Art 211   The End of the Bronze Age

Syllabus Daily Schedule Links Assignments Lecture Notes

The glories of the Late Bronze Age drew to an end as numerous Aegean sites were struck by great catastrophes and the established authorities were challenged on all sides.

Drews' map of Aegean sites destroyed ca. 1200 bce. See larger version

These changes have been identified with the so-called "Sea Peoples" who came into Anatolia and Syria-Palestine and even Egypt. While the exact nature of this "population movement" is hotly debated, in this class we have paid special attention to the interpretations of this period offered by Drews, who sees this first and foremost as military aggression.

Drews argues that, after several hundred years, a method was devised for defeating chariots in battle. In the years around 1200 bce, a coalition of various outsider groups was at last able to overwhelm the palace regimes established in the years after 1650 bce. Others have suggested that the movement of peoples was more in the nature of a "folk migration," but the destruction of sites throughout the Aegean argues that the invaders had no desire to live in the places that they conquered. Drews presents a map of sites destroyed during this period of "Great Catastrophe," pointing out that the vast majority of them were not re-inhabited.

The Egyptians were able to resist the invasions more successfully than many other governments. The victories of Ramesses III are depicted

Medinet Habu, Land and Sea Battles of Ramesses III See more

on his Mortuary Temple at Medinet Habu, providing the best documentation of the events. A lengthy description of the campaign of Year 8 includes the following:

As for the foreign countries, they made a conspiracy in their isles (rww). Removed and scattered in the fray were the lands at one time. No land could stand before their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Yereth, and Yeres on, (but they were) cut off at [one time]. A camp [was set up] in one place in Amor. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming, while the flame was prepared before them, forward toward Egypt.

Their confederation was the Peleset, Theker, Shekelesh, Denyen), and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upoon the lands to the very circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: "Our plans will succeed."

Scholars have tentatively identified some of these peoples and places. Ramsses III describes and illustrates both a land and sea battle, taking place in Cjahi, somewhere in southern Canaan. Although the invaders are sometimes described as "Sea Peoples," the word rww would be better translated as "sealands"; the Egyptian language had no word or concept that matched our "islands," and use this word to refer also to continental coasts. Translations have been advocated for all of the peoples named. For example, it is generally agreed that Theker = Tjekker, or Sikkar, or Zakkala, and is convincingly identified as Sicily. The Peleset are the Philistines, and so on.

Drews summarizes: the evidence from Medinet el Habu as follows:

In short, the Medinet Habu inscriptions and reliefs indicate that in Year Eight of Ramesses III invaders from Palestine, supported by shipborne adventurers from Sicily (and perhaps Italy), headed for Egypt, intending to sack whatever they could and to appropriate some of the fertile Delta lands. The "migrations" toward the eastern Delta in 1179 were evidently analogous to the Libyan incursions into the western Delta in 1208, 1182, and 1176 b.c.

Return to Art 211 home page http://merlin.alleg.edu/employee/a/acarr/art211/template.html Last updated September 2, 2002

Return to Amelia Carr's Home Page E-Mail to acarr@allegheny.edu