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

The contemporary sources with a bearing on the period of
the upheavals of the Sea Peoples at the end of the Late
Bronze Age are threefold: Egyptian, Cypro-Minoan, and
Ugaritic. Egyptian records inform us about the Libyan attack
supported by allies or mercenaries from the Sea Peoples
in year 5 of the reign of Merneptah (= 1208 BC),
about the ultimate combined land- and seaborne attack of
the Sea Peoples themselves in years 5 and 8 of the reign of
Ramesses III (= 1179 BC and 1176 BC), and, in the form
of the Wen Amon story, about the immediate aftermath of
the crisis. Next, in Cypro-Minoan documents we encounter
representatives of the Sea Peoples engaged in maritime
trade in the interlude between the Libyan invasion from the
reign of Merneptah and the ultimate combined land- and
seaborne attack from the reign of Ramesses III. Finally,
Ugaritic letters vividly describe the situation just before
the ultimate attack by the Sea Peoples on Egypt in the
reign of Ramesses III. I will present the Cypro-Minoan and
Ugaritic texts both in transliteration and translation,
whereas in connection with the Egyptian ones I will confine
myself to the translation only as a transliteration of the
full set is, to the best of my knowledge, yet to be published.
Egyptian
The chief source on the Lybian invasion is formed by the
great historical inscription of Merneptah (1213-1203 BC)
inscribed on a wall of the main temple at Karnak (Thebes).
The inscription consists of 79 lines in sum, but unfortunately
the text is only lacunarily preserved, about half of it
being lost. 80 The following two passages are relevant to
our subject:
Karnak inscription
Lines 13-15
80 Schulman 1987: 23.
5. CONTEMPORARY SOURCES
43
“[Year 5, 2nd month of] Summer, day (1), as follows:
the wretched, fallen chief of Libya, Meryey, son of
Ded, has fallen upon the country of Tehenu with his
bowmen (…) Sherden, Shekelesh, Ekwesh, Lukka,
Teresh, taking the best of every warrior and every
man of war of his country. He has brought his wife
and his children (…) leaders of the camp, and he has
reached the western boundary in the fields of Perire.”
81
In conjunction with the information from the so-called
Athribis stele (numbers between parentheses), the count of
the victims (lines 52-54) can be reconstructed as follows:
Libyans 6359, Shekelesh 222 (200), Teresh 742
(722), Ekwesh (2201), Sherden – ( – ). 82
Note that the allies of the Sea Peoples are explicitly referred
to as being circumcised, for which reason their
hands instead of their penises are cut off and counted. 83
Cypro-Minoan
The Cypro-Minoan documents bearing testimony of representatives
of the Sea Peoples engaged in maritime trade
come from Enkomi (cylinder seal Inv. no. 19.10) and
Kalavassos (cylinder seal K-AD 389) in Cyprus and Ras
Shamra/Ugarit (tablet RS 20.25) on the adjacent coast of
the Levant. Of these documents, two were discovered in a
datable context, the Kalavassos cylinder seal in an ashlar
(= dressed stone) building abandoned at the end of Late
Cypriote IIC and the tablet from Ras Shamra/Ugarit in the
remains of an archive of a villa in the residential area east
of the palace, destroyed, like the entire town, at the end of
the Late Bronze Age. 84 Accordingly, we arrive at a date of
c. 1180 BC as a terminus ante quem for the recording of
81 Breasted 1927: Vol. III, no. 574; Davies 1997: 155; cf. Drews
1993a: 49.
82 Breasted 1927: Vol. III, nos. 588, 601; Davies 1997: 163; cf.
Lehmann 1979: 490; Drews 1993a: 49.
83 Widmer 1975: 71, note 23.
84 For the exact location of tablet RS 20.25, see Buchholz 1999:
134-5, Abb. 34 (TCM).