http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/sea_peoples.htm - http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/sea_peoples.htm

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/seapeople.htm - http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/seapeople.htm

http://home.nycap.rr.com/foxmob/sea_peoples.htm - http://home.nycap.rr.com/foxmob/sea_peoples.htm

What do you think?  Who were the Sea Peoples?  Where did they come from and where did they finally settle?

this is my guess,

they were the survivors of the lost civilization, atlantas.

No they didn't. Unless you know something we don't 

I doubt they were survivors of Atlantis since it was just a literary device created by Plato.

But IIRC, the Sea Peoples did not appear to be just one group of people and they do have the feeling of being refugees.  Its possible that turmoil in and around the Mediterranean caused the displacement of a large group of people who were looking for a home.

extremely interesting site, vagabond. I'll check out the data it provides and later I might comment on it. But it has a great wealth of info. I have bought a book about the sea people in my summer book-stash expedition (books-for-the-holidays) but it is among those I still haven't gotten the time to read.

I will try to start it in the next few days though 

Good evening

Perhaps it was the Vikings, they did sail in to Palestine in the 1000s-1200s.

Feel free to ask me for proof.

I have trouble crediting anything about Atlantis as being anything other than a myth - propagated by several ancient writers who each elaborated on the existing myth for their own purposes.  There is an excellent article, with references to all the ancient sources, in the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854) (ed. William Smith, LLD) - online at Perseus : http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0064%3Aid%3Datlantis - http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atex t%3A1999.04.0064%3Aid%3Datlantis

In relation to the Sea Peoples - I have never seen any source that relates the two - does anyone have something that shows a correlation?  All ancient references (AFAIK)  to them relate to people from somewhere in the Mediterranean Basin

My guess is based on Eberhard Zangger's theory that the Sea People were Hellinic tribes of the Mycenean civilization. We know for a fact that the Phillistines thanks to a long list of records, seem to have originally came from Crete.

The connection between Mycenean culture and Philistine culture was made clear by finds, especially pottery styles, at the excavation of Ekron.
Very interesting is the finding of a large, well constructed building which covers 240 square meters.
Its walls are broad, designed to support a second story and its wide, entrance leads to a large hall, partly covered with a roof supported on a row of columns.
In the floor of the hall is a circular hearth paved with pebbles, as is typical in Mycenean buildings.

Or one could just take a look at some of the Phoenician colony names.
Kition, Neapolis, Leptis, Oia, Thapsos, Panormus, Karalis, Tharros, Lixos, Malaka.
Clearly all the above are Greek words.

An abstract of AAPA 2004 Meeting notes that: The proto-Phoenicians were Greek colonists,their leader was named Phoenix and they went in Syria during 3000-4000 bc.Later they lost their power and assimilated by the Assyrians,Haldaeans and other Semite people.Other thing the first Helleno-Phoenicians and other thing the late Semito-Phoenicians.

Another very interesting conection is the hero Heracles, his Phoenician/Phillistine equivalent was "Melkart" if spelled from right to left we find obvious similarities.

Well, that's debatable. No one really knows where Tarshish was located, nor do they know with certainty how old Tartessos is. It's an interesting possibility that the two may be one in the same, but it certainly isn't proven one way or the other.

Its interesting to note that both ancient Greek and Biblical sources make reference to Phoenicians manning the ships of the Egyptians and Hebrews, making three-year trips around Africa from either branch of the Red Sea, around Africa, into the Straits of Gibraltar and either to the Delta of the Nile or to the coast of Palestine.  The Hebrew ships were called "ships of Tarshish" which may point to a long-distance port-of-call.  It would not be inconsistent with an identification with Tartessos. 

i found this about sea people

A nice site with references to sea people is here..

http://nefertiti.iwebland.com/sea_peoples.htm - http://nefertiti.iwebland.com/sea_peoples.htm

It's for sure, is it? How so?

I wasn't directing it at you, rather the theory you present. I don't see how an ancient tribal people could be so widespread and powerful as to be able to usurp civilizations on either end of Southern Europe and the Middle East simultaneously, the logic that they invaded Iberia and must therefore have been the same people that took out Greece, Egypt and other ME places is, for lack of a better word, ridiculous.

Well, if you follow the discussion that Phallanx and I had, and the links posted here on Sea Peoples, it doesn't seem so evident that the Urnfields actually took out anyone but in some "nearby" regions. After reading some stuff posted here and in other topics I'm strongly reconsidering my former opinion of Sea Peoples and Urnfiled peoples being the same. Instead the only thing for sure we can say of the Urnfields peoples is that they experimented an expansion very simmilar to the one that La T�ne Celts would make 900 years after them, bringing them to the western Balcans (Illyrians), to Northern Italy (Italics and some Illyrians too) and to some specific areas of Western Europe (Celts). Wether Illyrians and Thracians (which seem non-Urnfield but are influenced and contemporary) took part in the Sea Peoples and the destruction of the Hittite empire or if this was a mainly Greek adventure, with some local allies like Lybians and Lycians and maybe even Etruscans, is another story.

At this moment I'm leaning for Phallanx' and others' theory that it was a mainly Greek "Viking-like" phenomenon (but with many incongnites).

Anyhow, History shows several cases of pre-gunpowder peoples expanding at fast speed even over apparently solid empires:
- Germanic invasions of the 5th century, that destroyed the Western Roman Empire;
- Arab/Muslim expansion of the 7th century, that destroyed the Sassanid Empire and took large pieces of the Eastern Roman Empire;
- Mongol expansion of the 13th century, that took over China and Persia and even the Caliph of Baghdad eventually.

Other examples can also be considered as well. I find no reason to doubt that a "horde" of Illyrian, Italic and Celtic tribes could expand easily into those rather undeveloped and rather nearby areas in the 13th century BCE, specially as archaeology supports strongly this phenomenon. A quasi-repetition of the phenomenon took part in the 4th-3rd centuries BCE this time including only Celts (in this case not just archaeology but also written documents prove it: La T�ne Celts were found from Britain and Ireland to Galatia in Anatolia and Northern Italy, having sacked Rome once).

1. I don't rule anything out.

2. You know they could just have been indigenous tribes that became dominant with the fall of their predecessors, not everything should be explained with an invasion theory.

Hatti belonged to the Caucasian group, not IE. hittite language was just assimilated by IE, they were originally Caucasian.

Cedric, The timing of your revival of this thread is fortuitous. I have recently become interested in the Sea Peoples, as I often come across them in my ancillary studies. With regard to the Wikipedia entries I have searched, I found something quite curious.

I converted the Wiki entries to PDFs, to make them more easily searchable, and this is what I noticed:

In my 53 page PDF on the “Sea Peoples” there is no mention of Phoenecia.

In my 54 page PDF on “Phoenicia”, there is no mention o “Sea Peoples”

Yet, regarding the Sea Peoples, they are given a time-frame for their exploits of between 1200 and 900 B.C.; whilst the Phoenicians are credited for enjoying their prime between 1200 and 800 B.C..  How can the two cultures be treated properly in isolation; describing one with no mention made of the other?

Are we not talking about the consolidation, in the Eastern Mediterranean, of a group, a culture, a way of life that had spread across the sea and become cosmopolitan to the Mediterranean? Are we not seeing, in the descriptions made by the Egyptians, Anatolia, Syrians and Hitites, the ascendency of an empire that had arose, under their noses, to dominate the full range of the Mediterranean, and were only now being noticed as the power player of the frontier between each of them and encroaching upon what they had understood to be their territory?

The Wikipedia has a chart which uses various ancient words for the Sea Peoples and their origins. Indeed the the assertions therein span the Length and breadth of the Mediterranean, from Sardinia, Sicily, The Tyrrhenian Sea, Mycenae, Greece and Anatolia. Could it not be all of these places? Could it be that Phoenicia had come of age and simply began to dominate all who resisted, and indeed, reasserted hegemony over what is often, possibly falsely, considered their homeland. 

It has been argued that the word Phoenician is a construct of later times, referring to the empire that plied in the trade of purple dies and textiles, and that it is not a term that they would have called themselves. 

Are the Sea Peoples simply the Phoenicians, in ascendency?

Regards,

Michael