Guild:The Sea People (historical)

The Sea People [TSP]
The Sea People, a mysterious confederacy of seafaring raiders who sailed into the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, invaded Cryus, Hatti and the Levant, and attempted to enter Egyptian territory during the late 19th Century, and especially year 8 of Ramses the III of the 20th century. We can also be referred to as the seapeoples- " The Ones who instill fear in the very heart of the enemy".

The earliest mention of the Sea Peoples is in an inscription of the Egyptian king Merneptah, whose rule is usually dated from 1213 BC to 1204 BC, although mention of individual groups does occur earlier. Merneptah states that in the fifth year of his reign (1208 BC) he claims to have defeated an invasion of an allied force of Libyans and the Sea People, killing 6,000 soldiers and taking 9,000 prisoners.

About twenty years later the Egyptian king Ramses III was forced to deal with another invasion of the Sea Peoples. In the mortuary temple he built at Medinet Habu, in Thebes, Ramses describes how, despite the fact "no land could stand before" the forces of the Sea People and that they swept through "Hatti, Kode, Carshemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya" destroying their cities, he defeated them in a sea battle. He gives the names of the tribes of the Sea People as including: the Peleset, the Tjerker, the Shekelesh, the Denyen, and the Weshesh. However, because this list is identical to the one Merneptah had included in his victory inscription, and because Ramses also describes on his temple walls several victories known to be fictitious, some Egyptologists believe that he never actually fought the Sea Peoples, but only claimed the victories of Merneptah as his own—a common practice of a number of the Pharaohs.

The Sea Peoples appear in another set of records dated around the early 12th century BC. Ammurapi, the last king of Ugarit (c.1191–1182 BC) received a letter from the Hittite king Suppiluliunma II warning him about the "Shikalayu who live on boats": compare the Shekelesh of the slightly earlier Merneptah/Ramses inscriptions. It may be relevant that shortly after he received this communication, Ammurapi was overthrown and the city of Ugarit sacked, never to be inhabited again.

The abrupt end of several civilizations in the decades traditionally dated around 1200 BC have caused many ancient historians to hypothesize that the Sea People caused the collapse of the Hittites, Mycenaean and Mitanni kingdoms.