The Sea Peoples

"My father, behold, the enemy's ships came here. My cities were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots are in the land of Hatti, and all my ships are in the land of Lukka? The country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us."

Around the year 1185 BCE, Ammurapi, the last king of the ancient city Ugarit, urged the king of nearby Alashiya to send help. His city, which had stood for thousands of years, was one of the great commercial capitals of the eastern Mediterranean. But help would never arrive. Ugarit fell and was never rebuilt. And it was not alone.

Up and down the coastline, from Greece to Anatolia to the Levant, an entire interconnected world of Bronze Age superpowers essentially stopped existing within the span of a few decades. Cities that had thrived for centuries were reduced to ash. Writing systems disappeared so completely that entire regions went functionally illiterate for centuries. And at the center of almost every ancient account of what happened, you find the same phrase showing up in Egyptian temple walls and Syrian palace archives alike, describing a coalition of raiders. People who made a “conspiracy in their islands” and came from the sea…

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