Who are this Sea People a Naval Raiders from the late bronze age?

Who are this Sea People a Naval Raiders from the late bronze age?

They are considered one of the major contributing causes to the bronze age collapse, 

which saw the decline and fall of several ancient civilizations around 1150 - 1250 BC.

The Luwians are ideal candidates to be Sea People, or at least to lead them, since they were in fact a sea-going people who controlled the most important seaway of the eastern Mediterranean, and who could be organized enough to mount a long distance campaign. Also, the fragment found at Ugarit says that the city could not defend itself because all the troops were in the land of Lukka. Why were they there? Because the Hittites and Luwians were at war.

According to dust and pollen sediment studies in Russia and Britain, among other places, there was a widespread drought in Eurasia, accompanied by global cooling around this time. The raiding of tribes from the north turned into a flood of desperate people, with everyone taking advantage of the pressure.

The Luwians may have been motivated by a mixture of Hittite aggression and economic desperation. There is an inscription or finding somewhere that is translated to read that the King of Lydia sent half the population away due to famine. (Lydia being a city of Luwians.) Certainly the Egyptians record the Sea People as having brought their families.

I am more persuaded that the Sherden gave their name TO Sardinia and the Shekelesh TO Sicily, than I am that the Sherdan and Shekelesh came FROM those places. This east to west migration also persists in the myth of Tyrhennius, a Luwian prince who settled people in Tuscany and became the Estruscans, whose skeletons have DNA linking them to Asia Minor.

The Philistines in the Levant have been proven to be related to Greeks, by DNA study. The Sardinians have strange DNA haplotypes found in very few other places, but including the Danube valley.

So I am going to go with the Sea People being a federation of Balkan tribes led by Luwians, provoked by Hittite aggression, but ultimately driven by desperation born of prolonged drought. After they destroyed the Hittites, they just kept raiding, until they lost at Egypt. After that, they fled west and settled the shores of Italy and its islands.

Some facts that need to fit the story;

a. Troy’s walls were destroyed around 1250 BCE, by earthquake.

b. The Troy that appeared to be under siege is dated around 1180–70 BCE, a good three generations later. Mycenae was destroyed very soon after.

c. The Iliad (strangely) gives us both the Greek and the Trojan points of view. Surely only victors write stories.

d. The Hittites invaded Cyprus about 1190 BCE and this triggered war with the Luwians. Up to that point, Cyprus was a Mycenaean colony.

e. The Trojans were Hittite allies at the battle of Kadesh around 1270 BCE, yet the Hittites are never mentioned in the Iliad.

f. We have the fragment from King Muwatalli of the Hittites to King Aleksandru of Troy around 1280 BCE commending him for conclusion of hostilities with the Greeks.

So from these facts, I think the sequence of events went like this:

There had been friction between Luwians and Greeks for a long time. The story of Paris stealing Helen of Troy is a description of slaving raids. (Helens = Greeks) Troy was known to have lots of female slaves working in the textile industry. At some point, this triggered war with the Greeks who laid siege to Troy before 1300 BCE, but they did not take the city, just as the Iliad describes. The war ended with the death of a Trojan prince. The Trojans gave the slaves back (the Helens), and the Greeks went home to deal with internal strife. (This is the story of the Odyssey minus the getting lost part).

A short time later, Troy became a Hittite ally. This is why the Hittites are missing from the Iliad. They were not yet allies to the Luwians.

Troy’s walls were destroyed by earthquake perhaps around 1250BCE (the horse - symbol of Poseidon, god of storms, earthquakes and the sea), but the city did not fall. Inhabitants assembled a new city in the ruins of the old. Around that time a serious drought starts. The drought escalates, and this starts to affect long-distance trade. Why mine for metal when you cannot trade it for food? At some point, around 1200, the copper trade is severely affected, and soon after, the Hittites seize Cyprus, the main source of copper.

This Hittite aggression unites the Greeks and the Luwians. Together, they attack the Hittites, and this triggers war with Egypt, as per the treaty of Rameses II. Together, the Greeks and Luwians were the sea people. The Sikels were probably from the Cyclades. The Tjeker were probably Trojans. Sherden were probably from Sardis. Philistines = Pelaset = Pelagios = pela Agios = people of The Aegean. This is why we have both points of view in the Iliad. They were camp stories told by bards of both side from the old war of their great grandfathers when they were enemies. But now they were on the same side. Somewhere in those camps, Homer’s great-great-great-grand-daddy was taking notes.

However, this war against the Hittites and Egyptians solves nothing. The tin trade collapses and bronze can no longer be made by anyone. The drought escalates, and now Danube tribes and the pastoralists of the Greek highlands (the Dorians) come south to the agricultural lands to raid. Troy and Mycenae, weakened by drought and warfare, are destroyed around the same time, perhaps by the same wave of raiders between 1180 and 1170 BCE.

So that is my new hypothesis. The sea people were an alliance of Greeks and Luwians, united after the Hittites invaded Cyprus.

There was a conflict over Troy around 1300 BCE. The Hittites fought a Greek-allied rebel called Piyama-Radu, who incited rebellion across southwest Anatolia. At some point, the Mycenaeans got directly involved, and there is even a myth with Heracles going to Troy. In the process, Troy was sacked by the Greeks, but not destroyed, but the Hittites prevailed and installed Aleksandu. So now the evidence piles up that the real Trojan war was much, much earlier than the Bronze Age collapse. It does not alter my earlier conjecture that the Sea People were an alliance of Greeks and Luwians. They fought to regain access to the copper mines.

I am now persuaded that the details of the Iliad are pure fiction. Homer took snippets of history from the time of Piyamaradu-Radu and overplayed them on an even older story spread by the Indo-Europeans of the copper age. The story, passed down by bards went like this:

Helen represents the sun. The sun is kidnapped by Winter, and taken across the sea (the Milky Way). The sun is rescued by the brothers (Gemini) with the help of a fleet-footed warrior (Orion) who slays the main opponent (Taurus).

This is the story passed down to become the Mahabharata, the myth of Osiris, Mithras and many other bronze-age stories. This is the story told by Homer’s ancestors. Homer’s innovation was to take known names from the Bronze Age and overlay them on top of the great cycle story. In reality, Menelaus and Helen were king and queen of Sparta and everyone knew that because they left behind a shrine that was a site of pilgrimage in the Iron Age. So Homer just used their names. Piyamaradu became Priam, Aleksandu became Alexander, and the name Hector was probably just an old Luwian word for “military leader.”

Homer meshed this together because his audience was composed of Greeks and Luwians and they loved stories about themselves even if they were not true. The Familiarity of the story structure would have delighted them. Everyone in Homer’s audience knew it was a story, not history.

As with the earlier update, this does not change the answer to the question. The Sea People were Greeks and Luwians in alliance against the Hittites and Egyptians. It started as an organized war over copper, but degenerated into piracy.