THE SEA PEOPLES OR THE PEOPLES OF THE AEGEAN. WHO WERE THEY? EGYPTIAN SOURCES AND ANCIENT AUTHORS Stefanos Sotiriou, historian

Introduction The term "Sea Peoples" never appears in antiquity as a collective ethnonym. It was coined in 1855 by the French Egyptologist Emmanuel de Rougé, who adopted the expression peuples de la mer on the basis of the inscriptions at Medinet Habu. Egyptian sources record nine different ethnic groups in seven principal documents dating between approximately 1210 and 1100 BC. These groups attacked Egypt, the Hittite Kingdom, Cyprus, and Ugarit and have long been associated with the collapse of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1200–1100 BC). The end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age broadly coincide with the fall of Troy and with extensive migrations of Pelasgian and Mycenaean populations toward Sicily and Southern Italy. This period also marks the emergence of the iron-armed Dorian peoples, including the Spartans, Macedonians, and Epirotes. A Necessary Clarification The so-called Sea Peoples did not liveed "at sea." Their homeland lay on the islands of the Aegean and along its surrounding coasts. In the present study, they are identified with the Pre-Hellenic populations of the Aegean world, who constituted the ancestral populations from which the historical Greek ethnos eventually emerged. From a population-genetic perspective, these groups included the prehistoric inhabitants of mainland Greece, the western coast of Asia Minor, Crete, and the Aegean islands, together with closely related populations that later settled in Southern Italy. The formation of every historical nation is understood as a gradual process of integration and fusion among closely related tribes. In this sense, the Sea Peoples may be viewed as part of the broader ethnogenetic process that ultimately produced the historical Greek people and the post-Mycenaean Greek language. From the Aegean, these populations launched military expeditions and colonizing movements toward Egypt, the Levant, Sicily, Sardinia, Southern Italy, and, to a lesser extent, other parts of the Mediterranean. Accordingly, this study proposes that the Sea Peoples largely correspond to the Pre-Hellenic populations known in Greek tradition as the Pelasgians and Leleges, together with speakers of their ancestral language (see the article "The Pelasgians and the Leleges in Ancient Greek and Latin Sources" available on Humanities Commons).