Sea Peoples

Now, in terms of its history, long before it was a superpower, Athens was just this modest little hilltop fortress that was definitely ignored by a lot of its flashy Greek neighbors.

But unfortunately, with a lot of the empires that were out and about in the Mediterranean Sea, There was this time period, the mysterious Sea Peoples, around 1200 BC, they went across the Mediterranean like an apocalypse.

Yes, they burned down all the empires of the ancient world.

You can reference this again in my Spartan episode.

I mean, this became like a 400-year dark age.

The Hittites, the Mycenaean kingdoms of Greece, and yes, even the Egyptian kingdom were all pretty much destroyed, and we don't really have a good handle on what happened.

Yes, they called these people the Sea Peoples, But it could have been a lot of environmental issues in terms of droughts, famines, so many different things that ultimately destroyed a lot of these kingdoms.

But the key thing was Athens came out of this unscathed.

This would be noteworthy enough in itself, but it happened at a time when the Hittite Empire and other states were also heavily damaged.

It also coincides with an attack on Egypt, which is described in its records as an invasion of Sea Peoples.

The Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia also suffered some setbacks around that time.

The question then is whether and how all of these events, which are now collectively called the Bronze Age Collapse, might have been connected.

And again, we are hampered by a lack of written records from that time.

As for the Mycenaeans, there is some question as to whether they were as much the perpetrators as the victims of what happened, because the Egyptians mentioned among the Sea Peoples a group they called the Ekwesh, who may have been identical with the Achaeans.

There was also a later myth about another Greek tribe called the Dorians, who invaded from the north around this time, but the archaeological evidence isn't conclusive.

In fact, there are scholars who think that it was a natural disaster like drought or earthquake that caused the Mycenaeans to abandon their cities.

That's the mystery that's haunted archaeologists for over a century.

What could possibly destroy multiple powerful empires simultaneously? Empires that were hundreds or thousands of miles apart? Empires with different cultures, different languages, different gods, different military strategies? What kind of disaster doesn't respect borders, doesn't discriminate between the powerful and the weak, and doesn't leave survivors who can rebuild? the evidence is written in ash layers and destruction debris at site after site across the eastern mediterranean palaces burned cities abandoned trade goods that travelled thousands of miles suddenly stop appearing in the archaeological record letters between kings go unanswered then stop being written altogether in egypt pharaoh rameses the third described battles against mysterious invaders he called the sea peoples enemies who came by land and sea destroying everything in their path but who were the sea peoples where did they come from and more importantly were they the cause of the collapse or just another symptom of something even bigger For decades, scholars have debated what happened in those catastrophic years around 1137 BC.

Was it invasion? Climate change? Earthquake storms? Economic collapse? Internal rebellion? And here's the truly unsettling part.

It might have been all of them at once.

The cracks were spreading.

And then, somewhere over the northern horizon, something appeared that would transform these slow-building stresses into catastrophic collapse.

The Sea Peoples were coming.

But before we get to them, we need to understand one more thing about these early warning signs.