Mediterranean Warfare and The Sea Peoples
Around this time large-scale revolts took place in several parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, and attempts to overthrow existing kingdoms were made as a result of economic and political instability by surrounding people who were already plagued with famine and hardship. Part of the Hittite kingdom was invaded and conquered by the so-called Sea Peoples whose origins - perhaps from different parts of the Mediterranean, such as the Black Sea, the Aegean and Anatolian regions - remain obscure. The thirteenth and twelfth-century inscriptions and carvings at Karnak and Luxor are the only sources for "Sea Peoples", a term invented by the Egyptians themselves and recorded in the boastful accounts of Egyptian military successes:
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...Their league was Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh. —A similar assemblage of peoples may have attempted to invade Egypt twice, once during the reign of Merneptah about 1224 BC, and then again during the reign of Ramesses III about 1186 BC.
Read more about this topic: Greek Dark Ages
Famous quotes containing the words warfare, sea and/or peoples:
“Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing—a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)