, and gave their name to these regions, after having been defeated by the Egyptians. In favor of such a possibility is the fact that the Shardana are known to have been fighting both for and against the Egyptians long before the advent of the Sea Peoples. Against the possibility is the fact that we are later told, by Ramses III, that he settled the survivors of the attacking forces in Egypt itself.⁷

Of all the foreign groups active in this arena at this time, only one has been firmly identified. The Peleset of the Sea Peoples are generally accepted as none other than the Philistines, who are identified in the Bible (Amos 9:7; Jer. 47:4) as coming from Crete. The linguistic identification was apparently so obvious that Jean-François Champollion, the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphics, had already suggested it before 1836, and the identification of specific pottery styles, architecture, and other material remains as Philistine was begun as early as 1899 by biblical archaeologists working at Tell es-Safi, identified as biblical Gath.⁸

While we do not know with any precision either the origins or the motivation of the invaders, we do know what they look like—we can view their names and faces carved on the walls of Ramses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. This ancient site is rich in both pictures and stately rows of hieroglyphic text. The invaders’ armor, weapons, clothing, boats, and oxcarts loaded with possessions are all clearly visible in the representations, so detailed that scholars have published analyses of the individual people and even the different boats shown in the scenes.⁹ Other panoramas are more graphic. One of these shows foreigners and Egyptians engaged in a chaotic naval battle; some are floating upside down and are clearly dead, while others are still fighting fiercely from their boats.

Since the 1920s, the inscriptions and scenes at Medinet Habu have been studied and exactingly copied by Egyptologists from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. The institute was and still is one of the preeminent centers in the world for the study of ancient civilizations in Egypt and the Near East. James Henry Breasted founded it upon his return from an epic journey through the Near East in 1919 and 1920, with fifty thousand dollars in seed money from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Archaeologists from the OI (as it is generally called) have excavated all over the Near East, from Iran to Egypt and beyond.

Fig. 2. Naval battle with Sea Peoples at Medinet Habu (after Medinet Habu, vol. 1, pl. 37; courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago).

Much has been written about Breasted and the OI projects that began under his direction, including the excavations at Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) in Israel, which lasted from 1925 to 1939. Among the most important were the epigraphic surveys that were conducted in Egypt, during which the Egyptologists painstakingly copied the hieroglyphic texts and scenes left by the pharaohs on their temples and palaces throughout Egypt. It is a tremendously tedious job to copy the hieroglyphics carved into stone walls and monuments. It involves hours of work, and transcribers are usually perched on ladders or scaffolding in the hot sun, peering at deteriorated symbols inscribed on gates, temples, and columns. Suffice it to say, the results are invaluable, especially since many of the inscriptions have suffered greatly as a result of erosion, damage by tourists, or other injuries. Were these inscriptions not transcribed, they would eventually become undecipherable to future generations. The results of the transcriptions from Medinet Habu were published in a series of volumes, the first of which appeared in 1930, with subsequent and related volumes appearing in the 1940s and 1950s.

Although scholarly debate continues, with some suggesting that the land and sea battles were separate events fought at different times and in different locations, including far to the north in the uppermost part of Canaan (northern Syria), most experts agree that the land and sea battles depicted on the walls at Medinet Habu were probably fought nearly simultaneously in the Egyptian delta or nearby. It is also possible that they represent a single extended battle that occurred both on land and at sea, and some scholars have even suggested that both represent ambushes of the Sea Peoples’ forces, in which the Egyptians caught them by surprise.¹⁰ In any event, the end result is not in question, for at Medinet Habu the Egyptian pharaoh quite clearly states:

Those who reached my frontier, their seed is not, their heart and soul are finished forever and ever. Those who came forward together on the sea, the full flame was in front of them at the river-mouths, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore. They were dragged in, enclosed, and prostrated on the beach, killed, and made into heaps from tail to head. Their ships and their goods were as if fallen into the water. I have made the lands turn back from (even) mentioning Egypt: for when they pronounce my name in their land, then they are burned up.¹¹

Ramses then continues, in a famous document known as the Papyrus Harris, again naming his defeated enemies:

I overthrew those who invaded them from their lands. I slew the Danuna [who are] in their isles, the Tjekker and the Peleset were made ashes. The Shardana and the Weshesh of the sea, they were made as those that exist not, taken captive at one time, brought as captives to Egypt, like the sand of the shore. I settled them in strongholds bound in my name. Numerous were their classes like hundred-thousands. I taxed them all, in clothing and grain from the store-houses and granaries each year.¹²

This was not the first time that the Egyptians fought against a collective force of Sea Peoples. Thirty years earlier, in 1207 BC, during the fifth year of Pharaoh Merneptah’s reign, a similar coalition of these shadowy groups had attacked Egypt.

Merneptah is perhaps best known to students of the ancient Near East as the Egyptian pharaoh who first uses the term Israel, in an inscription dating to this same year (1207 BC). This inscription is the earliest occurrence of the name Israel outside the Bible. In the Pharaonic inscription, the name—written with a special sign to indicate that it is a people rather than just a place—appears in a brief description of a campaign to the region of Canaan, where the people whom he calls Israel were located.¹³ The sentences are found within the context of a long inscription that is otherwise concerned with Merneptah’s ongoing battles with the Libyans, located just to the west of Egypt proper. It is the Libyans and the Sea Peoples who occupied most of Merneptah’s attention during this year, rather than the Israelites.

For example, in a text found at the site of Heliopolis, dated to Year 5, second month of the third season (tenth month), we are told, The wretched chief of Libya has invaded [with] Shekelesh and every foreign country, which is with him, to violate the borders of Egypt.¹⁴ The same wording is repeated on another inscription, known as the Cairo Column.¹⁵

In a longer inscription found at Karnak (modern-day Luxor), we are given additional details about this earlier wave of incursions by the Sea Peoples. The names of the individual groups are included:

[Beginning