Who Were the Sea Peoples? The Mystery of the Bronze Age Collapse

Around 1200 BC, the connected world of the Late Bronze Age came apart. The Hittite Empire disappeared, Mycenaean palaces burned, and the port of Ugarit was destroyed after its last king wrote that enemy ships had come. Egyptian pharaohs blamed a coalition of foreign seafarers that modern historians call the Sea Peoples. But who were they really? This documentary goes through the evidence: the Medinet Habu inscriptions of Ramesses the Third, the Sherden warriors who ended up as the pharaoh's bodyguards, the last letters from Ugarit, tree-ring evidence of a severe drought, new doubts about how many cities were actually destroyed, and the 2019 ancient DNA study of the Philistines at Ashkelon. We keep what the evidence shows separate from what scholars are still debating. That includes competing theories about drought, systems collapse, new kinds of warfare and migration, and the possibility that the Sea Peoples were refugees as much as raiders. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:54 A World Wired Together 02:21 A Name Nobody Used 03:13 The Pharaohs Testify 06:35 Nine Names, Few Answers 08:31 Fire on the Sea 09:58 The Other Suspects 12:58 Bones Beneath the Floors 15:14 Raiders, Refugees, or Both Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Br... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philist... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merneptah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0u... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesse... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hattusa https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/d... https://library.biblicalarchaeology.o... https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/... https://www.shh.mpg.de/1360247/sino-t... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/cu... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... https://news.cornell.edu/node/325828 https://www.sci.news/archaeology/seve... https://www.lockwoodpress.com/product... Music: "DreamDance 35 [ambient]" by Hardcore Scm (CC BY 3.0) https://www.jamendo.com/track/1196241 Images: Wikimedia Commons Rama (CC BY-SA 3.0 fr) Loris Romito The original uploader was LorisRomito at Italian Wikipedia . (CC BY-SA 3.0) Dosseman (CC BY-SA 4.0) Vyacheslav Argenberg (CC BY 4.0) David Kaniewski, Elise Van Campo, Karel Van Lerberghe, Tom Boiy, Klaas Vansteenhuyse, Greta Jans, Karin Nys, Harvey Weiss (CC BY 2.5) Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany (CC BY-SA 2.0) Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) (CC BY-SA 4.0) Rama (CC BY-SA 2.0 fr) Zunkir (CC BY-SA 4.0) Andreas Trepte (CC BY-SA 2.5) Peulle (CC BY-SA 4.0) Mary Harrsch (CC BY-SA 4.0) By Middle_East_topographic_map-blank.svg: Sémhur (talk) derivative work: Zunkir (Middle_East_topographic_map-blank.svg) [CC BY-SA 3.0 ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... ) or GFDL ( http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html )], via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) Mmelouk (CC BY-SA 4.0) Mackenzie Franklin (CC BY-SA 4.0) Fitzcarmalan (CC BY-SA 4.0) MusikAnimal (CC BY-SA 4.0) Olaf Tausch (CC BY 3.0) ArchaiOptix (CC BY-SA 4.0) Marc Ryckaert (CC BY-SA 4.0) Moyen_Orient_Amarna_1.svg : * Middle_East_topographic_map-blank.svg : Sémhur ( talk ) derivative work: Zunkir ( talk ) derivative work: Zunkir ( talk ) (CC BY-SA 3.0) Oltau (CC BY-SA 4.0) Steven C. Price (CC BY-SA 3.0) RafahKid Kid (CC BY-SA 2.0) Rémih (CC BY-SA 3.0) David Kaniewski, Elise Van Campo, Karel Van Lerberghe, Tom Boiy, Klaas Vansteenhuyse, Greta Jans, Karin Nys, Harvey Weiss - The Sea Peoples, from Cuneiform Tablets to Carbon Dating "From PLOS ONE, an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. "© 2011 Kaniewski et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited." (CC BY 2.5) Cattette (CC BY 4.0) Norbert Nagel (CC BY-SA 3.0) Photo by Adam Carr (CC BY-SA 3.0) Narpas (CC BY-SA 4.0) No machine-readable author provided. Shardan assumed (based on copyright claims). (CC BY-SA 2.5) Globetrotter19 (CC BY-SA 3.0) Artav80 (CC BY-SA 4.0) Murat Özsoy 1958 (CC BY-SA 4.0) Zde (CC BY-SA 4.0) Gianfranco Gazzetti (CC BY-SA 4.0) Frank Kidner (CC BY-SA 4.0) Basma Eloufy (CC BY-SA 4.0) James Gordon from Los Angeles, California, USA (CC BY 2.0) Shahzad Iqbal (CC BY-SA 4.0)