Millek, J. M. 2021. Just What did They Destroy? The Sea Peoples and the End of the Late Bronze Age. In: J. Kamlah and A. Lichtenberger (eds.), The Mediterranean Sea and the Southern Levant. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag: 59-98. (original) (raw)

The Sea Peoples, destruction, and the end of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean ca. 1200 BC are almost synonymous in much of the scholarly literature. While there are a wide range of theories for where the Sea Peoples originated and what drove them to leave their homes, they are always a factor in what brought about the Late Bronze Age civilizations. The Sea Peoples are then also notorious as being the harbingers of destruction whether it being Enkomi on Cyprus, Ras Shamra, the capital of Ugarit in Syria, the sites of the Philistine Pentapolis in the Southern Levant and many others beyond these. However, when attempting to assess the effects that the Sea Peoples had on the Eastern Mediterranean it is necessary to step back and reexamine the textual and archeological evidence to see what if anything they destroyed. The purpose of this article is first to critically examine the textual evidence from Egypt and Ugarit to see if it truly does describe the Sea Peoples as causing destruction. Secondly, I will critically assess the archeological data from cities and towns which have been assumed to have been destroyed by the Sea Peoples to see if there is any archaeological evidence of the supposed path of destruction caused by the Sea Peoples.