The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples - RePub - Erasmus Universiteit ...

4. AN HISTORIOGRAPHIC OUTLINE
In this section we will present an outline of the most important
modern literature on the Sea Peoples. Special attention
in this historiographic outline will be given to the
identification of the individual population groups, which is
still a matter of debate. Another point of interest is the
cause (or causes) of their sudden appearance on the stage
during the period aptly called the catastrophe at the end of
the Late Bronze Age. Our main purpose, to determine
whether the shortlived coalition of forces which we call the
Sea Peoples consists of a number of individual cohesive
ethn, is a question barely touched upon in the literature: it
surfaces only in the discussion between Gustav Adolf
Lehmann and Wolfgang Helck in the 1980s and in Drews
1993. For convenience’s sake, I will in the following use
standardized transcriptions for the ethnonyms of the Sea
Peoples as commonly used in the English language. An
example of how these ethnonyms can be written in Egyptian
hieroglyphic – the writing is not standardized and
therefore can vary per attestation – and their proper transliteration
is rendered in figure 3. 74 Note that the ethnonyms
are distinguished as such by the determinative of
foreign people (Gardiner 1994: T14 + A1).
The modern literature on the Sea Peoples commences
with the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic by Jean-
François Champollion in the first half of the 19th century
AD. In his Grammaire égyptienne of 1836 he proposed to
identify the Peleset as mentioned in the texts of Ramesses
III (1184-1153 BC) in his mortuary temple at Medinet
Habu (Thebes) with the Biblical Philistines – an identification
which goes unchallenged till the present day. Following
in his footsteps, Emmanuel de Rougé set out in his
contribution to the Revue Archéologique 16 of 1867 to
connect the other ethnonyms in the same texts and in the
one of Merneptah (1213-1203 BC) on a wall of the main
temple at Karnak (Thebes) with names of known Mediterranean
peoples or locations on the basis of similarity in
sound (“Gleichklang”). Thus he proposed to identify the
Teresh with the Tyrrhenians or Etruscans, the Shekelesh
with the Sicels, the Sherden with the Sardinians, all in the
74 As the Egyptologist J.F. Borghouts assures me, the use of Gardiner
1994: T 12 “bowstring” (phonetic value 3r) for Gardiner
1994: V 4 “lasso” (phonetic value w3) in the ethnonym Ekwesh is
a peculiarity of the Karnak text, paralleled, for example, in the writing
of Meswesh.
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central Mediterranean, the Ekwesh with the Akhaians in
mainland Greece, and the Lukka with the Lycians in southwest
Asia Minor. These suggestions were subsequently
amplified by François Chabas in his Études sur l’Antiquité
Historique d’après les sources égyptiennes et les monuments
réputés préhistoriques of 1872, who connected the
Tjeker with the Teukroi of the Troas in northwest Asia
Minor, the Denye(n) with the Daunians and the Weshesh
with the Oscans, the latter two both at home in Italy.
Moreover, he ventured to equal the Peleset, which we have
seen to be identified with the Biblical Philistines since the
time of Champollion, with the Pelasgians of Greek literary
sources – an equation, as far as the Philistines are concerned,
with a respectable history, first being put forward
by Etienne Fourmont in 1747.
The proposals of de Rougé and Chabas, with identifications
of the ethnonyms of the Sea Peoples running as
widely as from the western part of Asia Minor in the east
via mainland Greece in the centre to Sicily, Italy, and Sardinia
in the west were almost directly challenged by Gaston
Maspero – who, by the way, coined the term Sea
Peoples (“peuples de la mer”) in 1881, which is an apt
form of address considering the association of these peoples
with the sea and islands in the midst of the sea in the
Egyptian texts – in review articles of the former authors’
works and, more elaborately, in his monographs Histoire
Ancienne des peuples de l’orient classique of 1875 and
Struggle of the Nations, Egypt, Syria and Assyria of 1910.
In Maspero’s view, then, the homeland of the Sea Peoples
should be restricted to western Anatolia and mainland
Greece. Thus, apart from embracing the equation of the
Ekwesh with the Akhaians of mainland Greece, the Sherden
were supposed to be linked up with the Lydian capital
Sardis, the Shekelesh with the Pisidian town of Sagalassos,
and the Weshesh with the Carian place name Wassos. His
main reason for the central position of Anatolia in his reconstructions
was formed by Herodotos’ location of the ultimate
homeland of the Tyrrhenians in Lydia (Histories I,
94). Like in the case of the Tyrrhenians, these Anatolian
peoples were suggested to have moved after their attack on
Egypt to their later Central Mediterranean homelands.
Only the Philistines were supposed to have turned east and
settled in Canaan.