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

The view of Maspero that the Sea Peoples originated
solely from the eastern Mediterranean has had a great influence
on his successors, even up to the present day (cf.
Redford 1992: 246). At any rate, it has been taken over
without much critical reflection by H.R. Hall, who dominated
the field in the first half of the 20th century AD. In a
first contribution to the Annual of the British School at
Athens 8 of 1901-2, he expressed himself in favor of Maspero’s
identifications with the only noted exception of
Weshesh, which he preferred to connect with Cretan Waksioi
instead of Carian Wassos. Next, in a collection of papers
to the memory of Champollion which appeared in
1922 Hall presented a useful summary of the literature on
the topic of the Sea Peoples up to that moment. In this
summary, he proposed to identify the Denye(n), whom
Maspero had equated with the Danaoi of the Argolid in
mainland Greece, with the Danuna of Cilicia as mentioned
in the El-Amarna texts from the reigns of Amenhotep III
(1390-1352 BC) and Akhenaten (1352-1336 BC). Hall’s
work culminates in his contribution to the first edition of
the Cambridge Ancient History, which appeared in 1926.
Here he expressly distinguished the Sea Peoples, which, as
we have seen, according to him originated from western
Anatolia and mainland Greece, from the Keftiu, i.e. the
designation of the Cretans in Egyptian texts. Confronted
with the Biblical sources, according to which the Peleset
originated from Crete, he came up with the solution that
they had come from Asia Minor via Crete. Furthermore, he
noted in alignment with his earlier association of the Denye(n)
with the Danuna, that some of the Sea Peoples, like
the Sherden and the Lukka, were already mentioned in the
El-Amarna texts. Of them, the Sherden were stipulated to
have fought both on the Egyptian side and that of the Sea
Peoples in the upheavals at the time of Ramesses III. Finally,
in true Masperonian way, he envisioned the Sherden,
Shekelesh, and Teresh, after their failing attack on Egypt,
as being on their way to their ultimate homes in the central
Mediterranean. The career of Hall ended with his “going
Caucasian” so to say: in his last contribution on the subject
of 1929 he explained all ethnonyms of the Sea Peoples as
reflections of similar sounding Caucasian tribal names – a
fine example of the dangers of the etymological approach
when applied without further backing.
After the second World War, the first to take up the
subject of the Sea Peoples again, was Alan Gardiner. In his
Ancient Egyptian Onomastica of 1947 he meticulously described
all that was known at the time of a number of the
ethnonyms, especially so of the Sherden and the Peleset.
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Remarkable is that in connection with the Denye(n) he
spoke against their relation with the Danuna in Cilicia and
in favor of that with the Danaoi of the Argolid in mainland
Greece. Moreover, he sided with Hall in his opinion that
the Peleset were not originally at home in Crete, but used
this island as an intermediary station in their way to the
Levant. In connection with the Sherden, finally, he remarked,
with reference to an earlier contribution by
Wainwright (1939: 148), that the Teresh were known to
the Hittite world (probably implying a linguistic relation of
the ethnonym with Tarwisa (= Troy), which, however, is
dubious), but the Sherden and the Shekelesh not and hence
that the latter might be assumed to originate from outside
of it – the first rudimentary attempt to bring the controversy
between de Rougé and Chabas on the one hand and
Maspero on the other to a higher level.
Next, Paul Mertens presented in the Chronique
d’Égypte 35 of 1960 a nice overview of the Egyptian
sources on the Sea Peoples from their first occurrence in
the El-Amarna texts and those of Ramesses II (1279-1212
BC) up to their alignment with the Libyan king Meryre (=
Meryey) in the reign of Merneptah and their ultimate attack
on Egypt in the reign of Ramesses III. However, as far
as origins are concerned, he did not choose between the
central to east Mediterranean thesis of de Rougé and the
solely east Mediterranean antithesis of Maspero, whereas,
in connection with the Peleset, he followed Bonfante
(1946) in identifying them as Illyrians who migrated to the
Levant via Crete.
The first to address the question what caused the upheavals
of the Sea Peoples at the end of the Late Bronze
Age was Wolfgang Kimmig in a lengthy paper in the Festschrift
Tackenberg of 1964. In his view, these are a mere
function of the expansion of the Urnfield peoples of central
and eastern Europe into all directions, so also to the Mediterranean
in the south. As Kimmig keenly observed, the
contribution of bearers of the Urnfield culture to the
movement of the Sea Peoples is indicated by their ships as
depicted in the reliefs at Medinet Habu having bird head
protomes at the stern as well as the prow – a typical Urnfield
feature. He further rightly stipulated that some of the
Sea Peoples were already in contact with the Near East
when the expansion of the Urnfielders motivated them to
look for new homelands in an agreeable surrounding. Although
he tried to avoid the vexed question of the origins
of the Sea Peoples as much as possible, Kimmig restricted
his Urnfield model for the cause of the latters’ movement
to the eastern Mediterranean: an incursion of Urnfielders