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

into mainland Greece in his eyes set the whole process in
motion.
Against the background of Kimmig’s answer to the
question of causality, Richard D. Barnett’s treatment of the
Sea Peoples in the 3rd edition of the Cambridge Ancient
History, which first appeared as a separate issue in 1969
and subsequently as an integral part of Volume II, 2 in
1975, means a step back to the level of identifications on
the basis of likeness in sound, in which the author sides
with Maspero’s eastern Mediterranean thesis: thus the
Teresh are said to originate from Lydia, the Shekelesh to
be on their way to Sicily, whereas for the Sherden a homeland
in Cyprus is taken into consideration, from where, of
course, they departed to colonize Sardinia. As far as the
Peleset are concerned, he saw no problem in identifying
them with the Philistines and having them colonize cities
in Canaan – in his view Gaza, Askelon, Asdod and Dor –
from Crete. From an historical point of view, Barnett
pointed to the fact that the famine reported by Herodotos
(Histories I, 94) as the cause of part of the Lydian population
to leave their country and settle in Etruria might be a
reflection of the grain shipments by Merneptah to keep the
country of Hatti alive. Furthermore, he suggested that the
naval victory of the last Hittite great king Suppiluliumas II
(1205-1180? BC) against the island of Alasiya has a bearing
on his battle against the Sea Peoples having gained
themselves a foothold on Cyprus. 76
In the same year that Barnett’s contribution first appeared,
Rainer Stadelmann put forward an interesting paper
in Saeculum 19 in which he offered an alternative
answer to what caused the upheavals of the Sea Peoples. In
his view the prime move is made by the Phrygians, who,
originating from the Balkans, overran the Anatolian plateau
at the end of the Late Bronze Age and destroyed the
Hittite Empire. As a corollary to this migration, the Philistines
joined the Phrygians in their movement from the Balkans
to Asia Minor, but, instead of settling here, they
moved on to the Levant and Egypt via Crete and Cyprus.
Having been defeated by Ramesses III, the Philistines settled
in Palestine – an event which was previously assumed
by Albright (1932) and Alt (1944) to have been orchestred
by the Egyptian pharaoh, but, taking the evidence at face
value, the latter appeared no longer in control of this re-
76 For a critical review of Barnett’s contribution to the Cambridge
Ancient History, pointing out numerous instances of sloppiness,
see Astour 1972.
38
gion. As opposed to this, Stadelmann assumed that the
Sherden, Shekelesh, and Teresh went to the central Mediterranean
to find their new homes in Sardinia, Sicily, and
central Italy, from where they maintained trade contacts
with their former comrades in arms in the Levant up to the
time that the Phoenicians seized the opportunity to take
these over.
The following years are dominated by a German
scholar, Gustav Adolf Lehmann. In a series of works, starting
in 1970 and continuing to 1996, he tried to reconstruct
an historical outline of the events that led to and made up
the catastrophe at the end of the Late Bronze Age, using a
wide range of sources from Egyptian hieroglyphic through
Ugaritic alphabetic up to Hittite cuneiform. With only
slight adaptations, this historical picture forms the basic
background for my own studies on the ethnicity of the Sea
Peoples; for a brief summary of the main events, see section
3 above. Two points are of special interest to us here,
namely Lehmanns’ position on the cause (or causes) of the
upheavals of the Sea Peoples and that on their ethnic relevance.
Now, as to what caused the catastrophe, it can be
deduced from the distribution map of groups of the Sea
Peoples in the central and eastern Mediterranean in Die
mykenisch-frühgriechische Welt und der östliche Mittelmeerraum
in der Zeit der “Seevölker”-Invasionen um 1200
v. Chr. of 1985 (p. 47) and the accompanying text (pp. 43-
9) that he considered the Adriatic as the source of trouble
for the wider Mediterranean, population groups here possibly
being uprooted by developments in the Danubian area.
As against this model, it might be objected that the aforesaid
distribution map rather reflects the situation after the
catastrophe, when the Sea Peoples had been subject to a
widespread diaspora. With respect to the ethnic relevance
of the ethnonyms, Lehmann pointed out that the Egyptian
depictions of the Sherden in reliefs from the reigns of
Ramesses II and Ramesses III with very specific features
testifies to the fact that at least the nucleus of the Sea Peoples
consisted of pronounced ethnic groups (p. 58; see also
our motto). In a review article of Lehmann’s work of 1985
in Gnomon 58 of 1986, Wolfgang Helck reacted against
this inference with the words that
“Der Gedanke, daß wir es mit reinen ‘Seeräuber’ zu
tun haben, die sich – durch eine Naturkatastrophe
veranlaßt – in den Ausgangszentren des bisher von
ihnen nur auf See geplünderten Handels festsetzen,
wird nicht herausgezogen.” (p. 628).
Hand-in-hand with this degradation of the Sea Peo-