Sea Peoples

The Sea Peoples, or Peoples of the Sea, were a confederacy of seafaring raiders from the Aegean and Europe who sailed around the eastern Mediterranean and invaded Anatolia, Syria, Canaan, Cyprus, and Egypt toward the end of the Bronze Age.

The Sea Peoples are documented during the late 19th dynasty and especially during year 8 of Ramesses III of the 20th Dynasty when they tried to enter or control the Egyptian territory. The Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah explicitly refers to them by the term "the foreign-countries (or 'peoples') of the sea" (Egyptian n3 ḫ3s.wt n<.t> p3 ym) in his Great Karnak Inscription. Although most scholars believe that they invaded Cyprus, Hatti and the Levant, this hypothesis is disputed by others.

Among the Sea Peoples identified in Egyptian records are the Ekwesh, a group of Bronze Age Greeks (Achaeans); Teresh, Tyrrhenians, ancestors of the Etruscans; Luka, an Anatolian people of the Aegean (their name survives in the region of Lycia); Sherden, probably Sardinians; Shekelesh, probably the Italic tribe called Siculi; Peleset, generally believed to refer to the Philistines, who might have come from Crete and were with the Tekrur (possibly Greek Teucrians) the only major tribe of the Sea Peoples known to have settled permanently in the Levant.