1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) (4 page)

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.

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, 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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 as coming from Crete.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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, 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 possible that they represent a single extended battle that occurred both on land and at sea, and some scholars have suggested that both represent ambushes of the Sea Peoples’ forces, in which the Egyptians caught them by surprise.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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The same wording is repeated on another inscription, known as the “Cairo Column.”
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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 of the victory that his majesty achieved in the land of Libya] Eqwesh, Teresh, Lukka, Shardana, Shekelesh, Northerners coming from all lands…. the third season, saying: The wretched, fallen chief of Libya … has fallen upon the country of Tehenu with his bowmen—Shardana, Shekelesh, Eqwesh, Lukka, Teresh, taking the best of every warrior and every man of war of his country . . .

List of the captives carried off from this land of Libya and the countries which he brought with him . . .

Sherden, Shekelesh, Eqwesh of the countries of the sea, who had no foreskins:

Shekelesh 222 men

Making 250 hands

Teresh 742 men

Making 790 hands

Shardana—

[Making]—

[Ek]wesh who had no foreskins, slain, whose hands were carried off, (for) they

had no [foreskins]—

Shekelesh and Teresh who came as enemies of Libya—

Kehek, and Libyans, carried off as living prisoners 218 men.
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Several things are apparent in this inscription. First there are five groups, rather than six, who made up this earlier wave of Sea Peoples: the Shardana (or Sherden), Shekelesh, Eqwesh, Lukka, and Teresh. The Shardana and Shekelesh are present in both this invasion and the later one during the time of Ramses III, but the other three groups are different. Second, the Shardana, Shekelesh, and Eqwesh are specifically identified as being “of the countries of the sea,” while the five groups are together described as “Northerners coming from all lands.” The latter is not too surprising, for most lands with which the New Kingdom Egyptians were in contact (except for Nubia and Libya) lay to the north of Egypt. The identification of the Shardana and the Shekelesh as “countries of the sea” reinforces the suggestion that they are to be linked with Sardinia and Sicily, respectively.

The description of the Eqwesh as being from “the countries of the sea” has led some scholars to suggest that they are Homer’s Achaeans, that is, the Mycenaeans of the Bronze Age Greek mainland, whom Ramses III would perhaps identify as the Danuna in his Sea Peoples inscriptions two decades later. As for the final two names, scholars generally accept Lukka as a reference to peoples from southwestern Turkey, in the region later known during the classical era as Lycia. The origin of the Teresh is uncertain but might be linked to the Etruscans in Italy.
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We are told little else in the inscriptions, and have no more than a very general idea where the battle or battles were fought. Merneptah says only that the victory was “achieved in the land of Libya,” which he further identifies as “the country of Tehenu.” However, Merneptah clearly claims victory, for he lists the killed and captured enemy combatants, both men and “hands.” The general practice of the day was to cut off the hand of a dead enemy and bring it back as proof, in order to get credit and reward for the kill. Gruesome evidence of this practice has just been found from the Hyksos period in Egypt, some four hundred years before Merneptah’s time, in the form of sixteen right hands buried in four pits at the Hyksos palace at Avaris in the Nile delta.
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In any event, we do not know whether all of the Sea Peoples were killed or some survived, but we can probably assume the latter, since several of the groups returned in the second invasion thirty years later.